The headline isn’t correct. This ruling is about a specific element of Fair Use, not a blanket declaration that copyrighted data cannot be used to train models as the headline suggests.
Fair Use requires some conditions be met. The one that wasn’t met here was that the work you’re creating can’t compete with the copyright owner.
From the Reuters article:
“Ross took the headnotes to make it easier to develop a competing legal research tool,” the judge said. “So Ross’s use is not transformative.”
In other cases, for example the Author’s Guild lawsuit against Meta/Anthropic/etc courts have ruled that using books to train LLMs is fair use because LLMs and books don’t compete.
They were required to pay for the books, but not prevented by copyright from using them to train a model.
There’s nothing novel happening in this case from a legal perspective. Maybe this is the first case where the defendant didn’t clear the elements of fair use but those elements predate AI by decades and have been uses in thousands of cases.
As much as I hate AI, current copyright laws are out of control and are extended well beyond what they should be used for.
Wouldn’t be funny if disneys fuckery did in AI?
I mean Disney’s lawyer game is top notch. I would love to see the mouse vs AI battle.
I hate them too but AI is more of a threat to all of us. Any chance at stopping the madness is good enough for me.
Let them fight
I want both sides to lose and for it to really hurt.
When peasants were able to copy ‘intellectual property’ for personal benefit and enjoyment, it was a massive crime. When the oligarchs can steal - everything - for the slight chance of paying less in wages, it is an innovation.
I think it is pretty much certain the model companies escape any penalty for their mass theft of IP. There will be some settlements and token penalties that sound big on paper, but are nothing compared to the market valuations.
Not really. We had collage and training any kind of AI was fine before all this. There’s blood in the water and copyright companies can smell it.
OpenAI is happy to give them a piece of the pie if that means they are the only ones allowed to sell it to consumers.
You are right about the penalty being pennys compared to their profits. It’s not meant to punish them but help them build a moat, the one that got destroyed by China a few months ago.
I’m cynically believing that this is the beginning of enforcing a copywrite use tax; when anyone generates something that is visual or audible.
The tax will be collected by the government and put into a slush fund that mostly goes to corporations and wealthy, while ostensibly supposed to go fairly to all creators
I’m guessing it’s going to be a system where a company like Spotify doesnt let you upload generated music unless it has the metadata from the “legal” music generators so they can automatically send most of the profits to the shareholders.
Universal already owns Udio, Suno will follow soon. I wish it was an actual tax.
I ficking hope so. Either all profits aren’t privatized and distributed socially or blow the whole thing up.
This is your reminder that in 2026 absolutely ZERO court rulings matter long term except the Supreme Court, which is captured for life by conservatives.
No matter who wins the midterms or even the next election, that is with us for the rest of most of our lives.
What a time to be alive.
This is why the court MUST be packed. FDR threatened to do it 90 years ago, and the Dems better do it this time or else face another Trump again.
Only in the US. EU has teeth and occasionally uses them.
It very much is not. It is in effect until the end of the United States. This will be long before most of us die.
The future will be getting very bad very fast and most nation states will collapse in a few decades.
So there’s that I guess.
I think you are DRASTICALLY underestimating how durable fascist regimes are. Without external intervention they can continue for DECADES. Societies don’t just collapse when people get fed up.
For real, Russia is calling with a word for OP.
I don’t mean when people are fed up. I mean when millions are starving to death and the firestorms are ravaging our croplands. When the hurricanes give us a Katrina level disaster 6 times a year. When it becomes literally impossible for organized society to maintain itself.
This is happening sooner than you think.
Modern nation states are a hell of a lot more resilient than what you give them credit for. Look at some of the hardships nations survived during WW2. States can survive even mass famines. How? Simple rule. The police and the army eat first.
If it’s any comfort, there’s a good chance the sunlight won’t be reaching the suface of the earth for much of 2027, so we won’t be alive for too much longer.
Still doesn’t prevent data mining of forums for, “training.” Still doesn’t give people who’s contributed on forums a check for being of value to big tech. If they cared at all they’d be paying us money to train AI until it’s established. Google is offering points for data rather than money (https://deviceusagestudy.google/signup/invitecode) I only know that because I got a flier in the mail which means they’re desperate to get people to sign up.
Betteridge’s law of headlines in full effect.
For those (like me) who don’t know what Betteridge’s Law of Headlines is: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
AI companies spent years treating copyright like a Terms of Service box nobody reads. Now a court has suggested that »we copied it to build a competing product« may not magically become fair use because you sprinkle AI on top. Turns out disruption is slightly less fun when the disrupted people have lawyers.
Yeah…no. This is going to the Supreme Court and there’s zero chance their right wing, Trump-choad-gargling asses don’t rule in favor of AI companies.
Unfortunately, Congress will end up doing whatever its paid to do.
As far as I can tell, the 3rd circuit is just one step below the Supreme Court. So unless they take the case it’s pretty stuck. Congress would have to go above and beyond to change the existing laws to allow it.
Also with midterms coming up congress is going to have a harder time passing a law. Especially if the republicans lose the house or the senate. Then they’d have to get the democrats and the republicans to play ball, vs just one currently.
IMO Disney and other copyright holders have more lobbying power than AI companies at this time.
That said, damages of a winning suit will end up being minuscule compared the revenue these companies have made from said piracy.
Remember, Congress makes the laws that courts rule on.
Congress does change legislation for its buddies to get around the court system.
Gun manufacturers have their own little Congressional immunity from lawsuits, for instance, (PLCAA).
I think this should be the reasoning politicians use to make AI companies owned by the public.
These AI models are nothing without all the data they were trained on. All this data is content produced by humans throughout history. AI is the ultimate product of thousands of years of human progress. Why should we allow corporations to be the primary beneficiaries of this?
Agreed… the problem is that the damage is already done and there’s no way to really make it right to the copyright holders so mandating that all AI models and their weights should be treated as public domain would at least help a bit.
Ii think it’s an issue so long as private companies are profiting off the works of other people. If this is public (like a utility of some sort), I’m not sure the copyright claim means as much. I’m sure it would need to be handled in a way still.
Best case scenario but that’s not the one we will be getting.
Copyright juggernauts and data brokers, the ones that actually own all the data like Reddit and universal records, will get paid.
Open weight models won’t be allowed in business contexts or to be served online, OpenAI and company get a fat monopoly which suits them.
People are cheering for their own doom. The handful of big AI company are going to end up owning a solid chunk of the economy. It’s basically going to be an AI tax.
You will be replaced by an agent, OpenAI will only sell them to your employer in bulk at a stupid price so you can’t turn around and compete. That bulk price per agent will still be cheaper than your monthly wage.
Find me one politician that even mentioned forcing these models public. It’s a fantasy.
The current copyright system is a artifact of US-dominated systems the world is rapidly disassociating itself from.
The worst case scenario is American companies are able to lock down the United States, but the rest of the world will ignore it.
All LLM code output is now copyleft because there was GPL stuff in the training data, LOL!
spoiler
(Actually it’s probably all just copyright infringement and not usable at all because of all the conflicting licenses, but a guy can dream…)
Worth reading the original opinion appealed here: great technical writing and explanation of reasoning by the judge
Thanks for the hint.
This court finds AI guilty of copyright infringement.
The penalty will be… NOTHING!
If you think this will turn the tide I both envy how un- jaded you are and worry that you really aren’t paying attention.
Immediately made me think of Betteridge’s law of headlines.
I will remain cautiously optimistic but until it makes it through Supreme Court it’s not a done deal.
