As Music Industry Battles AI Firms Over Training, Trump Admin Says It’s Fair Use
Weighing in on a legal question with trillion-dollar stakes, the administration says AI firms don't need to pay for the millions of works they use without permission.
The Trump administration has taken a stance supporting AI companies in the ongoing legal disputes concerning AI model training, asserting in a recent court filing that entities like OpenAI are exempt from lawsuits when they utilize millions of copyrighted works for model development. The Department of Justice issued an advisory brief on September 1, urging a federal judge to rule in favor of OpenAI in a lawsuit brought forth by the New York Times, alongside a multitude of copyright cases initiated by record labels, authors, film studios, and other creators against AI corporations.
In a first-of-its-kind legal opinion, the DOJ contends that AI companies generally enjoy protection under copyright’s fair use provision when training their models on pre-existing works, thereby precluding the necessity to compensate the original creators. The filing asserts that restricting large language model development due to a misconstrued understanding of fair use doctrine would impede creative and scientific advancement, as well as impede American prosperity and economic mobility.
The DOJ's legal brief will undoubtedly pose a challenge for prominent music organizations, which have previously sued Anthropic, the creator of Claude, and Suno, a leading music AI firm, for allegedly employing millions of songs in training without obtaining proper consent. Like all litigation of this nature, the issue of fair use holds the deciding factor in those cases.
In the new filing, the DOJ argues that AI training constitutes an "extraordinarily transformative" utilization of existing works, which does not infringe upon the market for the originals. According to the feds, imposing charges for such training materials would unjustly "subsidize" legacy media outlets, rather than providing a fair market for the original creators.
The DOJ further argues that "requiring payment for such training materials would be problematic — and legally incorrect — to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of AI models impermissible without licensing." The DOJ emphasizes that AI model training aligns with the constitutional objective of copyright, which is to foster creative "progress."
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