Judge Alsup held that training a large language model on books is 'exceedingly transformative' fair use — while refusing to extend that blessing to the pirated library that fed it. The $1.5 billion settlement that followed shows where the real exposure lies.
Two days after Bartz, Judge Chhabria also found AI training to be fair use — but went out of his way to say the result reflected a failure of advocacy, not a vindication of the practice. His 'market dilution' theory is the doctrine to watch.
Before the generative-AI rulings, a Delaware court rejected fair use for using copyrighted material to build an AI legal-research tool — and pointedly distinguished the software cases the technology industry had relied upon. Its reach is narrower than its reputation.
A federal judge denied the music publishers a preliminary injunction against Anthropic over Claude's reproduction of song lyrics, finding their proposed order overbroad and their claimed harm unproven — even as a guardrails stipulation quietly reshaped the dispute.
Judge Sidney Stein largely denied OpenAI and Microsoft's motions to dismiss, keeping alive the theory that ChatGPT's outputs and the conduct of its users can infringe — a sharp contrast with how California courts have treated similar allegations.
A federal court let visual artists' direct and induced copyright claims against AI image generators proceed on the theory that protected works may persist inside the model itself — a holding that reframes how courts think about training data.
