Fair Use or Infringement? Recent Court Rulings on AI Trained on Copyrighted Works
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now part of daily life, powering customer service chatbots, virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, automated email responses, and personalized shopping recommendations. But as these systems get smarter, they need ever-larger amounts of data to learn, often drawing on copyrighted books and creative works. This has led to new legal battles over whether AI companies are crossing the line into copyright infringement, or whether their use of these materials to train large language models qualifies as “fair use.” Meta’s Fair Use Win: The Importance of Market Impact One of the most closely watched cases in this area is Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. , involving Meta (Facebook’s parent company) and its AI model “Llama.” The authors who brought the lawsuit argued that Meta used their books to train its AI without permission and that this would harm their ability to license their works in the future . The court approached the issue by carefully considering t...