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Fair Use Doctrine

A U.S. copyright law doctrine permitting limited unlicensed use of copyrighted works, judged by factors like purpose, amount used, and market effect.

Current stories

productConfirmed3 publishers

Trump administration files in support of OpenAI's fair-use defence in the Times case

The statement of interest argues that making unlicensed training impermissible would be legally incorrect, then concedes that fair use turns on the facts of each use. For teams pricing a content licence, the concession is the operative half.

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 25%
Operator
Operator 38%
Investor
Investor 37%

Reality

Evidence72
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives72
Confidence66
investConfirmed4 publishers

DOJ's 20-page brief backs OpenAI, argues AI training on copyrighted work is fair use

A filing with no binding force still moves the cost of walking away, and every publisher currently quoting a number to a lab is quoting it to a counterparty whose government has said in court that permission may not be required.

Perspective Coverage

5 publishers
Builder
Builder 26%
Operator
Operator 40%
Investor
Investor 34%

Reality

Evidence72
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives65
Confidence68
productOne report1 publisher

Internal OpenAI and Microsoft memos about substitution now anchor the Times' liability motion

A new filing in the New York Times case against OpenAI and Microsoft builds its market-harm argument out of the two companies' own internal documents, obtained in discovery. Anyone shipping an answer feature on these models sits downstream of it.

Publishers:thurrott.com

Reality

Evidence47
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+38
Incentives74
Confidence46
investOne report1 publisher

The Justice Department moves the AI copyright fight to the licensing table

Justice's September 1 filing in the consolidated OpenAI MDL calls model training extraordinarily transformative. It binds no judge, which is precisely why its work shows up in the price of a licence rather than in the law.

Publishers:techtimes.com

Reality

Evidence46
Adoption34
Hype gap+18
Incentives79
Confidence44
investOne report1 publisher

Sony and Warner name Amodei and Mann personally in their lyrics-piracy suit

Sony Music and Warner Chappell want up to $150,000 for each of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of songs, and they argue in the filing that the $1.5bn Anthropic already paid was too small to deter anyone valued at $2 trillion.

Publishers:fortune.com

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+24
Incentives84
Confidence55
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Round Hill's twin suits move the liability from the output to the intake

The publisher's complaints against Suno and Anthropic plead DMCA circumvention beside infringement, which moves a buyer's diligence question onto the corpus rather than the filter.

Publishers:forbes.com

Reality

Evidence48
Adoption45
Hype gap+30
Incentives72
Confidence46
investOne report1 publisher

WikiHow's suit against OpenAI asks for a remedy that outlives the damages award

The 24th US copyright case against OpenAI wants a court order barring scraped how-to articles from future training runs. Only about a tenth of the articles carry registrations.

Reality

Evidence32
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+14
Incentives66
Confidence38
productOne report1 publisher

Alsup fined the download, not the training: the copyright risk in your stack is provenance

Alsup found Anthropic's training lawful and penalised the pirating of the books, so the exposure in an AI roadmap is the chain of custody for the data, and whether the output competes with its source.

Publishers:techcrunch.com

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap−10
Incentives55
Confidence52