Another AI fair use ruling today, and this one is *much* better for creators.
tl;dr: The judge said "In many circumstances it will be illegal to copy copyright-protected works to train generative AI models without permission."
Authors sued Meta for training on their books; Meta claimed fair use. Judge Chhabria actually ruled it was fair use. *But* he was clear: he only ruled this because he felt the authors argued the case badly.
He went further. To the question of whether unlicensed training is illegal, he said "in most cases the answer will be yes".
He said generative AI can flood the market, undermining the market for the originals that are copied, disincentivizing creation.
Generative AI has "the ability to severely harm the market for the works being copied, and thus severely undermine the incentive for human beings to create."
He went further. He called out Judge Alsup's ruling yesterday in the Anthropic case, which went against authors on fair use, as being based on an "inapt analogy" (likening AI training to human learning), and accused him of "blowing off the most important factor in the fair use analysis" - the market effect on the work that is copied.
Tech lobbyists will frame the headline as "Meta wins on fair use", to try to convince people things are going tech companies' way. They are not.
Judge Chhabria could not be more clear. "The upshot is that in many circumstances it will be illegal to copy copyright-protected works to train generative AI models without permission. Which means that the companies, to avoid liability for copyright infringement, will generally need to pay copyright holders for the right to use their materials."
This is a much more thoughtful interpretation of copyright law than yesterday's decision, and I suspect time will show it is the correct one.