OpenAI Highlights Court Briefs Supporting Fair Use in AI
As legal battles continue, OpenAI has highlighted various court briefs from creators, academics, and legal experts arguing that fair use is essential for AI training and technological innovation.
Radwan AbdulhadiEditor and technology writer
OpenAI Defends Fair Use Amid Legal Challenges
Authors, journalists, creators, academics, accessibility advocates, legal experts, librarians, economists, and business leaders have voiced support for the longstanding principle of fair use and its application to artificial intelligence training. For decades, fair use has played a critical role in driving innovation that benefits everyone, helping deliver important medical and scientific breakthroughs as well as new technologies.
According to perspectives shared on <a href="https://openai.com/index/fair-use-benefits-everyone/">OpenAI News</a>, recent legal actions attempt to ignore a half century of legal history. Specifically, <a href="https://openai.com/new-york-times/">The New York Times’ lawsuit</a> asks observers to toss aside the longstanding principle of fair use in pursuit of an undeserved payday, while experts across a wide range of fields argue otherwise.
Arguments from Libraries and Technology Alliances
Organizations such as the American Council of the Blind, the Association of Research Libraries, the American Library Association, the Consumer Technology Association, and the Business Software Alliance have filed submissions emphasizing that courts should reject attempts to extend copyright beyond established limits. They note that AI training uses copyrighted works for a fundamentally different purpose without providing substitute access.
These communities share an interest in studying and learning from broad sources of knowledge. Restrictions on fair use training would affect both the institutions building artificial intelligence systems and the people utilizing them across software, education, and accessibility fields, according to the filed briefs.
Addressing Market Dilution and Economic Theories
Legal and economic submissions also addressed market dilution theories, arguing that copyright law has never restricted aggregate competitive pressure from noninfringing outputs. Amicus curiae briefs ask courts to hold that competitive pressure from works occupying the same subject matter or genre is not cognizable market harm under the Copyright Act.
Furthermore, experts emphasize that copyright protects authors against the substitution of their protected expression rather than against the commercial success of new, competing expressions that merely draw inspiration or learn from existing material without copying.
Perspectives on Foundation Models and Transformative Technologies
Startups and technical experts argue that foundation models demonstrate how utilizing copyrighted works for training constitutes a fair use rather than infringement. The primary purpose of training a foundation model is to build a general-purpose tool that users can adapt to new ends rather than directly reproducing the training data.
Additional commentary notes that when artificial intelligence training enables the creation of new knowledge, software, and analytical capabilities, those broader public benefits reinforce the legal framework supporting fair use under standard statutory factors.
Literature, Arts, and Independent Creators
Literary figures and artists have also weighed in on how artificial intelligence shapes creative disciplines. For instance, commentators suggest that individual models function as entirely new mediums offering authors fresh capabilities to generate texts, explore ideas, and reason.
Independent creators who rely on copyright protection while incorporating modern tooling note that artificial intelligence assists in managing surrounding business and creative processes rather than displacing original human expression in the marketplace.
Sources
- OpenAI NewsFair use benefits everyone
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