The “fair use” doctrine under the US Copyright Act of 1976 allows for copyrighted materials to be used for purposes like criticism, journalism, and research.
Whether something is deemed fair use depends on several factors, including how transformative it is, how much of the work is used, and whether the reproduction alters the market value of the original.
It’s the keystone of the AI industry’s legal defense in a litany of ongoing lawsuits filed by rightsholders, who are accusing tech companies of unlawfully using their intellectual property to train their AI models.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long maintained that the AI race would be “over” if this key provision of copyright law were ever overturned. After all, with legal precedent, AI companies like OpenAI could finally be held accountable for shamelessly crawling the entire web, including vast swathes of copyrighted materials, to shovel into the maws of their AI models.
