First Two Opinions Drop On AI And Copyright Fair Use

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC

In the last week, two different federal district judges in the Northern District of California issued rulings in the first substantive decisions addressing whether use of extensive copyrighted material to train generative AI models is permissible fair use.

The court in the first case,Bartz v. Anthropic PBC,lauded the defendant's large language model ("LLM"), " as "among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes," and found that use of other parties books to train the models was a fair use (as long as the copies it used were not pirated).

The court in the second case,Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., while also finding for the defendant on fair use, pointed to the plaintiff's failure to submit sufficient evidence of market harm from the copying – and opined that "in most cases" the defendant will lose, absent permission from or payment to the owner of the content used to train an AI LLM model.