Courts Rule Against AI Training on Copyrighted Material Without Permission
Over 25 federal lawsuits currently challenge how AI companies use copyrighted material for training and what rights apply to AI-generated outputs. Recent landmark rulings confirm that human authorship remains strictly required for copyright protection.
More than 25 copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies are currently pending in federal court, challenging both the inputs used to train AI models and the content they generate. These legal battles create new opportunities for plaintiffs attorneys to pursue claims against the unauthorized use of copyrighted material by artificial intelligence developers.
A recent landmark decision from the District of Delaware rules in favor of Thomson Reuters in its case against Ross Intelligence, marking the first major US ruling on AI training data. The court finds that Ross's use of Westlaw's legal headnotes fails to meet the threshold of transformative use and actively harms the market for the original work, setting a critical precedent for future input disputes.
On the issue of AI-generated outputs, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upholds the requirement that only human-created works receive copyright protection. This ruling aligns with the US Copyright Office's recent reports, which emphasize that human authorship is a strict prerequisite for copyright, leaving AI-generated content largely unprotected under current US law.