Federal Judge Rules AI Training on Copyrighted Content Infringes Copyright, Rejects Fair Use Defense

Federal Judge Rules AI Training on Copyrighted Content Infringes Copyright, Rejects Fair Use Defense

On Feb. 11, 2025, a federal judge granted summary judgment to a copyright holder, determining that a software company’s use of copyrighted content to train an AI legal research tool constituted direct copyright infringement and rejecting the AI tool company’s fair-use defense. Judge Bibas’s opinion departed from the seminal “intermediate copying” cases in Google and Sega and applied the Supreme Court’s “transformative use” analysis from Warhol. …

Using copyrighted content to train AI without permission is not ‘fair use’, US court rules in Thomson Reuters case

However, the ruling might not apply to the music industry’s lawsuits against generative AI developers Source

US judge demolishes fair use defence in what could be landmark AI lawsuit

A US judge has rejected all the copyright infringement defences - including fair use - put forward by Ross Intelligence, an AI company that was sued by Thomson Reuters, saying “none of Ross’s possible defences holds water, I reject them all”, and changing his previous position that the fair use claim should be considered by a jury. With dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies currently working their way through the US courts, and with …

Court Unplugs AI Fair Use Defense, But Context Is Key

Written by Mark Humphrey Yesterday, the United States District Court for the District of Delaware became the first court in the United States to issue a substantive decision on whether using copyrighted material to “train” an artificial intelligence (AI) tool is protected by the fair use doctrine, finding that fair use did not apply under a rather unique set of facts. Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre …

Thomson Reuters has won a potentially landmark legal battle in the trench warfare between AI companies and content publishers and producers. At the heart of the dispute: "fair use" or the fair exploitation of content.