Plathon

The training of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the past years over massive quantities of books, music scores and recordings, paintings and other pictures, movies, videos… protected by Intellectual Property rights has driven hefty debate. It brought many prominent AI companies under the spotlight.

Copyright and IP lawsuits are multiplying

Copyright and intellectual property claims and lawsuits against large AI companies have multiplied. A few were settled, many are ongoing.

Some ruled in favor of the plaintiff (such as, in Germany, the GEMA vs OpenAI case), others in favor of the AI companies, generally in the US.

This split is not trivial, and is geopolitical as much as it is legal.

Two cases, although they are not the most recent, stuck with me.

Late June 2025, Meta and Anthropic (the company behind the famous LLM “Claude”, one of ChatGPT’s main rivals) won significant lawsuits in the US around the use of copyrighted materials to train their AI models.

A very good article from the MIT Technology Review, "What comes next for AI copyright lawsuits", July 3rd, 2025, by Will Douglas Heaven summarizes the two cases very well. Because it is very well written, I am quoting a short part of it here:

“In both cases, a group of authors (…) set out to prove that a technology company had violated their copyright by using their books to train large language models. And in both cases, the companies argued that this training process counted as fair use, a legal provision that permits the use of copyrighted works for certain purposes.

There the similarities end. Ruling in Anthropic’s favor, senior district judge William Alsup argued on June 23 that the firm’s use of the books was legal because what it did with them was transformative, meaning that it did not replace the original works but made something new from them “The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes”, Alsup wrote in his judgment.

In Meta’s case, district judge Vince Chhabria made a different argument. He also sided with the technology company, but he focused his ruling instead on the issue of whether or not Meta had harmed the market for the authors’ work. Chhabria said that he thought Alsup had brushed aside the importance of market harm. “The key question in virtually any case where a defendant has copied someone’s original work without permission is whether allowing people to engage in that sort of conduct would substantially diminish the market for the original” “

(read the full article here)

These are two of the essential conditions for the notion of “fair use “ to come into play:

• The work has to be highly transformative
• It does not substitute for the original work and therefore does not create significant market harm

For memory, the case Authors’ Guild vs Google from 2015 already paved the way in this direction.

What is actually copyright?

The notion of copyright and of protection of authors’ rights (the concept of intellectual property) is actually quite recent.

The invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1454 made it much cheaper to reproduce books. As there was initially no copyright law, anyone could buy or rent a press and print any text

The concept of copyright first developed in England : the Statute of Anne (1710), formally titled the Copyright Act 1710, emerged in Britain as a direct response to a growing conflict around publishing monopolies and authors' rights.

Before this statute, "The Stationers' Company", a strong trade guild of printers and booksellers, enjoyed an unlimited monopoly imposed by the Crown, regulating what works were published and profiting from them without necessarily paying the authors.

For the first time, lawmakers formally acknowledged that authors, who had been hitherto inadequately remunerated or simply ignored in financial matters, required legal protection and financial incentives: "Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted ..."

By granting authors exclusive rights to their creations for a fixed term (initially 14 years, renewable once), authors were directly financially rewarded.

The Statute's core idea, that authors have a fundamental right to benefit economically from their creative work, remains at the heart of modern copyright law (e.g. the Berne International Copyright Convention of 1886).

Might does not make it right

Let’s not be naïve: the “Statute of Anne” was not motivated by mere altruism towards authors and for the sake of justice and fairness. Politics is politics. The Statute allowed Parliament to dismantle the monopoly of the powerful Stationers' Company, which had previously controlled book printing and content dissemination through perpetual Crown privileges. By breaking this publisher monopoly, Parliament aimed to stimulate economic competition and gain better control over public information flow at a politically sensitive time following the Glorious Revolution (1688).

But it paved the way for a new idea: that having the technical means to reproduce a book, and illustration or any other content does not necessarily give one the right to do so. That force does not make legitimacy: might does not necessarily make right. And that reproduction requires the authors’ consent, possibly under certain conditions (e.g. remuneration).

The motto: the ends justify the means

AI companies, and behind them the countries that host them, are racing for competitive innovation – a race led by the US and China.

In a world where AI will fundamentally transform the rules of productivity, competitiveness and sovereignty, having the strongest model has become more than an economic competition, a fight for better margins or a few more market shares.

The rallying of most, if not all, the America’s Big Tech gurus behind the new US Administration after January 2025 has made it clear, if it was not already clear enough before: technology, and in particular AI, has become one of the main geopolitical battlefield. In a strong collusion of interests between Tech moguls and Political power, AI dominance has become a primary driver of geopolitical dominance.

These recent rulings need to be read in that context. What is at stake is much more than the commercial benefit of a couple of companies. These rulings are the symptom of the general direction the world is taking. A world in which the post-WWII order is being shaken and slowly torn down by the very same ones who built it in the first place. 

Romain Leroy-Castillo