(Reuters) – The new year could bring pivotal developments in a series of copyright lawsuits that could shape the future of artificial intelligence businesses.
The lawsuits filed by authors, news outlets, visual artists, musicians and other copyright holders accuse , Anthropic, Meta Platforms and other technology companies of using their work to train and other AI-based content generators without permission or payment.
Courts will likely begin hearing arguments starting next year about whether defendants’ copying amounts to “fair use,” which could be the defining legal issue of the AI copyright war.
Tech companies have argued that their AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by studying it to learn how to create new, transformative content. Copyright holders argue that companies illegally copy their works to generate rival content that threatens their livelihoods.
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OpenAI, Meta, investment firm Andreessen Horowitz and others warn that being forced to pay copyright holders for their content could harm the US AI industry. Some content owners began voluntarily licensing their material to technology companies this year, including Reddit, News Corp and the Financial Times.
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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 altogether if courts agree with them on the issue of fair use. Judges hearing cases in different jurisdictions may reach conflicting conclusions about fair use and other issues, and multiple rounds of appeals are likely.
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An ongoing dispute between Thomson Reuters and former legal research competitor Ross Intelligence may provide an early indication of how judges will treat fair use arguments.
Thomson Reuters – the parent company of Reuters News – alleged that Ross improperly used copyrighted material from its Westlaw legal search platform to build an AI-powered legal search engine. Ross denied wrongdoing, citing 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 matter next year.
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Another early indicator of fair use could arise in a dispute between music publishers and Anthropic over the use of its song lyrics to train its Claude chatbot. U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Corley is considering fair use as part of the publishers’ request for an injunction against the company. Corley made oral arguments on the proposed injunction last month.
In November, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in New York dismissed a case by news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet against OpenAI, concluding that they failed to demonstrate that they were harmed by OpenAI’s alleged copyright violations.
The outlets’ cases differ from most other lawsuits because they accused OpenAI of illegally removing copyright management information from their articles rather than directly infringing their copyrights. But other cases could also end without a fair use determination if judges decide that copyright holders were not harmed by the use of their work in AI training.
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(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington)
