Northern District of California Decides AI Training Is Fair Use, but Pirating Books May Still Be Infringing

Two groundbreaking decisions from the Northern District of California—Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. and Bartz v. Anthropic PBC—shed light on how courts are approaching the use of copyrighted materials in training large language models (LLMs). Both cases involved authors alleging copyright infringement based on the use of their books to train generative AI models, and both courts held that use of the copyrighted materials to train the AI models was transformative. The court in Anthropic held, however, that copying pirated books constitutes copyright infringement and the transformative nature of the use did not rescue such infringement. Conversely, the Meta court held that copying from pirate sites to train AI is fair use, but only because the plaintiffs failed to submit evidence of market harm, which the court believed to be the most relevant factor. As such, while use of copyrighted works to train AI may be fair use, copying works without permission carries the risk of infringement. Read the full Alert on the Duane Morris website.

Generative AI Training Case Flags Competition as Major Factor

Duane Morris attorneys Jennifer Lantz, Jeremy Elman and Max DiBaise authored the Bloomberg Law article, “Generative AI Training Case Flags Competition as Major Factor,” exploring what the Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence decision’s novel application of the “fair use” defense of copyright law means for generative AI training.

Companies must be mindful of the ultimate purpose of new artificial intelligence tools to avoid running into copyright infringement issues during the training process. If widely adopted, the Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence decision suggests “intermediate copying” cases are unlikely to provide a strong defense when the final output of a tool mirrors the products it was trained on. Accordingly, the key question is likely to what extent the AI system is competing with the underlying copyrighted work. The further away the system is, the more likely it is to be protected under the fair-use doctrine. Read the full article on the Bloomberg Law website.

© 2009-2025 Duane Morris LLP. Duane Morris is a registered service mark of Duane Morris LLP.

The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author and are not to be construed as legal advice.

Proudly powered by WordPress