Report from The Verge
In Brief – Federal Judge William Alsup has ruled on summary judgement that artificial intelligence company Anthropic did not break the law when it used copyrighted books to train its AI chatbot without the consent of the authors or publishers, setting a strong precedent for the application of the “fair use” doctrine to large language model training. However, he sided with the author plaintiffs on charges related to Anthropic’s use of pirated books to build what was described as a massive “central library” held for unnamed future applications, a use that the judge rejected as transformative and failed the test for fair use. Alsup’s strong affirmation of the applicability of the fair use exception to the training of Generative AI large language models (LLMs), which he described as a highly transformative use, represents a win for AI developers who have faced numerous copyright lawsuits from writers, media organizations, image creators and musical artists. However, the decision also hinged on facts that might not be present in other cases, including that Anthropic’s chatbot was not alleged to create copies of the authors’ works, so copying only involved “inputs” for the LLM training, not outputs that violated copyright.
Context – Copyright questions around the legality of training neural networks are probably the biggest legal and regulatory issues surrounding today’s most popular AI services. In the US, lawsuits have center stage and legislation is unlikely, at least before enough judges rule. In the EU, with its AI Act, regulators and AI expert groups will play key roles. As noted, in this case, the were no claims that the AI system was creating copies. That is not the case with some image generators or in the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI. Finally, although Judge Alsup avoided ruling on how the fair use doctrine applies when there is conscious piracy to gather content for LLM training, he warned, “Such piracy of otherwise available copies is inherently, irredeemably infringing even if the pirated copies are immediately used for the transformative use and immediately discarded. But this order need not decide this case on that rule.” With that, copyright holders can consider this a split decision.