Chhabria’s decision is still seen as a victory by those who believe that AI training can be transformative. “Judge Chhabria ruled today, bottom line, that training generative AI models on copyrighted material is clearly transformative, and absent proven market harm is fair use,” Adam Eisgrau, senior director of AI, Creativity, and Copyright Policy for the technology trade group Chamber of Progress, says: “He didn’t like coming to that conclusion for reasons he details and which, with respect to market harm, are utterly out of step with established fair use precedent. Market dilution is malarkey.”
That’s it. Chhabria took pains to stress that his ruling was based on the specific set of facts in this case—leaving the door open for other authors to sue Meta for copyright infringement in the future: “In many circumstances it will be illegal to copy copyright-protected works to train generative AI models without permission,” He has written. “Which means that the companies, to avoid liability for copyright infringement, will generally need to pay copyright holders for the right to use their materials.”
“On the surface this looks like a win for the AI industry,” Matthew Sag a professor in the law and AI at Emory University says that Meta clearly scored a win with Chhabria’s recognition of AI training as transformative. “However, the court does take very seriously the idea that AI models trained on plaintiffs’ books could ‘flood the market with endless amounts of images, songs, articles, books, and more,’ thereby harming the market for the original works. He probably takes it more seriously than the plaintiffs did, given that they did not put any evidence on this issue. I have never seen a ruling where a judge lamented the failure of the plaintiffs to argue their case quite like this one.”
“The court ruled that AI companies that ‘feed copyright-protected works into their models without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying for them’ are generally violating the law,” In a press release, the attorneys for plaintiffs at Boies Schiller said. “Yet, despite the undisputed record of Meta’s historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works, the court ruled in Meta’s favor. We respectfully disagree with that conclusion.”
Meta’s Team had a more optimistic response. “We appreciate today’s decision from the Court,” Thomas Richards is the spokesperson at Meta. “Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology.”
Other AI plaintiffs are closely watching the results. “We’re disappointed in the decision, but only in part,” Mary Rasenberger is the CEO of the Author’s Guild. The Author’s Guild has sued OpenAI for copyright violations in their own case. Rasenberger notes that Chhabria’s ruling was deliberately limited.
“In the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these 13 authors—not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models,” Chhabria wrote. “And, as should now be clear, this ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful.”
