Groundbreaking Court Rulings Could Upend the Future of AI Training and Copyright—What You Need to Know Now
My expectation is—and has been for some time—that these cases will drive the AI vendor community (or at least those with the resources) to seek content agreements with the publishing world as quickly and efficiently as possible. The risks of being found outside of compliance are so great that AI companies will want to hedge their bets. In some ways, they are trying to build the next billion-dollar business on a bed of sand, but that is one court ruling away from being deemed illegitimate or worse a significant liability. Another possible approach might be to revive the notion of an industry-wide settlement, something akin to the Google Books Settlement that collapsed many years ago in the Authors Guild vs Google case, though this will face many of the same challenges that the Books Rights Registry faced as a solution. There’s some chatter that a settlement was always the preferred outcome, but one challenge with a settlement is that with each loss in court, the resulting settlement becomes ever more costly.
