Hollywood unions urge judge to reject 'fair use' defence in OpenAI copyright case
The actors' union SAG-AFTRA, the Writers Guild of America East and West and the American Federation of Musicians have asked a federal judge to reject a blanket fair use exemption for training AI models, in the consolidated copyright case brought by news outlets and authors against OpenAI.
Four major US entertainment unions filed a joint amicus brief on Thursday, 29 October, in the consolidated copyright case in New York in which the New York Times, other news outlets and well-known authors are suing OpenAI. They argue that the company is "appropriating the work of middle- and working-class people to develop their technology" by training its models on third-party content without permission or payment.
"The harms of unlicensed training fall not just on companies like the News Plaintiffs, but on the countless professionals behind the work," the 34-page brief says. It warns that a categorical fair use exemption would allow a "potentially enormous transfer of value" from creators to corporations, and insists that, despite the new technology, the dispute is "no more than an ordinary copyright case".
The unions want fair use, the legal doctrine that allows some uses of protected work without a licence, to be judged case by case rather than granted across the board to AI training. Their brief focuses on the human work behind news writing before widening the argument to other creative professions.
Besides the newspapers, the plaintiffs include writers such as George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Franzen and Ta-Nehisi Coates, as well as the Authors Guild. OpenAI has argued that training on publicly available material is fair use. The outcome is expected to shape how AI companies can use copyrighted work in the US.