The new year may bring pivotal developments in a series of copyright lawsuits that could shape the future business of artificial intelligence.
The lawsuits from authors, news outlets, visual artists, musicians and other copyright owners accuse OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Platforms (META.O) and other technology companies of using their work to train chatbots and other AI-based content generators without permission or payment.
Courts will likely begin hearing arguments starting next year on whether the defendants' copying amounts to "fair use," which could be the AI copyright war's defining legal question.
Tech companies have argued that their AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by studying it to learn to create new, transformative content. Copyright owners counter that the companies unlawfully copy their works to generate rival content that threatens their livelihoods.
OpenAI, Meta, Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz and others warn that being forced to pay copyright holders for their content could cripple the burgeoning U.S. AI industry. Some content owners began voluntarily licensing their material to tech companies this year, including Reddit, News Corp and the Financial Times.
Reuters licensed its articles to Meta in October.
Other copyright holders, such as major record labels, the New York Times and several best-selling authors continued to press their claims or filed new lawsuits in 2024.
AI companies could escape U.S. copyright liability completely if the courts agree with them on the fair use question. Judges hearing the cases in different jurisdictions could reach conflicting conclusions on fair use and other issues, and multiple rounds of appeals are likely.
An ongoing dispute between Thomson Reuters and former legal research competitor Ross Intelligence could provide an early indication of how judges will treat fair use arguments.
Thomson Reuters - the parent company of Reuters News - alleged that Ross misused copyrighted material from its legal research platform Westlaw to build an AI-powered legal search engine. Ross denied wrongdoing, invoking fair use.
U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas said last year that he could not decide before a jury trial whether Ross made fair use of the content. But Bibas canceled the scheduled trial and heard new fair use arguments in November, which could lead to a new ruling on the issue next year.
Another early fair use indicator could come in a dispute between music publishers and Anthropic over the use of their song lyrics to train its chatbot Claude. U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Corley is considering fair use as part of the publishers' request for a preliminary injunction against the company. Corley held oral arguments over the proposed injunction last month.
In November, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in New York dismissed a case from news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet against OpenAI, finding that they failed to show they were injured by OpenAI's alleged copyright violations.
The outlets' cases differ from most of the other lawsuits because they accused OpenAI of illegally removing copyright management information from their articles instead of directly infringing their copyrights. But other cases could also end without a determination on fair use if judges decide that copyright owners were unharmed by the use of their work in AI training.
