The US Department of Justice has sided with AI companies in a copyright case.
It argues AI training on copyrighted material is fair use.
This contradicts a US Copyright Office report.
What happened
The US Department of Justice has sided with AI companies in a copyright lawsuit brought by the New York Times, arguing that training AI models on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use.
Why it matters
The DOJ argues that copyrighted text used for training does not amount to infringement because outputs "often if not always lack substantial similarity" to originals. This is a landmark case seen as a bellwether for how courts will handle copyright and AI training.
What to watch
The DOJ's position conflicts with a US Copyright Office report that rejected blanket fair use. The Copyright Office argued that commercial applications competing with original works exceed what fair use allows.
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The DOJ's filing introduces a key analogy, comparing AI training to the writer Joan Didion copying Hemingway's stories as a teenager to learn. The department argues that under a different ruling's logic, Didion could have faced liability whenever she published, and that it would be unthinkable to require payment for drawing on a book to write something new. This frames AI training as a creative process.
The department also claims LLMs have creative and public value, stating that human beings create original works using LLMs and that liability would stifle creativity. It notes that even New York Times writers reportedly use LLMs to draft and edit articles. These arguments are positioned against the concern that a multibillion-dollar company turning content into mass-market products is different from a single author's learning process.
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