AI companies spent years treating copyright like a Terms of Service box nobody reads. Now a court has suggested that »we copied it to build a competing product« may not magically become fair use because you sprinkle AI on top. Turns out disruption is slightly less fun when the disrupted people have lawyers.

I think this should be the reasoning politicians use to make AI companies owned by the public.

These AI models are nothing without all the data they were trained on. All this data is content produced by humans throughout history. AI is the ultimate product of thousands of years of human progress. Why should we allow corporations to be the primary beneficiaries of this?

When peasants were able to copy 'intellectual property' for personal benefit and enjoyment, it was a massive crime. When the oligarchs can steal - everything - for the slight chance of paying less in wages, it is an innovation.

I think it is pretty much certain the model companies escape any penalty for their mass theft of IP. There will be some settlements and token penalties that sound big on paper, but are nothing compared to the market valuations.

As much as I hate AI, current copyright laws are out of control and are extended well beyond what they should be used for.

I hope Studio Ghibli sue them for a bazillion dollars

The headline isn't correct. This ruling is about a specific element of Fair Use, not a blanket declaration that copyrighted data cannot be used to train models as the headline suggests.

Fair Use requires some conditions be met. The one that wasn't met here was that the work you're creating can't compete with the copyright owner.

From the Reuters article:

"Ross took the headnotes to make it easier to develop a competing legal research tool," the judge said. "So ​Ross’s use is not transformative."

In other cases, for example the Author's Guild lawsuit against Meta/Anthropic/etc courts have ruled that using books to train LLMs is fair use because LLMs and books don't compete.

They were required to pay for the books, but not prevented by copyright from using them to train a model.

There's nothing novel happening in this case from a legal perspective. Maybe this is the first case where the defendant didn't clear the elements of fair use but those elements predate AI by decades and have been uses in thousands of cases.

In fact, as Copyright Lately‘s Aaron Moss points out, even the AI industry called the latest ruling a win, with tech industry group Chamber of Progress senior director of AI Adam Eisgrau tweeting that the ruling “implicitly confirms that highly transformative gen AI training to produce a hugely multi-purpose model with substantial public benefit is likely fair use!”

"We stole even more, so that makes it legal!"

>"How influential the latest appeals court ruling will be is debatable. The court found that Ross had effectively copy-pasted Thomson Reuters’ “headnotes,” or brief editorial summaries of legal issues, verbatim for its legal search engine, a practice that isn’t difficult to separate from fair use."

>"In fact, as Copyright Lately‘s Aaron Moss points out, even the AI industry called the latest ruling a win, with tech industry group Chamber of Progress senior director of AI Adam Eisgrau tweeting that the ruling “implicitly confirms that highly transformative gen AI training to produce a hugely multi-purpose model with substantial public benefit is likely fair use!”"

Looks like the company that got sued just copy pastaed protected content without making any type of change to make it fair use.

Not the "win" anti-AI people were looking for and the article seems to be misunderstood by most.

Seems as long as AI models use some form "transformative" method to train their AI, then it's fair use.

This is your reminder that in 2026 absolutely ZERO court rulings matter long term except the Supreme Court, which is captured for life by conservatives.

No matter who wins the midterms or even the next election, that is with us for the rest of most of our lives.

What a time to be alive.

If this could be upheld (though unfortunately it won't) then it could completely end the generation of new models and the companies that make them. The models that are already out would never go away and might as well be available for people to run locally but if they want new ones it should be done for the collective good with oversight. I.e. state run.

But again, just wishful thinking on my part.

Worth reading the original opinion appealed here: great technical writing and explanation of reasoning by the judge

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/xmvjbznbkvr/THOMSON%20REUTERS%20ROSS%20LAWSUIT%20fair%20use.pdf

All LLM code output is now copyleft because there was GPL stuff in the training data, LOL!

Betteridge's law of headlines in full effect.

I don't care if copyright holders win I just want AI to lose.

This court finds AI guilty of copyright infringement.

The penalty will be... NOTHING!

Just like the tariffs, they will use this to steal our money ... they will use tax money to pay the crony companies that play victim.

If you think this will turn the tide I both envy how un- jaded you are and worry that you really aren't paying attention.

This is great progress. Curious to see how the Supreme Court eventually rules