Encyclopedia Britannica, the publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Strike 3, an adult-film company, may not seem to have much in common. But they all agree on one thing: They want payment for the use of their work in training AI models. In the past year, each of them has brought a lawsuit against the big AI companies, claiming that their content was used to train models without permission.And they’re not alone. More than 130 lawsuits have been brought against OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, xAI, Perplexity, Nvidia, Suno, and other developers of generative AI over their use of copyrighted work, with some plaintiffs seeking damages in the amount of billions of dollars. Last week, in a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI, documents emerged showing that OpenAI developers had hacked the Times’ paywall to download articles. In the same documents, an executive from Microsoft, which at the time had an exclusive partnership with OpenAI, said the operation looked like “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”[Read: ]Someone is mysteriously snapping up used books around the worldOpenAI and the other AI companies defend their practices by claiming to be making a “fair use” of copyrighted work: Broadly, they claim their models “transform” the work they are trained on, resulting in something new and different from the original. Whatever the outcome of these lawsuits, the rulings may determine how much control creators and publishers have over their intellectual and creative work in the future.Because these lawsuits feature big names and big numbers, their filings draw widespread media attention. But a potentially significant development went largely unnoticed recently. In early September, the Trump administration asked a judge to rule in favor of the AI companies in more than a dozen of these lawsuits.The message came from the Department of Justice, which filed a statement of interest, or SOI, that claimed that any ruling in favor of creators would be “erroneous” and “a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine.” Ultimately, DOJ argued that America’s “AI dominance” is a matter of national security, and that no law should impede or delay its development.DOJ’s statement was so broad that even political allies of the Trump administration were dubious. The conservative attorney and political strategist Mike Davis wrote a Fox News opinion piece in which he called for DOJ to withdraw its SOI. “In a free market, businesses pay for the inputs they need,”… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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