Mining, Scraping, Training, Generating: Copyright Implications of Generative AI

Abstract

Generative AI (GenAI) impacts the ways we create, engage with, and understand creative and intellectual works. These new forms of sociotechnical (inter)action pose challenges for existing legal regimes, ethical frameworks, and social relationships. This research undertakes an in‐depth copyright analysis of GenAI based on U.S. law, focusing on its fair use doctrine and conceptions of transformation. This work finds that courts' characterization of uses as primarily either “expressive” or “mediating” is an important, though often implicit, factor in their decisions. Furthermore, while “transformative use” has dominated fair use decisions for the past thirty years, findings from this research suggest that GenAI may usher in a renewed emphasis on the doctrine's market harms element which, in application, may be dispositive with respect to GenAI outputs. This work concludes by offering recommendations aimed at clarifying that the value of copyright arises from social and relational aspects of creative practice and sociotechnical transformation. Arguments and rationales that (over)emphasize atomization and algorithmic decontextualization of the material properties of creative works are unlikely to attend to the underlying purpose of the Act: “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts”.