Groundbreaking Court Rulings Could Upend the Future of AI Training and Copyright—What You Need to Know Now
Good content matters. It matters to training and matters even more for use in agentic AI and RAG models, neither of which models were involved in these lawsuits and both of which would be subject to a different copyright analysis. Human authored content is critical, and licensing supports its creation and use.
Rick Anderson
Both of Judge Alsup’s rulings make sense to me.
First, as to the “fair use” nature of using copyrighted texts to train AI large language models: it seems clear to me that such applications represent a transformative use of the copyrighted content. Using these texts to train a language model is a radically different use from that for which the texts were designed and intended. Furthermore, this use does not result in a product that competes in any way with the original works in the marketplace and therefore has no impact on the copyright holders’ ability to sell copies or access – nor does it result in anything that could reasonably be characterized as a derivate work of the original. I can’t fault the court’s finding with regard to the fair-use argument.