Licensing will likely become more common between generative AI developers and rights-holding content companies. That’s even in the unlikely event that AI companies win numerous pending copyright battles currently going through U.S. courts.
What are generative AI models?
First, it is not certain that all applications of generational AI systems are legal under the US Copyright Act.
In the many U.S. AI lawsuits alleging copyright infringement, generative AI companies have argued that training their models on copyrighted works qualifies for the fair use exception of the Copyright Act. That argument relies heavily on a 2015 court ruling that Google’s digitization of millions of books was fair use.
Still, fair use provisions are fact-specific and require a court to apply a four-factor test, with the purpose of the use and its impact on the marketplace being key. While Google’s digitizing of books to display short quotations in response to a search query satisfied the Second Circuit’s application of the fair use test, not every AI model may receive the same court-approved seal of fair use-worthiness.
