Copyright, artificial intelligence can use books. Anthropic wins in court
There is no copyright infringement, at least in the US: that is the meaning of a ruling, at times revolutionary. Let's see what changes.
3' min read
3' min read
AI models can use books, even copyrighted ones, to train themselves. There is no copyright infringement, at least in the US: that is the sense of a ruling, at times revolutionary, by a US federal judge this week that Anthropic's artificial intelligence did not break the law when it used copyrighted books to train its chatbot Claude, without the consent of the texts' authors or publishers.
The decision, handed down Monday by Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, is seen by experts around the world as a victory for AI companies, which have faced copyright lawsuits from writers and news organisations for using their work to train AI systems.
It is true that the ruling does not apply to Europe, where more restrictive rules apply; however, the stark direction that jurisprudence is taking in the US may weigh on the European balance of power between publishers and authors on the one hand and AI companies on the other. If Europe remains isolated in the protection of copyright against AI, it will be more difficult for it to keep the point, also in light of the geopolitical relations between the US and the EU.
The reasons for the ruling are striking. Alsup argued that book training is transformative use, is not plagiarism (it falls under the American 'fair use' discipline) and is akin to an aspiring writer reading copyrighted texts 'not to replicate or supplant' those works, 'but to create something different'.
The ruling concerns a lawsuit filed last year against Anthropic by three authors - Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson - who claim that the company used their work without their consent.
