Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) company Anthropic has claimed to a US court that using copyrighted content in large language model (LLM) training data counts as “fair use”, however.
Under US law, “fair use” permits the limited use of copyrighted material without permission, for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research.
In October 2023, a host of music publishers including Concord, Universal Music Group and ABKCO initiated legal action against the Amazon- and Google-backed generative AI firm Anthropic, demanding potentially millions in damages for the allegedly “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics”.
By and large copyright infringement is illegal. That some things aren’t infringement doesn’t change that a general stance of “if I don’t have permission, I can’t copy it” is correct. The first argument in the EFF article is effectively the title: “it can’t be copyright, because otherwise massive AI models would be impossible to build”. That doesn’t make it fair use, they just want it to become so.