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Senate Hearing Debates AI Training on Copyrighted Works | Publishers Weekly

The hearing featured five witnesses, four of whom argued that that the AI companies’ training methods are a clear violation of fair use, while the fifth, Edward Lee, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, made the case that their methods could be protected by fair use and he cautioned that before Congress takes any action it should let the issues play out in court.

In making his argument, Lee cited two recent rulings in lawsuits brought against Anthropic and Meta where both judges found that copying was indeed fair use. In each instance, however, the judges wrote that the tech companies were not in the clear. In the Anthropic case, the court ruled that while using legally acquired copyrighted books to train AI large language models constitutes fair use, downloading pirated copies of those books for permanent storage violates copyright law.

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The back-and-forth of the session, which AAP CEO Maria Pallante called a "terrific hearing" in a note to members, seem to enforce Hawley’s view on what needs to be done. If what AI companies are doing isn’t infringement, Hawley said, “Congress needs to do something. I mean, if the answer is that the biggest corporation in the world, worth trillions of dollars, can come take an individual author’s work like Mr. Baldacci’s, lie about it, hide it, profit off of it, and there’s nothing our law does about that, we need to change the law.”

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