AI companies spent years treating copyright like a Terms of Service box nobody reads. Now a court has suggested that »we copied it to build a competing product« may not magically become fair use because you sprinkle AI on top. Turns out disruption is slightly less fun when the disrupted people have lawyers.

Unfortunately, Congress will end up doing whatever its paid to do.

As far as I can tell, the 3rd circuit is just one step below the Supreme Court. So unless they take the case it’s pretty stuck. Congress would have to go above and beyond to change the existing laws to allow it.

Also with midterms coming up congress is going to have a harder time passing a law. Especially if the republicans lose the house or the senate. Then they’d have to get the democrats and the republicans to play ball, vs just one currently.

IMO Disney and other copyright holders have more lobbying power than AI companies at this time.

That said, damages of a winning suit will end up being minuscule compared the revenue these companies have made from said piracy.

Big copyright companies are powerful, but the AI bubble is currently holding up the American economy, and there is the AI race with China. Hard to tell how that goes. If Trump wins/cheats his way to a win in the midterms it’s going to be more in favor of AI.

Remember, Congress makes the laws that courts rule on.

Congress does change legislation for its buddies to get around the court system.

Gun manufacturers have their own little Congressional immunity from lawsuits, for instance, (PLCAA).

It’s too late to change the legislation now. The piracy was commited under current law.

Yeah…no. This is going to the Supreme Court and there’s zero chance their right wing, Trump-choad-gargling asses don’t rule in favor of AI companies.

Just like the tariffs, they will use this to steal our money … they will use tax money to pay the crony companies that play victim.

I think this should be the reasoning politicians use to make AI companies owned by the public.

These AI models are nothing without all the data they were trained on. All this data is content produced by humans throughout history. AI is the ultimate product of thousands of years of human progress. Why should we allow corporations to be the primary beneficiaries of this?

Agreed… the problem is that the damage is already done and there’s no way to really make it right to the copyright holders so mandating that all AI models and their weights should be treated as public domain would at least help a bit.

Ii think it’s an issue so long as private companies are profiting off the works of other people. If this is public (like a utility of some sort), I’m not sure the copyright claim means as much. I’m sure it would need to be handled in a way still.

It actively prevents companies like Disney from using AI generation tools to stamp out movies like assembly line products. They can’t afford to have their movies become public domain at release.

It won’t protect jobs in advertising, because a lot of companies won’t care if their ads become public domain. This might be a problem because a lot of actors get their start in ad bits, and a lot of graphic artists make a living on ad images.

AI companies are burning money pits… don’t make me the tax payer the patsy who pays off the unimaginable debts of AI companies.

but think of the CEOs for a minute, they still gotta run the AI, whether through predatory government contracts or predatory private business

how are they gunna afford their 4th house they visit one week a year?

4th house…? What are you, some kind of shit eating peasant…?

damn, it really is unimaginable wealth lol

That’s exactly why there’s a chance of it happening.

Socialise the costs, privatise the gains. Bail me out, daddy!

Given the size of this bubble (WAY bigger than 2007), the taxpayers are going to hold the bag. We might as well force the companies to share the benefits (if any) as well.

Currently, there are no profits, tho.

Either the entire tech industry, and any business that relies on the tech industry (read: most businesses) explode and take modern human society with it… or every human the world over contributes in some part toward letting them continue their death march towards human extinction. What a choice.

The AI isn’t very useful, that’s a problem. The government will make them public, then the public will own their huge dept. the oligarchs will receive golden parachutes in the form of a buyout and we will get stuck with the bill. Fuck that, make the technofeudalists liquidate at reasonable prices. Give people their homes back. Make them pay to supply clean water everywhere an open-loop DC was constructed. Jail them for terrorism after polluting our skies and attempting to corner the market on information in order to control the populace.

Don’t you mean “could be the reasoning”? AI companies aren’t profitable, they would want to be “publicly owned” so that everyone else will be holding their bags. They’re already trying to hedge it into everyone’s retirement funds etc. It would not be in our best interests to be even more exposed to this.

Do you mean compelling them to operate on a completely open source basis?

If you mean as in government owned/controlled, considering the primary thieves are US corporations, that would be the equivalent of the american government laundering stolen goods and compounding the theft from the rest of the world.

Best case scenario but that’s not the one we will be getting.

Copyright juggernauts and data brokers, the ones that actually own all the data like Reddit and universal records, will get paid.

Open weight models won’t be allowed in business contexts or to be served online, OpenAI and company get a fat monopoly which suits them.

People are cheering for their own doom. The handful of big AI company are going to end up owning a solid chunk of the economy. It’s basically going to be an AI tax.

You will be replaced by an agent, OpenAI will only sell them to your employer in bulk at a stupid price so you can’t turn around and compete. That bulk price per agent will still be cheaper than your monthly wage.

Find me one politician that even mentioned forcing these models public. It’s a fantasy.

The current copyright system is a artifact of US-dominated systems the world is rapidly disassociating itself from.

The worst case scenario is American companies are able to lock down the United States, but the rest of the world will ignore it.

Good thing they raised all that capital. Go ahead and shovel it all over to the creators.

Worth reading the original opinion appealed here: great technical writing and explanation of reasoning by the judge

…thomsonreuters.com/…/THOMSON REUTERS ROSS LAWSUI…

Thanks for the hint.

This is great progress. Curious to see how the Supreme Court eventually rules

“Ya this is illegal. Your fine is 60$”

This court finds AI guilty of copyright infringement.

The penalty will be… NOTHING!

Immediately made me think of Betteridge’s law of headlines.

I will remain cautiously optimistic but until it makes it through Supreme Court it’s not a done deal.

A law is useless unless it’s enforced. We live in an era where courts say a lot of shit but the legal system doesn’t back it up.

If you think this will turn the tide I both envy how un- jaded you are and worry that you really aren’t paying attention.

Copyright law is as copyright law does.

“It was not.”

All LLM code output is now copyleft because there was GPL stuff in the training data, LOL!

spoiler

___ (Actually it’s probably all just copyright infringement and not usable at all because of all the conflicting licenses, but a guy can dream…)

I think LLM code output is already copyleft because non-humans legally can not hold copyrights.

LLM output doesn’t automatically get a copyright. But, if it is (part of) a work that includes “human creative effort” (prompts don’t count), the human(s) can hold a copyright on that work.

In addition, the output can still be a derivative work in violation of the copyrights of (some of) the training data, whether or not there are copyrights on that output. It would have to have sufficient similarity to some work in the training data, but that’s not too uncommon.

And, GPL and CC-SA works are known to be in the training data of most models, including Apertus.

:(

Copyleft is a way of leveraging copyright against itself to ensure nobody else can make a proprietary version of the thing. It is not the same as Public Domain/lack of copyright.

in my defense there are a lot of words to remember

This is your reminder that in 2026 absolutely ZERO court rulings matter long term except the Supreme Court, which is captured for life by conservatives.

No matter who wins the midterms or even the next election, that is with us for the rest of most of our lives.

What a time to be alive.

If it’s any comfort, there’s a good chance the sunlight won’t be reaching the suface of the earth for much of 2027, so we won’t be alive for too much longer.

It very much is not. It is in effect until the end of the United States. This will be long before most of us die.

The future will be getting very bad very fast and most nation states will collapse in a few decades.

So there’s that I guess.

I think you are DRASTICALLY underestimating how durable fascist regimes are. Without external intervention they can continue for DECADES. Societies don’t just collapse when people get fed up.

For real, Russia is calling with a word for OP.

Maybe they meant the end of “the United States as we know it,” which could be right. Or, arguably, already is.

But as a lifelong resident of the US, your point about how long regimes can last is extra scary. Two of the biggest facets of this country’s identity have been that we have a lot of money/resources and that we have a lot of weapons. Plus we have our special brand of “fuck y’all; got mine” culture.

It seems like a nasty recipe for a fascist regime to isolate and turtle up and just grind along for half a century.

I don’t mean when people are fed up. I mean when millions are starving to death and the firestorms are ravaging our croplands. When the hurricanes give us a Katrina level disaster 6 times a year. When it becomes literally impossible for organized society to maintain itself.

This is happening sooner than you think.

Modern nation states are a hell of a lot more resilient than what you give them credit for. Look at some of the hardships nations survived during WW2. States can survive even mass famines. How? Simple rule. The police and the army eat first.

Only in the US. EU has teeth and occasionally uses them.

This is why the court MUST be packed. FDR threatened to do it 90 years ago, and the Dems better do it this time or else face another Trump again.

When peasants were able to copy ‘intellectual property’ for personal benefit and enjoyment, it was a massive crime. When the oligarchs can steal - everything - for the slight chance of paying less in wages, it is an innovation.

I think it is pretty much certain the model companies escape any penalty for their mass theft of IP. There will be some settlements and token penalties that sound big on paper, but are nothing compared to the market valuations.

Not really. We had collage and training any kind of AI was fine before all this. There’s blood in the water and copyright companies can smell it.

OpenAI is happy to give them a piece of the pie if that means they are the only ones allowed to sell it to consumers.

You are right about the penalty being pennys compared to their profits. It’s not meant to punish them but help them build a moat, the one that got destroyed by China a few months ago.

I’m cynically believing that this is the beginning of enforcing a copywrite use tax; when anyone generates something that is visual or audible.

The tax will be collected by the government and put into a slush fund that mostly goes to corporations and wealthy, while ostensibly supposed to go fairly to all creators

I’m guessing it’s going to be a system where a company like Spotify doesnt let you upload generated music unless it has the metadata from the “legal” music generators so they can automatically send most of the profits to the shareholders.

Universal already owns Udio, Suno will follow soon. I wish it was an actual tax.

It’s almost like rules are just made up

For them.

I don’t care if copyright holders win I just want AI to lose.

I’d kinda prefer both lose…

Yeah that is the ideal outcome.

Now I feel bad for basing my programming career on material I apparently “stole” from books and other copyrighted sources. Hell, sometimes I even straight-up copypasted example code. I blame society.

Betteridge’s law of headlines in full effect.

For those (like me) who don’t know what Betteridge’s Law of Headlines is: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

en.wikipedia.org/…/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

As much as I hate AI, current copyright laws are out of control and are extended well beyond what they should be used for.

I hate them too but AI is more of a threat to all of us. Any chance at stopping the madness is good enough for me.

As long as we live under capitalism, copyright protects small artists, writers, and creators as much as it protects large shitty corporations who weaponize it.

I’d love to be rid of all intellectual property, but we have a lot to fix before that can become reality without punishing people who rely on it.

I’m down with some huge reforms though.

No, not at all. Do you have any idea of how expensive it is to bring a lawsuit? What you are saying about protecting small artists is pure propaganda. Furthermore, this only matters for commercial artist as copyright is never used in 99.999% of real life cases

We will never move forward as long as we allow all of our modern culture and technology to be locked up by corporations through imaginary property rights.

It also costs money to register a copyright. And if it’s not registered when the copyright infringement happens, statutory damages don’t apply and you need to prove actual damages instead.

Its actually mainly used to bully small creators so they can have precedent to go after larger ones.

Wouldn’t be funny if disneys fuckery did in AI?

I mean Disney’s lawyer game is top notch. I would love to see the mouse vs AI battle.

AI is way more out of control than copyright.

There's simply no way to justify what the AI compies have been doing. As that one Microsoft exec said, it's the "largest theft of labor" in modern history

I agree, but I fucking hate that it’s AI that’s breaking the concept. First of all, it’s not like it’s a righteous fight, whoever wins, we all lose. Second, as much as I think copywrite is abused like hell, I still think the idea, one closer to the original, has merit and does provide crucial protections for individuals.

Sadly the fucking plagiarism machine and the anti-human dirtbags running it have found the absolute worst possible way to break the system. Ultimately resulting in nothing for us plebes that copywrite should protect and all the benefits that the shit copywrite coroporate power grab produced for them.

Still doesn’t prevent data mining of forums for, “training.” Still doesn’t give people who’s contributed on forums a check for being of value to big tech. If they cared at all they’d be paying us money to train AI until it’s established. Google is offering points for data rather than money (deviceusagestudy.google/signup/invitecode) I only know that because I got a flier in the mail which means they’re desperate to get people to sign up.

So they take one extra step. Create a forum. Have a different company mine all the data and repost it to the forum. Then the AI company can mine the forum.

A rule like “forums are ok” is a goatse-sized gaping loophole.

I hope Studio Ghibli sue them for a bazillion dollars

The headline isn’t correct. This ruling is about a specific element of Fair Use, not a blanket declaration that copyrighted data cannot be used to train models as the headline suggests.

Fair Use requires some conditions be met. The one that wasn’t met here was that the work you’re creating can’t compete with the copyright owner.

From the Reuters article:

“Ross took the headnotes to make it easier to develop a competing legal research tool,” the judge said. “So ​Ross’s use is not transformative.”

In other cases, for example the Author’s Guild lawsuit against Meta/Anthropic/etc courts have ruled that using books to train LLMs is fair use because LLMs and books don’t compete.

They were required to pay for the books, but not prevented by copyright from using them to train a model.

There’s nothing novel happening in this case from a legal perspective. Maybe this is the first case where the defendant didn’t clear the elements of fair use but those elements predate AI by decades and have been uses in thousands of cases.

I ficking hope so. Either all profits aren’t privatized and distributed socially or blow the whole thing up.

Let them fight

I want both sides to lose and for it to really hurt.

It would be best if they destroyed each other, but perhaps that’s overly optimistic

>“How influential the latest appeals court ruling will be is debatable. The court found that Ross had effectively copy-pasted Thomson Reuters’ “headnotes,” or brief editorial summaries of legal issues, verbatim for its legal search engine, a practice that isn’t difficult to separate from fair use.”

 

>“In fact, as Copyright Lately‘s Aaron Moss points out, even the AI industry called the latest ruling a win, with tech industry group Chamber of Progress senior director of AI Adam Eisgrau tweeting that the ruling “implicitly confirms that highly transformative gen AI training to produce a hugely multi-purpose model with substantial public benefit is likely fair use!””

Looks like the company that got sued just copy pastaed protected content without making any type of change to make it fair use.

Not the “win” anti-AI people were looking for and the article seems to be misunderstood by most.

Seems as long as AI models use some form “transformative” method to train their AI, then it’s fair use.

In fact, as Copyright Lately‘s Aaron Moss points out, even the AI industry called the latest ruling a win, with tech industry group Chamber of Progress senior director of AI Adam Eisgrau tweeting that the ruling “implicitly confirms that highly transformative gen AI training to produce a hugely multi-purpose model with substantial public benefit is likely fair use!”

“We stole even more, so that makes it legal!”

So it is still legal for me to pirate anything I want as long as i train a small ass AI model on the side with it?

This would be a separate issue from piracy

This is more about what you can DO with something you legally purchased. Think film rights. If you want to use a song in your movie, you can’t just go to Tower Records and buy the CD. Buying the CD gives you a right to listen to that CD, but it does not give you the right to use it in your movie.

Likewise, this court argues, having legal access to a work does not give you the right to feed it into an LLM as training data.

It’s a bit like the Muppet Show. The Muppet Show was a bunch of puppets singing along with musical pop stars of the day. But because the show was produced before VHS and DVD were a thing, none of the artists had given permission for them to re-release the show on DVD. So re-releasing the Muppet Show was a tedious process of negotiation with every rights holder (made much less tedious by being purchased by Disney).

But I absolutely hear you and am currently training a small LLM on my favorite TV, movies, and music. Have I started the actual training yet? No. I don’t see the need until I’ve filled up this 15TB HDD with training data so I can do it all in one pass.

Likewise, this court argues, having legal access to a work does not give you the right to feed it into an LLM as training data.

Seems more narrow than that. If your “AI” just copies the input almost verbatim, then it’s not “transformative”.

Unfortunately they still seem to regard the big players’ consumption as “transformative” enough to not count.

Remember to clone a repo for an AI for plausible deniability.

When ask why your consuming the copyrighted material simply say you’re in the quality control phase.

If this could be upheld (though unfortunately it won’t) then it could completely end the generation of new models and the companies that make them. The models that are already out would never go away and might as well be available for people to run locally but if they want new ones it should be done for the collective good with oversight. I.e. state run.

But again, just wishful thinking on my part.