This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value”; Vanity Fair, April 15, 2025

KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair; This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value”

"Last month, I prompted Meta AI with a question: “Is it okay to use pirated books to train AI?” The machine’s response was unequivocal. “Using pirated books to train AI is not okay,” it admonished. “In fact, it’s a serious violation of copyright laws and can have significant consequences for authors and publishers. Recently, it’s been reported that Meta used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programs, which has sparked widespread outrage and condemnation from the writing community.”"

Jack Dorsey Says Intellectual Property Law Shouldn't Exist, and Elon Musk Agrees: 'Delete All IP Law'; Entrepreneur, April 14, 2025

SHERIN SHIBU EDITED BY MELISSA MALAMUT  , Entrepreneur; Jack Dorsey Says Intellectual Property Law Shouldn't Exist, and Elon Musk Agrees: 'Delete All IP Law'

"While Dorsey may want to end intellectual property law, copyright holders are still holding on to their work. Dozens of cases have been filed over the past few years in U.S. federal court against AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, as authors, artists, and news organizations accuse these companies of using their copyrighted work to train AI models without credit or compensation.

AI needs ample training material to keep it sharp. It took about 300 billion words to train ChatGPT, an AI chatbot now used by over 500 million people weekly. AI image generator DALL·E 2 needed "hundreds of millions of captioned images from the internet" to become operational."

Creators Are Losing the AI Copyright Battle. We Have to Keep Fighting (Guest Column); The Hollywood Reporter, April 16, 2025

Ed Newton-Rex ; Creators Are Losing the AI Copyright Battle. We Have to Keep Fighting (Guest Column)

"The struggle between AI companies and creatives around “training data” — or what you and I would refer to as people’s life’s work — may be the defining struggle of this generation for the media industries. AI companies want to exploit creators’ work without paying them, using it to train AI models that compete with those creators; creators and rights holders are doing everything they can to stop them."

The real argument artists should be making against AI; Vox, April 16, 2025

 Sigal Samuel, Vox; The real argument artists should be making against AI

[Paywall to access]

Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case; TechCrunch, April 11, 2025

Kyle Wiggers , TechCrunch; Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case

"A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on e-books without permission.

The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense “a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.”"

I’m Not Convinced Ethical Generative AI Currently Exists; Wired, February 20, 2025

 REECE ROGERS , Wired; I’m Not Convinced Ethical Generative AI Currently Exists

"For me, the ethics of generative AI use can be broken down to issues with how the models are developed—specifically, how the data used to train them was accessed—as well as ongoing concerns about their environmental impact. In order to power a chatbot or image generator, an obscene amount of data is required, and the decisions developers have made in the past—and continue to make—to obtain this repository of data are questionable and shrouded in secrecy. Even what people in Silicon Valley call “open source” models hide the training datasets inside...

The ethical aspects of AI outputs will always circle back to our human inputs. What are the intentions of the user’s prompts when interacting with a chatbot? What were the biases in the training data? How did the devs teach the bot to respond to controversial queries? Rather than focusing on making the AI itself wiser, the real task at hand is cultivating more ethical development practices and user interactions."

OpenAI Copyright Suit Consolidation Portends Consistency, Risk; Bloomberg Law, April 8, 2025

Annelise Levy

, Kyle Jahner , Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Copyright Suit Consolidation Portends Consistency, Risk

"OpenAI Inc.'s tactical win consolidating a dozen copyright suits against it nevertheless carries risks for the company, as the matters proceed before a judge who’s already ruled against the company in key decisions.

The US Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation last week centralized casesacross the country in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York for pretrial activity, which could include dispositive motions including summary judgment, as well as contentious discovery disputes that have been common among the cases.

“This will help create more consistency in the pre-trial outcomes, but it also means that you’ll get fewer tries from different plaintiffs to find a winning set of arguments,” Peter Henderson, an assistant professor at Princeton University, said in an email...

While streamlined, the pretrial proceedings figure to remain contentious as the parties press novel questions about how copyright laws apply to the game-changing generative AI technology. The disputes carry vast ramifications for companies reliant on millions of copyrighted works to train their models."

Judge calls out OpenAI’s “straw man” argument in New York Times copyright suit; Ars Technica, April 4, 2025

ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; Judge calls out OpenAI’s “straw man” argument in New York Times copyright suit

"Essentially, the judge agreed with the NYT that OpenAI has not yet provided any evidence that the newspaper knew how ChatGPT would perform until the product was out in the wild. Therefore, he denied OpenAI's motion to dismiss those claims as time-barred, while denouncing as a "straw man" an OpenAI argument that the NYT, "as a 'sophisticated publisher,' had a duty 'to take prompt action after being put on notice of what it now claims to be alleged infringement.'""

Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward; NPR, March 27, 2025

Bobby Allyn, NPR ; Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward

"A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI's request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper's content without permission or payment.

In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case's main copyright infringement claims to go forward.

Stein did not immediately release an opinion but promised one would come "expeditiously."

The decision is a victory for the newspaper, which has joined forces with other publishers, including The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, to challenge the way that OpenAI collected vast amounts of data from the web to train its popular artificial intelligence service, ChatGPT."

Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright; The Guardian, March 25, 2025

Ella Creamer , The Guardian; Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright

"Richard Osman has said that writers will “have a good go” at taking on Meta after it emerged that the company used a notorious database believed to contain pirated books to train artificial intelligence.

“Copyright law is not complicated at all,” the author of The Thursday Murder Club series wrote in a statement on X on Sunday evening. “If you want to use an author’s work you need to ask for permission. If you use it without permission you’re breaking the law. It’s so simple.”

In January, it emerged that Mark Zuckerberg approved his company’s use of The Library Genesis dataset, a “shadow library” that originated in Russia and contains more than 7.5m books. In 2024 a New York federal court ordered LibGen’s anonymous operators to pay a group of publishers $30m (£24m) in damages for copyright infringement. Last week, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen. In response, authors and writers’ organisations have rallied against Meta’s use of copyrighted works."

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI; The Atlantic, March 20, 2025

Alex Reisner , The Atlantic; Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

"Editor’s note: This search tool is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can read an analysis about LibGen and its contents here. Find The Atlantic’s search tool for movie and television writing used to train AI here."

Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case; Reuters, March 26, 2025

Blake Brittain , Reuters; Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case

"Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by Universal Music Group and other music publishers to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said that the publishers' request was too broad and that they failed to show Anthropic's conduct caused them "irreparable harm."

Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works; Variety, March 17, 2025

Todd Spangler , Variety; Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works

"More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies.

The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others — which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi — were submitting comments for the Trump administration’s U.S. AI Action Plan⁠. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders."

How to tell when AI models infringe copyright; The Washington Post, March 24, 2024

Editorial Board, The Washington Post; How to tell when AI models infringe copyright

"Fair use has been a big part of AI companies’ defense. No matter how well a plaintiff manages to argue that a given AI model infringes copyright, the AI maker can usually point to the doctrine of fair use, which requires consideration of multiple factors, including the purpose of the use (here, criticism, comment and research are favored) and the effect of the use on the marketplace. If, in using a copied work, an AI model adds “something new,” it is probably in the clear."

Should AI be treated the same way as people are when it comes to copyright law? ; The Hill, March 24, 2025

 NICHOLAS CREEL, The Hill ; Should AI be treated the same way as people are when it comes to copyright law? 

"The New York Times’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft highlights an uncomfortable contradiction in how we view creativity and learning. While the Times accuses these companies of copyright infringement for training AI on their content, this ignores a fundamental truth: AI systems learn exactly as humans do, by absorbing, synthesizing and transforming existing knowledge into something new."

AI firms push to use copyrighted content freely; Axios, March 20, 2025

 Ina Fried, Axios; AI firms push to use copyrighted content freely

"A sharp divide over AI engines' free use of copyrighted material has emerged as a key conflict among the firms and groups that recently flooded the White House with advice on its forthcoming "AI Action Plan."

Why it matters: Copyright infringement claims were among the first legal challenges following ChatGPT's launch, with multiple lawsuits now winding their way through the courts.

Driving the news: In their White House memos, OpenAI and Google argue that their  use of copyrighted material for AI is a matter of national security — and if that use is limited, China will gain an unfair edge in the AI race."

The AI Copyright Battle: Why OpenAI And Google Are Pushing For Fair Use; Forbes, March 15, 2025

Virginie Berger , Forbes; The AI Copyright Battle: Why OpenAI And Google Are Pushing For Fair Use

"Furthermore, the ongoing lawsuits against AI firms could serve as a necessary correction to push the industry toward genuinely intelligent machine learning models instead of data-compression-based generators masquerading as intelligence. If legal challenges force AI firms to rethink their reliance on copyrighted content, it could spur innovation toward creating more advanced, ethically sourced AI systems...

Recommendations: Finding a Sustainable Balance

A sustainable solution must reconcile technological innovation with creators' economic interests. Policymakers should develop clear federal standards specifying fair use parameters for AI training, considering solutions such as:

• Licensing and Royalties: Transparent licensing arrangements compensating creators whose work is integral to AI datasets.
• Curated Datasets: Government or industry-managed datasets explicitly approved for AI training, ensuring fair compensation.
• Regulated Exceptions: Clear legal definitions distinguishing transformative use in AI training contexts.

These nuanced policies could encourage innovation without sacrificing creators’ rights.

The lobbying by OpenAI and Google reveals broader tensions between rapid technological growth and ethical accountability. While national security concerns warrant careful consideration, they must not justify irresponsible regulation or ethical compromises. A balanced approach, preserving innovation, protecting creators’ rights, and ensuring sustainable and ethical AI development, is critical for future global competitiveness and societal fairness."

OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use; Ars Technica, March 13, 2025

ASHLEY BELANGER  , Ars Technica; OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use

"OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump's AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies' unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity's creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren't substitutes for original works.

So far, one landmark ruling favored rights holders, with a judge declaring AI training is not fair use, as AI outputs clearly threatened to replace Thomson-Reuters' legal research firm Westlaw in the market, Wired reported. But OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits, including a major suit brought by The New York Times."

French publishers and authors sue Meta over copyright works used in AI training; AP, March 12, 2025

 KELVIN CHAN, AP; French publishers and authors sue Meta over copyright works used in AI training

"French publishers and authors said Wednesday they’re taking Meta to court, accusing the social media company of using their works without permission to train its artificial intelligence model. 

Three trade groups said they were launching legal action against Meta in a Paris court over what they said was the company’s “massive use of copyrighted works without authorization” to train its generative AI model. 

The National Publishing Union, which represents book publishers, has noted that “numerous works” from its members are turning up in Meta’s data pool, the group’s president, Vincent Montagne, said in a joint statement."

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder; The Register, March 11, 2025

Thomas Claburn , The Register; Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

"A judge has found Meta must answer a claim it allegedly removed so-called copyright management information from material used to train its AI models.

The Friday ruling by Judge Vince Chhabria concerned the case Kadrey et al vs Meta Platforms, filed in July 2023 in a San Francisco federal court as a proposed class action by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, who reckon the Instagram titan's use of their work to train its neural networks was illegal.

Their case burbled along until January 2025 when the plaintiffs made the explosive allegation that Meta knew it used copyrighted material for training, and that its AI models would therefore produce results that included copyright management information (CMI) – the fancy term for things like the creator of a copyrighted work, its license and terms of use, its date of creation, and so on, that accompany copyrighted material.

The miffed scribes alleged Meta therefore removed all of this copyright info from the works it used to train its models so users wouldn’t be made aware the results they saw stemmed from copyrighted stuff."