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AI companies say training on copyrighted work is fair use

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Judge rules for Meta in dispute with authors

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Judge also says fair use argument would often not succeed

By Blake Brittain

June 25 (Reuters) - A federal judge in San Francisco

ruled on Wednesday for Meta Platforms ( META ) against a group

of authors who had argued that its use of their books without

permission to train its artificial intelligence system infringed

their copyrights.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said in his decision the

authors had not presented enough evidence that Meta's AI would

dilute the market for their work to show that the company's

conduct was illegal under U.S. copyright law.

Chhabria also said, however, that using copyrighted work

without permission to train AI would be unlawful in "many

circumstances," splitting with another San Francisco judge who

found on Monday in a separate lawsuit that Anthropic's AI

training made "fair use" of copyrighted materials.

"This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's

use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is

lawful," Chhabria said. "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."

Spokespeople for Meta and attorneys for the authors did

not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The authors sued Meta in 2023, arguing the company misused

pirated versions of their books to train its AI system Llama

without permission or compensation.

The lawsuit is one of several copyright cases brought by

writers, news outlets and other copyright owners against

companies including OpenAI, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Anthropic

over their AI training.

The legal doctrine of fair use allows the use of copyrighted

works without the copyright owner's permission in some

circumstances. It is a key defense for the tech companies.

Chhabria's decision is the second in the U.S. to address

fair use in the context of generative AI, following U.S.

District Judge William Alsup's ruling on the same issue in the

Anthropic case.

AI companies argue their systems make fair use of

copyrighted material by studying it to learn to create new,

transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright

holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI

industry.

Copyright owners say AI companies unlawfully copy their work

to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods.

Chhabria expressed sympathy for that argument during a hearing

in May, which he reiterated on Wednesday.

The judge said generative AI had the potential to flood the

market with endless images, songs, articles and books using a

tiny fraction of the time and creativity that would otherwise be

required to create them.

"So by training generative AI models with copyrighted

works, companies are creating something that often will

dramatically undermine the market for those works, and thus

dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create

things the old-fashioned way," Chhabria said.