Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Anthropic for using protected literary works in the training process of the artificial intelligence model Claude.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed Anthropic’s liability for copyright infringement, arguing that the use qualifies as fair use. The court reasoned that the use does not transform the work, as it does not alter its content but merely converts it into a coded language, nor does it reproduce the works, since it does not create new works based on them, but rather uses them to learn how to generate original creations.
Given that a “work” is defined as any creation of the human intellect, do AI-generated creations possess this attribute? Bartz vs. Anthropic PBC raises a significant debate between public interest and authors’ rights, especially in a context where protected works are used in a training process that generates billions in economic benefits while the original authors receive no compensation.
