Groundbreaking Court Rulings Could Upend the Future of AI Training and Copyright—What You Need to Know Now
Of the 40-plus AI training cases in the US, we now have preliminary decisions in three. And have moved backwards in terms of clarity. To vastly oversimplify the results, training AI is non-transformative infringement (Thomson Reuters v Ross), training is transformative and mostly fair use with a major caveat (Bartz), or training is mostly not fair use– but was fair use in this case because the lawyers did not plead correctly (Kadrey).
I can criticize and nit-pick these decisions for pages. I am especially concerned with the Bartz court’s lack of market harm analysis given the importance of market harm as set right by the Supreme Court in the Andy Warhol case. Both Bartz and Kadrey also ignored long-term precedent about the importance of licensing to fair use analysis.
