Thomson Reuters wins AI training copyright case — what this does and doesn’t mean
Thomson Reuters has won most of its copyright case against defunct legal startup Ross Intelligence, who trained an AI model on headnotes from Westlaw. [Wired, archive; opinion, PDF, case docket] Th…
Being an Internet Old, I do worry about rulings that could narrow the scope of fair use, since good things do rely upon it, and there's always the risk of a sowing/reaping thing, but I won't pretend to have actual legal expertise.
With the wide-ranging theft that AI bros have perpetrated, AI corps' abuse of the research exception, AI's ability to directly compete with original work (Exhibit A) and the myriad other things autoplag has unleashed on us, I suspect we're gonna see a significant weakening of fair use.
Giving a concrete prediction, the research exception's gonna be at high risk of being repealed. OpenAI et al crossed the Rubicon when they abused it to launder their "research data" into making their autoplags - any future research case will have to contend with allegations of being a for-profit operation in disguise.
On a more cultural front, if BlueSky's partnering with ROOST and the shitshow it kicked off is any indication, any use (if not mention) of AI is gonna lead to immediate accusations of theft. Additionally, to pull up an old comment of mine, FOSS licenses are likely gonna dive in popularity as people come to view any form of open-source as asking for AI bros to steal your code.
This is a civil case, right? Are there any criminal cases ongoing (as far as you know)?
I was thinking the other day about when some twenty years ago EU and EU countries created pretty drastic criminal laws for copyright violations. And also about how they included both jail time and punitive damages, so that in EU countries that doesn't otherwise use punitive damages, only copyright crimes can be punished such.
These laws were of course ghost written by lobbyists from large corporations, often from the US. But you can't say that when pushing it through, so they were officially created to protect authors, artists, musicians and composers.
So it would be funny - and potentially very profitable - if for example some (or a lot) of authors reported for example Meta for their crime of creating local copies of books from LibGen before using it as training materials.
Now, I think the law is there to protect big corporations and if push comes to show relevant ministers and prosecutors might get invited to a trip to the US to understand how to interpret the law. But funny, and potentially very profitable.
correction - they won a key ruling that means they won most of the case