Judge in A.I. Training Data Case Questions Meta Over Fair Use Claims ⇥ wired.com

Blake Brittain, Reuters:

In the first court hearing on a key question for the AI industry, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria grilled lawyers for both sides over Meta’s request for a ruling that it made “fair use” of books by Junot Diaz, comedian Sarah Silverman and others to train its Llama large language model.

Worth noting Thompson Reuters, Reuters’ parent company, just won a similar case.

Kate Knibbs, Wired:

US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria spent several hours grilling lawyers from both sides after they each filed motions for partial summary judgment, meaning they want Chhabria to rule on specific issues of the case rather than leaving each one to be decided at trial. The authors allege that Meta illegally used their work to build its generative AI tools, emphasizing that the company pirated their books through “shadow libraries” like LibGen. The social media giant is not denying that it used the work or that it downloaded books from shadow libraries en masse, but insists that its behavior is shielded by the “fair use” doctrine, an exception in US copyright law that allows for permissionless use of copyrighted work in certain cases, including parody, teaching, and news reporting.

So let me get this straight: if an artist makes a song sharing only a similar vibe with another one, that is copyright infringement, but if a massive corporation downloads illicit copies of a bunch of books to enrich its A.I. training, that is fair use? Perhaps copyright law is entirely the wrong domain for both of these issues.