AI training of copyrighted material not fair use: Third Circuit

After AI companies massively scan and destroy physical books, they become the only ones in the world with digital copies.

A "Copyright Refusal Mechanism" feature exclusive to OpenAI's GPT-OSS-20B. It controls the model's tendency to refuse to provide copyrighted material, a behavior absent in the model it was compared against.

introducing a commercial text and data mining exception for AI training would expand the AI sector in the country.

To call it theft is accurate in my opinion, but then I'm a bigger believer in copyrigh

USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

Dänemark steuert im Urheberrecht nach: Es soll künftig verboten sein, Deepfakes und andere „digitalen Imitationen der persönlichen Merkmale einer Person“ zu teilen und zu verbreiten. Das „einklagbare Copyright auf Aussehen, Stimme und generelle“ (heise.de) soll um Rechtsschutzmöglichkeiten gegenüber Plattformen flankiert werden. Kulturminister Jakob Engel-Schmidt erklärte gegenüber dem Guardian: "Mit dem Gesetzentwurf einigen wir uns auf die eindeutige Botschaft, dass jeder das Recht auf seinen eigenen Körper, seine eigene Stimme und seine eigenen Gesichtszüge hat.“

The last time a state tried to regulate this industry was Maryland in 2021. A federal court said it violated copyright law because it banned publishers from selling books in Maryland altogether, unless they lowered prices for libraries.

“That’s a valuable asset in which we have invested extensively, and it’s not for someone just to take a photo of and do what they wanted.”

To my friends in the “open” Internet movement, I have to ask: Whatdid you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley underminedcopyright to make commerce become more about services instead ofcontent: more about our code instead of their files.

Current intellectual property laws constitute an “anti-constitutional” barrier to the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI), systematically frustrating the explicit purpose of the Intellectual Property (IP) Clause.

Pacioli was granted copyright inthe work by the Venetian authorities, protecting his work from piracy.

Copyleft Richard Towers 2025. All wrongs reserved.

A U.S. court has recently (Jan 19th, 2006) ruled that caching does not constitute a copyright violation, because of fair use and an implied license (Field vs Google, US District Court, District of Nevada, CV-S-04-0413-RCJ-LRL, see also news article on Government Technology). Implied license refers to the industry standards mentioned above: If the copyright holder does not use any no-archive tags and robot exclusion standards to prevent caching, WebCite® can (as Google does) assume that a license to archive has been granted. Fair use is even more obvious in the case of WebCite® than for Google, as Google uses a “shotgun” approach, whereas WebCite® archives selectively only material that is relevant for scholarly work. Fair use is therefore justifiable based on the fair-use principles of purpose (caching constitutes transformative and socially valuable use for the purposes of archiving, in the case of WebCite® also specifically for academic research), the nature of the cached material (previously made available for free on the Internet, in the case of WebCite® also mainly scholarly material), amount and substantiality (in the case of WebCite® only cited webpages, rarely entire websites), and effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (in the case of Google it was ruled that there is no economic effect, the same is true for WebCite®).

Caching and archiving webpages is widely done (e.g. by Google, Internet Archive etc.), and is not considered a copyright infringement, as long as the copyright owner has the ability to remove the archived material and to opt out.

The startup shut down in 2021, citing the cost of litigation.

uled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.

Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.

PESTLE is licensed under a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license

Company information © Todd Hillsley is licensed under a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license

Media AttributionsBusiness information factors © Todd Hillsley is licensed under a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) licenseScholarly and Non scholarly © Todd Hillsley is licensed under a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license

In practice, tracking all authors in all copyright notices is quite cumbersome. Instead, often only the original author is credited here even when copyright is shared with additional contributors. A more reasonable approach is to credit all authors collectively, e.g. as “the FooProject contributors” or “Original Author and others”. However, I am not sure whether that results in a valid copyright notice as the copyright holders must be clearly recognizable.

The other reason to update these notices is if there are new authors. Typically, this is done by adding a new copyright line for each set of authors, with the most recent on top. For example: Copyright 2016–2018 George Copyright 1999, 2007–2016 Fred Adding a new line is sensible since many open-source licenses require that existing copyright notices are kept intact – so you must not update them in any way. And in the above example, adding George to Fred's copyright notice would be misleading since George did not publish any of their work in 1999 and Fred didn't publish in 2018.

The law in many countries allows users certain rights over data whose copyright they do not own (including text, images, and other media), often under headings such as fair use or public interest. Depending on jurisdiction, these may cover issues such as whistleblowing, production of evidence in court, quoting or other small-scale usage, backups of owned media, and making a copy of owned material for personal use on other owned devices or systems. The steps implicit in trusted computing have the practical effect of preventing users exercising these legal rights.

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled, on July 3, 2012, that it is indeed permissible to resell software licenses even if the digital good has been downloaded directly from the Internet, and that the first sale doctrine applied whenever software was originally sold to a customer for an unlimited amount of time, as such sale involves a transfer of ownership, thus prohibiting any software maker from preventing the resale of their software by any of their legitimate owners.

what if a band decides to take one of the udio generated songs and re-record it entirely will they own the full copy rate to that very new recording now if I 00:21:03 was udio the answer probably be like no you made that thing using our platform

this is more of a unfair competition 00:10:36 issue I think as a clearer line than the copyright stuff

Proper Citation

Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act. Signed into law by President Bush on November 2, the TEACH Act loosens the restraints created by the DMCA insofar as education is concerned

More importantly, the idea of Fair Use was effectively removed from Web-based education because of the DMCA

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed in Oct. 1998 "to implement United States treaty obligations and to move the nation's copyright law into the digital age.

Resources for using sound recordings in online education

Resources for using video in online education

Place the video in the context of the course, explaining why it was chosen and what it was intended to illustrate. Recontextualize the video when appropriate through the addition of background readings, study questions, commentary, criticism, annotation, and student reactions.

Resources for using images in online education

If copying an image, use the lowest image resolution possible to achieve your purpose.

Note: Professor Meghani is making too much work for herself by scanning the text. Instead, she could direct her students to Project Gutenberg, which contains public domain titles available for download in multiple formats. In this case, the Marxists Internet Archive would also be a good sourc

It is not necessary to prevailon each of the four factors for asuccessful fair use claim.

Fair use is a flexible standard andall four statutory factors areconsidered together.

The US Constitution clearlystates that the purpose of theintellectual property system is to“promote the progress of science andthe useful arts

ir use is a right explicitly recognizedby the Copyright Act.1 The SupremeCourt has recognized this right as a“First Amendment safeguard” becausecopyright law might otherwiseconstrict freedom of speech

The Copyright Clearance Center can grant permission to digitize, display and transmit print works

Using the Four Factors

TEACH Act Checklist

The TEACH Act checklist, summarizes the 22 (!) prerequisites. Nevertheless, we may be optimistic that, together with fair use, this statute will achieve Congress' goal of facilitating online education.

are a small subset of the uses of online resources educators may wish to make. It only covers in class performances and displays, not, for example, supplemental online reading, viewing, or listening materials. For those activities, as well as many others, we'll need to continue to rely on fair use. Remember, however, when relying on fair use, the fair use test is sensitive to harm to markets. This means that in general, where there is an established market for permissions, there will often be a narrower scope for fair use, and our reliance on fair use should be limited.

The TEACH Act authorizes us to digitize works for use in online education, but only to the extent we are authorized to use those works in Section 110(2), and so long as they are not available digitally in a format free from technological protection.

The statute's complexity provides a new context within which to think about fair use: compared to the many conditions and limits contained in Section 110(2), the four factor fair use test seems simple and elegant.

The audiovisual works and dramatic musical works may only be shown as clips -- "reasonable and limited portions".

The TEACH Act of 2002, expanded the scope of online educators' rights to perform and display works and to make copies integral to such performances and displays, making the rights closer to those we have in face-to-face teaching. But there is still a considerable gap between what the statute authorizes for face-to-face teaching and for online education.

Copyright law provides educators with a separate set of rights in addition to fair use, to display (show) and perform (show or play) others' works in the classroom. These rights are in Section 110(1) of the Copyright Act and apply to any work, regardless of the medium.

Because your institution is likely to be liable, along with an accused individual, for the infringements of faculty, students and staff, most institutions advise such individuals not to use works for which required permission cannot be obtained.

There truly may be no one who cares about what you do with a particular work, but the bottom line is that no amount of unsuccessful effort eliminates liability for copyright infringement. Copyright protects materials whether the owner cares about protection or not.

If you are preparing a commercial product, you will need assurances of authority to grant permission because your publisher will expect those assurances from you.

question them about whether they retained copyright or whether they assigned it to their publisher.

If you know who the author and the publisher are, you can contact them directly. If you do not know who the publisher is, The Literary Marketplace (for books) or Ulrich's Web (for journals - requires login) may help you.  Once you know whom to ask, writing a letter, calling or emailing are all appropriate ways to initiate contact.

Where fair use may be questioned, implied rights may be broader, but an express right to use is best - it's clear and reassuring. It's possible today to search Creative Commons licensed works by license type, or limit your search to be sure that your results include only materials intended for use by educators and students.

You can easily give your works an express license by attaching a Creative Commons license to the materials you post online. It's easy and it sends the message that you want your materials to be part of the flow of creativity. No one creates in a vacuum. Just as you build on others' works, others will build on yours.

So, just by posting online, an author implies a limited license to use their work in this manner.

Simply putting the fingers to the save key creates a copyrighted work. Once expression is committed to a tangible medium, copyright protection is automatic. So, postings of all kinds are protected the same as published printed works.

why training artificial intelligence in research context is and should continue to be a fair use

And then Singapore and Japan also have provisions and they basically allow the reproduction necessary for text and data mining.

three different issues that are being implicated by artificial intelligence. And this is true with, you know, all artificial intelligence, not just a generative but particularly generative.

Over the years, publishers have made many attempts to avoid this exchange, controlling both the purchase price and what purchasers do with the books after they are sold. For example, in the early 1900s, publishers tried to control resale prices on the books people bought from retailers by stamping mandatory resale prices on a book’s front page.6 (That attempt was rejected by the US Supreme Court).7 Publishers also tried to limit where people could resell books they bought, in one case claiming that a book sold in Thailand couldn’t be resold in the US.8 (That attempt was also rejected by the US Supreme Court, in 2013).9 These attempts failed because the publisher’s copyright does not give them absolute control of a book in perpetuity; the copyright system is a balance between publishers and purchasers.10 If publishers want the benefits of the copyright system, they also have to accept the limits it imposes on their power.

One user on X pointed to the fact that Japan has allowed AI companies to train on copyright materials. While this observation is true, it is incomplete and oversimplified, as that training is constrained by limitations on unauthorized use drawn directly from relevant international law (including the Berne Convention and TRIPS agreement). In any event, the Japanese stance seems unlikely to be carry any weight in American courts.

After a bit of experimentation (and in a discovery that led us to collaborate), Southen found that it was in fact easy to generate many plagiaristic outputs, with brief prompts related to commercial films (prompts are shown).

Is Downloading Videos from YouTube and Other Sites LegalAnother common concern about 4K Video Downloader is whether it is legal to download videos from YouTube and other sites. The answer is yes, but with some caveats. According to the Fair Use Doctrine, it is legal to download videos for personal use, such as watching them offline or creating a backup copy. However, it is illegal to distribute or share downloaded videos without the consent of the copyright owner.

the number of possible melodies is finite and therefore liable to patterns being repeated unintentionally.

the unique characteristic of generative AI being non-human implies thepromise of ownership-free educational content.

First, under a highly permissive view, theuse of training data could be treated as non-infringing because protected works are not directlycopied. Second, the use of training data could be covered by a fair-use exception because atrained AI represents a significant transformation of the training data [63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68].1Third, the use of training data could require an explicit license agreement with each creatorwhose work appears in the training dataset. A weaker version of this third proposal, is to atleast give artists the ability to opt-out of their data being used for generative AI [69]. Finally,a new statutory compulsory licensing scheme that allows artworks to be used as training databut requires the artist to be remunerated could be introduced to compensate artists and createcontinued incentives for human creation [70].

The lawsuit against OpenAI claims the three authors “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material for ChatGPT. Nonetheless, their copyrighted materials were ingested and used to train ChatGPT.”

In the Office's view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author,” which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans. The Office's registration policies and regulations reflect statutory and judicial guidance on this issue.

For open educators, this runs counter to the very reason we use OER in the first place. Many open educators choose OER because there are legal permissions that allow for the ethical reuse of other people’s material — material the creators have generously and freely made available through the application of open licenses to it. The thought of using work that has not been freely gifted to the commons by the creator feels wrong for many open educators and is antithetical to the generosity inherent in the OER community.

It can’t include, say, e-book copies of everything in the Stanford library, as books are protected by copyright law.

Will OpenAI claim copyright over what outputs I generate with the API? Written by Asher Ryan Updated over a week ago OpenAI will not claim copyright over content generated by the API for you or your end users. Please see our Terms of Use for additional details.

Certainly it would not be possible if theLLM were doing nothing more than cutting-and-pasting fragments of text from its training setand assembling them into a response. But this isnot what an LLM does. Rather, an LLM mod-els a distribution that is unimaginably complex,and allows users and applications to sample fromthat distribution.

the outputs of generative AI programs will continue to pass immediately into the public domain.

The US Copyright Office rejected his attempt to register copyright in the work – twice

the Office re-evaluated the claims and again concluded that the Work “lacked therequired human authorship necessary to sustain a claim in copyright,” because Thaler had“provided no evidence on sufficient creative input or intervention by a human author in theWork.

Some AI systems are capable of autonomously generating new works, which may themselves be protected under UK law.

Statutory damages are available for an infringement that occurred prior to copyright registration.

In September, the US Copyright Office granted a first-of-its-kind registration for a comic book generated with the help of text-to-image AI Midjourney. The comic is a complete work: an 18-page narrative with characters, dialogue, and a traditional comic book layout. And although it’s since been reported that the USCO is reviewing its decision, the comic’s copyright registration hasn’t actually been rescinded yet. It seems that one factor in the review will be the degree of human input involved in making the comic. Kristina Kashtanova, the artist who created the work, told IPWatchdog that she had been asked by the USCO “to provide details of my process to show that there was substantial human involvement in the process of creation of this graphic novel.”

In our new book, Rebecca Giblin and I call this "chokepoint capitalism". In today's highly concentrated creative labor markets, copyright's normal role of giving creators bargaining leverage over their supply chain is transformed.

. Barbrook shows how this futurist prophecy is borrowed from America’s defunct Cold War enemy: Stalinist Russia. Technological progress was the catalyst of social transformation. With copyright weakening, intellectual commodities were mutating into gifts. Invented in capitalist America, the Net in the late-1990s had become the first working model of communism in human history.

It is the work itself that is copyrighted, not the form.56 While works mustbe in a fixed form to qualify for copyright protection, that protection is for the workitself. Some forms are necessarily part of some types of works (e.g., sculpture), butthis cannot be said of most printed works.57 The form in which a work is fixed isirrelevant, and Congress recognized the importance of media neutrality when itadopted the language in the Copyright Act.58 Digitization changes only the form,and “the ‘transfer of a work between media’ does not ‘alte[r] the character of ’ thatwork for copyright purposes.”

I believe it is possible to build a digital library thatrespects both of the intended beneficiaries of the Copyright Clause—copyrightowners and society—while testing commonly held assumptions about the limita-tions of copyright law. In balancing these goals, TALLO permits circulation of theexact number of copies purchased, thereby acknowledging the rights inherent incopyright, but it liberates the form of circulation from the print format.

The 2010 court case Vernor v. Autodesk disrupted this business model by challenging the “you bought it, you own it” notion that had long been the standard for physical books.Footnote 23 Resulting from this case, ebooks were deemed computer software that only needed to be licensed, rather than physical products owned by the purchaser. This verdict meant publishers did not need to sell ebooks to libraries with the same freedoms and rights as print books.

Artist receives first known US copyright registration for generative AI art

Can copyright vest in an AI? The primary objective of intellectual property law is to protect the rights of the creators of intellectual property.10 Copyright laws specifically aim to: (i) promote creativity and encourage authors, composers, artists and designers to create original works by affording them the exclusive right to exploit such work for monetary gain for a limited period; and (ii) protect the creators of the original works from unauthorised reproduction or exploitation of those works.

To my knowledge, conferring copyright in works generated by artificial intelligence has never been specifically prohibited. However, there are indications that the laws of many countries are not amenable to non-human copyright. In the United States, for example, the Copyright Office has declared that it will “register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being.” This stance flows from case law (e.g. Feist Publications v Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. 499 U.S. 340 (1991)) which specifies that copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Similarly, in a recent Australian case (Acohs Pty Ltd v Ucorp Pty Ltd), a court declared that a work generated with the intervention of a computer could not be protected by copyright because it was not produced by a human.

With the advent of AI software, computers — not monkeys — will potentially create millions of original works that may then be protected by copyright, under current law, for more than 100 years.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No partof this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever withoutpermission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in criti-cal articles and reviews.—U.S. copyright notice

copyright laws (the Dwarfelles are used as substitutes for the original Dwarfs, since Disney owns the Dwarf characters, and this is not a Disney film).

I consider this a Public Domain image as the image does not pass the ‘creativity involved’ threshold which generally presupposes a human creator, for copyright to apply (meaning neither AI nor macaques).

The Copyright Act sets up this balance of rights as between rights holders and users. And one of the things that users get is the ability to control use of particular copies that they buy. So this is where the doctrine for sale comes in.

NFTs do not supplant copyright law, not even close. NFTs are bound by normal everyday rules of copyright.

the first thing a recipient should do is look to see whether Higbee has claimed that the copyright has already been registered and provided the registration number. If the copyright has not been registered, he cannot bring suit on an alleged infringement unless the work is not a “United States work”

We write on behalf of plaintiffs Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins PublishersLLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and Penguin Random House LLC (the “Plaintiffs”) to request apre-motion summary judgment conference pursuant to Individual Practice 2(B).

But the copyright on the materials still gives the organization control over how the information is used, which is what some tribal leaders find objectionable.

national copyright legislation

A domain name or URL

In contrast, a recipe that creatively explains or depicts how or why to perform a particular activity may be copyrightable.

Some works, however, contain elements that either lack the required creativ-ity or are placed outside the bounds of copyright by the law.

Why isn’t our goal to have all OERs eventually exist in the public domain? If we really care about ease of reuse, if we really respect creators of derivative works, and if we really want to see the open education movement succeed, we should have the public domain as our final goal.

how can a community so focused on freedom approve of any restrictions? Specifically, when expressing concern about restrictions making it difficult to reuse works, how can this community approve of the copyleft or share-alike concept?

Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to pre-pare, or to authorize someone else to create, an adaptation of that work.

it is not possible to extend the length of protection for a copyrighted work by creating a derivative work

Compilations of data or compilations of preexisting works (also known as “col-lective works”) may also be copyrightable if the materials are selected, coordi-nated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes a new work.

To be copyrightable, a derivative work must incorporate some or all of a preexisting “work” and add new original copyrightable authorship to that work.

d’étudier la possibilité de mettre en place un cadre international concernant les exceptions et limitations au droit d’auteur à des fins pédagogiques et de recherche afin de faciliter les échanges et la coopération transfrontaliers en matière de REL ;

copyright and open licensing of educational material

The usual targets of The Publishers Association include domains that facilitate access to the popular Libgen library and eBook portals eBookee and FreeBookSpot. The trend was maintained this week when ISP TalkTalk revealed that more domains had been blocked in the UK. The new additions are as follows: ebookee.unblockit.kim, ebookee.123unblock.world, ebookee.mrunblock.bar, ebookee.nocensor.biz, ebookee.unbl4you.cyou, ebookee.unbl0ck.icu, ebookee.unblockproject.top, ebookee.proxybit.sbs, freebookspot.unblockit.kim, libgen.unblockit.kim, libgen.123unblock.world, libgen.mrunblock.bar, libgen.nocensor.biz, libgen.unbl4you.cyou,, libgen.unbl0ck.icu, libgen.unblockproject.top, libgen.proxybit.sbs

From a media point of view, Genius was offensive for its initial underlying claim: that it was okay to take anyone’s content for zero compensation, so long as it “added transformative value” by tacking on a comment box where people could say it sucked.