If AI companies can copy entire libraries first and ask permission later, copyright becomes optional for the biggest players. The outcome of these lawsuits won’t just decide who pays authors. It could determine whether creators still have meaningful control over their work in the AI era.
Good on them, but I’m sure that will have as much impact as the suit against book scanning did a decade ago.
They should still sue
I’m sure that case will be cited here.
In similar cases, the court has found the company liable for using the books without paying for them (so they had to pay for every individual book) but the process of training an AI model was ‘sufficiently transformative’ (see: Authors Guild v Google) so as to not be considered a copyright violation.
They may win damages equal to the costs of the books that were used, but they won’t get the models deleted or be able to claim damages for the models that were created.
I dunno there was quite an impact when they sued the internet archive.
I think the legal team at Google is probably several orders of magnitude better funded though, which seems to be how things go :/
