Federal judge William Alsup ruled that training AI models in books published without the author’s permission is legal for humanity to be integrated. This is the first time a court has given credit to an AI company’s claim that fair use doctrines can exempt AI companies from disability when training LLMS using copyrighted materials.
The decision will be a blow to authors, artists and publishers who have filed dozens of lawsuits against companies such as Openai, Meta, Midjourney, and Google. The ruling does not guarantee that other judges will follow the lead of Justice Alsup, but it places the foundation of precedent on wing with high-tech companies through creatives.
These cases often depend on how judges interpret the doctrine of fair use. This is an infamously carved sculpture from copyright laws that have not been updated since 1976.
The Fair Use Judgment considers what the work is used in (parody and education may be viable), whether it is replicated for commercial interest (you can write Star Wars fan fiction, but can’t sell), and how transformative the derivative work is from the original.
Companies like Meta have held similar fair use debates to defend the training of copyrighted works, but before this week’s decision, it was less clear how the courts would sway.
In this particular case of Bartz vs. humanity, the plaintiff’s group of authors also questioned the way in which humanity achieved and preserved the work. According to the lawsuit, humanity tried to create a “central library” of “all books in the world” to maintain “forever.” However, these copyrighted millions of books were downloaded for free from pirate sites, which is clearly illegal.
The judge found that training of these materials for humanity was fair use, but the court would hold a trial on the nature of the “central library.”
“There will be a trial on the pirated copies used to create the Central Library of Mankind and the resulting damages,” Justice Allsup wrote in the decision. “After that humanity later purchased a copy of a book that he had stolen from the Internet, he will not be exempt from liability for theft, but it could affect the extent of statutory damage.”
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