AI & copyright: Anthropic benefits from fair use, but will have to compensate the theft of thousands of works
Coup de théâtre! A Californian judge has just ruled that Anthropic’s LLM Claude’s training with copyrighted works benefits from the « fair use » exception, provided the works were acquired legally. On the other hand, the AI developer’s piracy of books is not covered by the exception, and must be compensated for by the injured authors, a compensation that could reach several billion dollars. The application, or otherwise, of the fair use exception, or « fair use » to the training of generative AI with copyrighted works is at the heart of the debate, with nearly forty lawsuits in the United States, and more and more lawsuits in Europe too. Last February, a ruling in Delaware had denied the application of this exception to copyright to the use of protected…