Copyright law could threaten the AI ​​industry – 02/01/2024 – Tech

If 2023 was the year that artificial intelligence changed everything, 2024 may be remembered as the year that US copyright law changed regarding AI.

The explosion of generative AI and the popularity of Microsoft-backed initiatives such as OpenAI, Meta, Midjourney and others have resulted in a number of copyright cases brought by writers, artists and other copyright holders who claim that AI has had success only thanks to their work.

Judges have so far been skeptical of plaintiffs’ claims of infringement based on AI-generated content.

However, the courts have yet to address the more complicated and potentially billion-dollar question of whether AI companies are infringing on a massive scale by training their systems with vast amounts of images, text and other data obtained from the internet.

Tech companies warn that lawsuits could create major obstacles for the growing AI industry.

The plaintiffs claim the companies owe them for using their work without permission or compensation.

Several groups of authors have filed class action lawsuits in 2023 over the use of their texts in AI training.

This includes writers like John Grisham and “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin, to comedian Sarah Silverman and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

Tech companies have hired legions of lawyers from some of the biggest law firms in the US to take on the cases. They defended AI training in comments to the US Copyright Office, comparing it to the way humans learn new concepts and arguing that their use of the material qualifies as “fair use” under copyright law. Copyright.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

An ongoing lawsuit involving Thomson Reuters — the parent company of Reuters News — could be one of the first major indicators for AI copyright issues.

The company accused Ross Intelligence in 2020 of illegally copying thousands of “headnotes” from its Westlaw legal research platform, which summarizes court decisions, to train an AI-based legal search engine.

A federal judge ruled in September that the Delaware case must go to trial to determine whether Ross violated the law. The lawsuit could set an important precedent on fair use and other issues for AI copyright litigation. A jury could begin hearing the case as early as August.