Anthropic wins key ruling on AI in authors' copyright lawsuit(reuters.com)
reuters.com
Anthropic wins key ruling on AI in authors' copyright lawsuit
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-ruling-ai-authors-copyright-lawsuit-2025-06-24/
8 comments
Full order here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
The headline misses the nuance that there will be a trial on Anthropic's gathering "pirated copies to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages." But the court got it right IMO that "the use of the [copyrighted] books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use..."
The headline misses the nuance that there will be a trial on Anthropic's gathering "pirated copies to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages." But the court got it right IMO that "the use of the [copyrighted] books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use..."
Exceedingly transformative or not, the issue is one of consent.
No, fair use does not require consent. That's the point of fair use. You might think it should, but that's not the law.
Alsup has a reputation as being a very tech-savvy judge. His judgement is well reasoned. There is one part of it that I potentially take issue with:In Section 4A (p27) of the judgement doc, he analyses the effect on the market for the Author's works.
But Authors’ complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works. This is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act.
I'm not sure whether this argument should hold in general.If I train an LLM on Taylor Swift's entire discography, to produce songs in the style of Taylor Swift then surely that is competitive or creative displacement.
Possibly the underlying issue is that if I train an LLM on large corpus of work (say C21 singer / songwriter work) I am training the LLM to write singer / songwriter pop. but I could also ask the same LLM to provide me with songs in the style of Taylor Swift or Ethel Cain or whoever. One would seem infringing, the other non-infringing.
It's complicated...
But Authors’ complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works. This is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act.
I'm not sure whether this argument should hold in general.If I train an LLM on Taylor Swift's entire discography, to produce songs in the style of Taylor Swift then surely that is competitive or creative displacement.
Possibly the underlying issue is that if I train an LLM on large corpus of work (say C21 singer / songwriter work) I am training the LLM to write singer / songwriter pop. but I could also ask the same LLM to provide me with songs in the style of Taylor Swift or Ethel Cain or whoever. One would seem infringing, the other non-infringing.
It's complicated...
This is a really interesting point, and you're right to say it's complicated. I'm sort of an anti-IP hawk (I actually rep defendants in IP cases) and personally agree with it. But the US Copyright Office's position on GenAI supports the opposite view:
> Nor do we agree that AI training is inherently transformative because it is like human learning. To begin with, the analogy rests on a faulty premise, as fair use does not excuse all human acts done for the purpose of learning. A student could not rely on fair use to copy all the books at the library to facilitate personal education; rather, they would have to purchase or borrow a copy that was lawfully acquired, typically through a sale or license. Copyright law should not afford greater latitude for copying simply because it is done by a computer. Moreover, AI learning is different from human learning in ways that are material to the copyright analysis. Humans retain only imperfect impressions of the works they have experienced, filtered through their own unique personalities, histories, memories, and worldviews. Generative AI training involves the creation of perfect copies with the ability to analyze works nearly instantaneously. The result is a model that can create at superhuman speed and scale. In the words of Professor Robert Brauneis, “Generative model training transcends the human limitations that underlie the structure of the exclusive rights.”[0]
I disagree with the Copyright Office here, but ofc they're the Copyright Office and I could be wrong. More broadly I'm struggling with how to permit and incentivize creation of powerful generative models while not screwing creators in the process. There are startups and other efforts trying to address this through novel licensing, etc., but AFAIK there's no great solution. I'm also cautiously optimistic that there will be some decentralized and/or federated options. It's complicated indeed.
[0] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
> Nor do we agree that AI training is inherently transformative because it is like human learning. To begin with, the analogy rests on a faulty premise, as fair use does not excuse all human acts done for the purpose of learning. A student could not rely on fair use to copy all the books at the library to facilitate personal education; rather, they would have to purchase or borrow a copy that was lawfully acquired, typically through a sale or license. Copyright law should not afford greater latitude for copying simply because it is done by a computer. Moreover, AI learning is different from human learning in ways that are material to the copyright analysis. Humans retain only imperfect impressions of the works they have experienced, filtered through their own unique personalities, histories, memories, and worldviews. Generative AI training involves the creation of perfect copies with the ability to analyze works nearly instantaneously. The result is a model that can create at superhuman speed and scale. In the words of Professor Robert Brauneis, “Generative model training transcends the human limitations that underlie the structure of the exclusive rights.”[0]
I disagree with the Copyright Office here, but ofc they're the Copyright Office and I could be wrong. More broadly I'm struggling with how to permit and incentivize creation of powerful generative models while not screwing creators in the process. There are startups and other efforts trying to address this through novel licensing, etc., but AFAIK there's no great solution. I'm also cautiously optimistic that there will be some decentralized and/or federated options. It's complicated indeed.
[0] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
Note that the lawsuit has nothing to do with using models, only creating them. It is entirely possible for Anthropic to win, but still lose (somewhere else).
Other interesting things.
On pages 8 and 9, the judge points out that Anthropic made a claim about not being able to do something, then produced a document showing otherwise. They clawed the document back and are pretending it never existed. The two sides are fighting over this.
On pages 14-18, the judge discusses the issue of buying a paper book, scanning it, destroying the paper copy, and using the digital copy as if it were the paper copy. The judge rules that this is legal, which I am fairly certain is the opposite of what was decided in the lawsuit against the Internet Archive. Thus, this will almost certainly be appealed and we'll see how it goes. But if it succeeds, it could destroy the awful ebook schemes that plague libraries!