A federal judge has ruled that training AI on copyrighted works without specific permission to do so is “fair use”. There’s a “but”, though.

According to Fortune (A federal judge says training AI on copyrighted works is ‘fair use,’ but casts doubt on use of pirated materials, written by Sharon Goldman and available here), California District Judge William Alsup said that AI company Anthropic could assert a “fair use” defense against copyright claims for training its Claude AI models on copyrighted books. But the judge also ruled that it mattered exactly how those books were obtained.

According to the judge’s ruling, Anthropic’s use of the books to train Claude was “exceedingly transformative” and constituted “fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act.” Anthropic told the court that its AI training was not only permissible, but aligned with the spirit of U.S. copyright law, which it argued “not only allows, but encourages” such use because it promotes human creativity. The company said it copied the books to “study Plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”

While training AI models with copyrighted data may be considered fair use, Anthropic’s separate action of building and storing a searchable repository of pirated books is not, Alsup ruled. Alsup noted that the fact that Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet “will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”

Alsup ordered a separate trial on Anthropic’s storage of those pirated books, which could determine the company’s liability and any damages related to that potential infringement. The judge has also not yet ruled whether to grant the case class action status, which could dramatically increase the financial risks to Anthropic if it is found to have infringed on authors’ rights.

In finding that it was “fair use” for Anthropic to train its AI models on books written by three authors—Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson—who had filed a lawsuit against the AI company for copyright violations, Alsup addressed a question that has simmered since before OpenAI’s ChatGPT kick-started the generative AI boom in 2022: Can copyrighted data be used to train generative AI models without the owner’s consent?

Dozens of AI-and-copyright-related lawsuits have been filed over the past three years, most of which hinge on the concept of fair use, a doctrine that allows the use of copyrighted material without permission if the use is sufficiently transformative—meaning it must serve a new purpose or add new meaning, rather than simply copying or substituting the original work. 

Alsup’s ruling may set a precedent for these other copyright cases—although it is also likely that many of these rulings will be appealed, meaning it will take years until there is clarity around AI and copyright in the U.S.

So, what do you think? Do you think this ruling that that training AI on copyrighted works will impact other AI copyright cases? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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