In courts across the country, publishers and creators are suing large AI companies for training generative AI models on copyrighted works. It’s easy to see these cases as a David-and-Goliath showdown between authors and publishers fighting for a cut of Big Tech company profits. But this fight is actually much larger. It affects billions of people who aren’t represented in the case at all, including researchers, artists, activists, journalists, people with disabilities, and anyone who accesses and shares content online.
That’s why EFF is stepping in to defend the
public’s
rights in these cases. Today, EFF filed an
amicus brief
in
In re OpenAI,
explaining how the court’s ruling on fair use could impact people worldwide. If fair use gets narrowed, it will impede work that benefits the public, like medical research and investigative journalism, and even limit access to privacy protection tools.
Let’s be clear: creators and workers deserve support as AI changes their fields, and Big Tech companies must be held accountable for the harms they cause. But giving copyright holders more control over the web won’t accomplish either of these goals. If the plaintiffs prevail in these cases, courts would have to rewrite copyright law in ways that hurt everyone except powerful media and tech companies.
Rewriting Fair Use Makes Everyone Worse Off
Copyright exists for one reason: to stimulate creativity and innovation in service of the greater public good. Unfortunately, the plaintiffs in this lawsuit are arguing to limit everyone’s fair use rights, in ways that would thwart the basic purpose of copyright. The harms of shrinking fair use will go far beyond generative AI, impacting everyone.
Initial speculation that AI models would be infringement machines, churning out works highly similar to those on which they were trained,
has proven unfounded
. And courts have already found fair use in cases where copyrighted works were used to train generative AI models, reco
