Fair Use

Fair use and fair dealing

Copyright law in the US has an exception called fair use.

Fair use allows people to use copyrighted material in limited ways without permission, including in news reporting, education or research.

AI companies argue that training on text is similar. They say they are not copying the books to resell them, they're learning patterns from them, the same way a human reader might.

In Australia, we have fair dealing, which is more strict than fair use.

Fair use in US court cases

There have been several court cases in the US where AI model developers have defended their training on copyrighted materials is ok because of fair use.

Courts are still deciding who is right. In 2025, in a case between Anthropic and a collection of authors, a US judge ruled that training on legally obtained books was acceptable.

But downloading pirated copies of books to train Claude was not. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the lawsuit.

There are many other examples of creative artists suing AI companies.