This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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!"
>"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.
I hope Studio Ghibli sue them for a bazillion dollars
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.
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.
Its actually mainly used to bully small creators so they can have precedent to go after larger ones.
I agree, but I fucking hate that it’s AI that’s breaking the concept. First of all, it’s not like it’s a righteous fight, whoever wins, we all lose. Second, as much as I think copywrite is abused like hell, I still think the idea, one closer to the original, has merit and does provide crucial protections for individuals.
Sadly the fucking plagiarism machine and the anti-human dirtbags running it have found the absolute worst possible way to break the system. Ultimately resulting in nothing for us plebes that copywrite should protect and all the benefits that the shit copywrite coroporate power grab produced for them.
Let them fight
I want both sides to lose and for it to really hurt.
I ficking hope so. Either all profits aren’t privatized and distributed socially or blow the whole thing up.
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
For them.
Still doesn't prevent data mining of forums for, "training." Still doesn't give people who's contributed on forums a check for being of value to big tech. If they cared at all they'd be paying us money to train AI until it's established. Google is offering points for data rather than money (https://deviceusagestudy.google/signup/invitecode) I only know that because I got a flier in the mail which means they're desperate to get people to sign up.
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.
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.
This is why the court MUST be packed. FDR threatened to do it 90 years ago, and the Dems better do it this time or else face another Trump again.
Only in the US. EU has teeth and occasionally uses them.
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.
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?
AI companies are burning money pits... don't make me the tax payer the patsy who pays off the unimaginable debts of AI companies.
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.
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...)
I think LLM code output is already copyleft because non-humans legally can not hold copyrights.
Copyleft is a way of leveraging copyright against itself to ensure nobody else can make a proprietary version of the thing. It is not the same as Public Domain/lack of copyright.
in my defense there are a lot of words to remember
LLM output doesn't automatically get a copyright. But, if it is (part of) a work that includes "human creative effort" (prompts don't count), the human(s) can hold a copyright on that work.
In addition, the output can still be a derivative work in violation of the copyrights of (some of) the training data, whether or not there are copyrights on that output. It would have to have sufficient similarity to some work in the training data, but that's not too uncommon.
And, GPL and CC-SA works are known to be in the training data of most models, including Apertus.
:(
