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.
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.
It’s hilarious that the final boss for AI could end up being The Mouse and Associates.
It feels disgusting to root for the copyright legions. Sign of the times.
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.
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.
It actively prevents companies like Disney from using AI generation tools to stamp out movies like assembly line products. They can't afford to have their movies become public domain at release.
It won't protect jobs in advertising, because a lot of companies won't care if their ads become public domain. This might be a problem because a lot of actors get their start in ad bits, and a lot of graphic artists make a living on ad images.
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.
AI companies are burning money pits... don't make me the tax payer the patsy who pays off the unimaginable debts of AI companies.
That's exactly why there's a chance of it happening.
Socialise the costs, privatise the gains. Bail me out, daddy!
Given the size of this bubble (WAY bigger than 2007), the taxpayers are going to hold the bag. We might as well force the companies to share the benefits (if any) as well.
Currently, there are no profits, tho.
The AI isn’t very useful, that’s a problem. The government will make them public, then the public will own their huge dept. the oligarchs will receive golden parachutes in the form of a buyout and we will get stuck with the bill. Fuck that, make the technofeudalists liquidate at reasonable prices. Give people their homes back. Make them pay to supply clean water everywhere an open-loop DC was constructed. Jail them for terrorism after polluting our skies and attempting to corner the market on information in order to control the populace.
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.
It’s almost like rules are just made up
If this could be upheld (though unfortunately it won't) then it could completely end the generation of new models and the companies that make them. The models that are already out would never go away and might as well be available for people to run locally but if they want new ones it should be done for the collective good with oversight. I.e. state run.
But again, just wishful thinking on my part.
As much as I hate AI, current copyright laws are out of control and are extended well beyond what they should be used for.
AI is way more out of control than copyright.
There's simply no way to justify what the AI compies have been doing. As that one Microsoft exec said, it's the "largest theft of labor" in modern history
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.
As long as we live under capitalism, copyright protects small artists, writers, and creators as much as it protects large shitty corporations who weaponize it.
I’d love to be rid of all intellectual property, but we have a lot to fix before that can become reality without punishing people who rely on it.
I’m down with some huge reforms though.
No, not at all. Do you have any idea of how expensive it is to bring a lawsuit? What you are saying about protecting small artists is pure propaganda. Furthermore, this only matters for commercial artist as copyright is never used in 99.999% of real life cases
We will never move forward as long as we allow all of our modern culture and technology to be locked up by corporations through imaginary property rights.
It also costs money to register a copyright. And if it's not registered when the copyright infringement happens, statutory damages don't apply and you need to prove actual damages instead.
Wouldn’t be funny if disneys fuckery did in AI?
I hope Studio Ghibli sue them for a bazillion dollars
In fact, as Copyright Lately‘s Aaron Moss points out, even the AI industry called the latest ruling a win, with tech industry group Chamber of Progress senior director of AI Adam Eisgrau tweeting that the ruling “implicitly confirms that highly transformative gen AI training to produce a hugely multi-purpose model with substantial public benefit is likely fair use!”
"We stole even more, so that makes it legal!"
So it is still legal for me to pirate anything I want as long as i train a small ass AI model on the side with it?
Remember to clone a repo for an AI for plausible deniability.
When ask why your consuming the copyrighted material simply say you're in the quality control phase.
This would be a separate issue from piracy
This is more about what you can DO with something you legally purchased. Think film rights. If you want to use a song in your movie, you can't just go to Tower Records and buy the CD. Buying the CD gives you a right to listen to that CD, but it does not give you the right to use it in your movie.
Likewise, this court argues, having legal access to a work does not give you the right to feed it into an LLM as training data.
It's a bit like the Muppet Show. The Muppet Show was a bunch of puppets singing along with musical pop stars of the day. But because the show was produced before VHS and DVD were a thing, none of the artists had given permission for them to re-release the show on DVD. So re-releasing the Muppet Show was a tedious process of negotiation with every rights holder (made much less tedious by being purchased by Disney).
But I absolutely hear you and am currently training a small LLM on my favorite TV, movies, and music. Have I started the actual training yet? No. I don't see the need until I've filled up this 15TB HDD with training data so I can do it all in one pass.
Likewise, this court argues, having legal access to a work does not give you the right to feed it into an LLM as training data.
Seems more narrow than that. If your "AI" just copies the input almost verbatim, then it's not "transformative".
Unfortunately they still seem to regard the big players' consumption as "transformative" enough to not count.
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.
>"How influential the latest appeals court ruling will be is debatable. The court found that Ross had effectively copy-pasted Thomson Reuters’ “headnotes,” or brief editorial summaries of legal issues, verbatim for its legal search engine, a practice that isn’t difficult to separate from fair use."
>"In fact, as Copyright Lately‘s Aaron Moss points out, even the AI industry called the latest ruling a win, with tech industry group Chamber of Progress senior director of AI Adam Eisgrau tweeting that the ruling “implicitly confirms that highly transformative gen AI training to produce a hugely multi-purpose model with substantial public benefit is likely fair use!”"
Looks like the company that got sued just copy pastaed protected content without making any type of change to make it fair use.
Not the "win" anti-AI people were looking for and the article seems to be misunderstood by most.
Seems as long as AI models use some form "transformative" method to train their AI, then it's fair use.
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.
Only in the US. EU has teeth and occasionally uses them.
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."
I don't care if copyright holders win I just want AI to lose.
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
This court finds AI guilty of copyright infringement.
The penalty will be... NOTHING!
Just like the tariffs, they will use this to steal our money ... they will use tax money to pay the crony companies that play victim.
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.
This is great progress. Curious to see how the Supreme Court eventually rules
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
