What comes next for AI copyright lawsuits?

There are dozens of similar copyright lawsuits that work through the courts at the present time, where cases were submitted against all big players – not only the Anthropor and the dead but Google, Openai, Microsoft and more. On the other hand, prosecutors of artists and individual authors range to large companies such as Getty and New York Times.

The results of these cases are to have a tremendous impact on the future of artificial intelligence. In fact, they will decide whether or not the models can continue to order a free lunch. If not, they will need to start paying these training fees through new types of licensing deals – or finding new ways to train their models. These possibilities can increase industry.

This is why last week wins technology companies. So: closed cases? not quite. If you dig in the details, the rulings are definitely less and dry than it appears at first. Let’s take a closer look.

In both cases, a group of authors (the anthropological lawsuit was a collective action; 13 prosecutors were prosecuting Mita, including high-level names such as Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates) to demonstrate that the technology company has violated their copyright using their books to train large language models. In both cases, companies argued that this training process is calculated as a fair use, a legal ruling that allows the use of copyright -protected work for certain purposes.

There is the end of similarities. The verdict in favor of Anthropor, the provincial judge, William Alsoub, argued on June 23 that the company’s use of books was legal because what it did with them was transformative, which means that he did not replace the original works but made something new of them. “Technology was the discussion among the most transformative that many of us will see in our lives,” Alsup wrote in his ruling.

In the Meta case, the provincial judge, Vince Chapria, made a different argument. He also stood with the technology company, but he instead focused his rule on the issue of whether Meta had harmed the market for the authors’ work or not. Chapria said he believed that alsup had alienated aside the importance of damage to the market. He wrote on June 25: “The main question is in almost any case, as the defendant copied the work of an original person without permission, whether allowing people to engage in this type of behavior will significantly reduce the market for the original.”

The same result; Too very different. It is not clear exactly what this means for other cases. On the one hand, it enhances at least two copies of the argument of just use. On the other hand, there is some dispute over how to determine a fair use.

But there are greater things that must be noticed. Chapria was very clear in his judgment that Meta won not because he was on the right, but because the plaintiffs failed to provide a strong argument enough. “In the great plan for things, the consequences of this ruling are limited,” he wrote. “This is not a collective action, and therefore the ruling only affects the rights of these 13 authors – and not countless others who used their work to train their models. As it should be clear now, this ruling does not stand on the assumption that the use of Meta for copyrights to train their language models.” This reads a lot like an invitation to anyone else with grievance to come and go another.