AI and copyright: the American trials (episode 4) – the Copyright Office versus fair use
The Copyright Office concludes in a pre-published report that the fair use exception should generally not apply when training generative AI tools with copyrighted works. The subject of the relationship between artificial intelligence and copyright continues to dominate the headlines in the USA, with over thirty lawsuits against Google, OpenAI, Perplexity and Meta: we follow them in this series of articles. In our previous three episodes, we talked about the arguments of the platforms, the early ruling that decided in favor of the rightsholders, and the arguments of law professors in the Kadrey v Meta case. In this 4th episode, we move somewhat out of trial territory, with a report from the Copyright Office that could nonetheless weigh in on the various ongoing cases involving generative AI training with copyrighted…