Anthropic and Meta both won landmark cases concerning copyright infringement in two Northern California district courts in late June, signalling the beginning of the fight on fair use between AI companies and creators.
The law firm McDermott Will & Emery wrote in a blog post that both companies showed the use of copyrighted materials in LLM training is highly transformative. The decision in the case against Meta also signified a new battleground surrounding market-harm evidence, as the authors were not able to show data that tied the company’s AI, Llama, to a loss in book sales or licensing value.
The post said appeals for the cases are “virtually certain,” and concluded that while companies wait on clearer appellate laws, they should “assume that training on text obtained from dubious sources remains a high-risk activity and that a lack of market-harm evidence may be only a temporary shield.”
Anthropic’s case included the use of pirated material to create its central library, which will be subject to another trial, according to the judge’s decision.
Anthropic’s case. Three authors (Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson) had their work copied by Anthropic through both pirated and purchased sources, according to the filing.
The company used the unauthorized copies to train LLMs and kept library copies in place as a permanent and general-purpose resource, “even after deciding it would not use certain copies to train LLMs or would never use them again to do so.”
Judge William Alsup, who oversaw the case against Anthropic, said that the evidence provided did not prove any non-transformative use of the work through its model, Claude.
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“Yes, Claude could help less capable writers create works as well-written as [the plaintiffs’] and competing in the same categories,” Alsup wrote. “But Claude created no exact copy, nor any substantial knock-off. Nothing traceable to [the plaintiffs’] works.”
Alsup said that the use of the books to train Claude was “exceedingly transformative” and was fair use under the Copyright Act.
Meta’s case. Judge Vince Chhabria, who oversaw the Meta case, also pointed out that the tech giant’s use of 13 authors’ works was transformative. He said in his order that while a company is more likely to be protected by fair use doctrine, there isn’t a rule saying that this “inoculates you from a claim of copyright infringement.”
Chhabria continued that under the fair-use doctrine, the market harm for copyrighted work is “more important than the purpose for which the copies are made.” He continued in the conclusion that Meta’s use of the authors’ works presented no meaningful evidence on market dilution “at all.”
The plaintiffs in this case contended that Llama is capable of reproducing snippets of text from their books and that Meta’s use of their works for training without permission diminished their ability to license work for training LLMs.
“Both of these arguments are clear losers,” Chhabria wrote. “Llama is not capable of generating enough text from the plaintiffs’ books to matter, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to the market for licensing their works as AI training data.”