Generative AI companies are claiming a landmark win following a decision by the United States District Court Northern District of California in a case brought in August 2024 by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson for copyright infringement. On 23 June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the use of copyrighted books by Anthropic to train its LLM Claude was “fair use” and “transformative”. The decision states that “the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative. Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different. If this training process reasonably required making copies within the LLM or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a transformative use.”
However, there is a silver lining for copyright owners, as the decision also states that Anthropic will still have to face “trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness). That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
The decision on Kadrey v. Meta came on 25 June. Albeit favourable to Meta, the judge made clear that “Given the state of the record, the Court has no choice but to grant summary judgment to Meta on the plaintiffs’ claim that the company violated copyright law by training its models with their books. But in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these thirteen authors—not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models. And, as should now be clear, this ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful. It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”
According to commentators, the decision is mostly based on a failure to evidence market harm and will have limited impact on future cases.