AI Co. Anthropic Nabs Partial Fair Use Win in Copyright Case
The headlines about this case will miss a lot of the nuances; it's not a complete win for Anthropic, but it is an important one. The ruling found that training AI on legally obtained copyrighted books is fair use because it's "quintessentially transformative." That doesn't mean that training on pirated books is fair use, and nothing in this ruling explicitly addresses content publicly available online. The output of AI is also an unresolved question; I predict we'll have some rulings that generating text or images that too closely matches existing copyrighted works is not protected. AI tools (especially image generation tools) need guardrails to prevent the generation of copyrighted content.