The copyright reckoning

The copyright reckoning is the still-unsettled fight over whether training a model on copyrighted work is infringement or fair use. It surfaced first around generation rather than training: GitHub Copilot raised questions about code licences, and Stable Diffusion put millions of scraped images into a public model. The US Copyright Office set an early marker by ruling that AI-generated images could not themselves be copyrighted.

Litigation followed the money. The New York Times sued OpenAI at the end of 2023, the most prominent of a wave of publisher suits, and the early rulings split. A court rejected Ross Intelligence’s fair-use defence, but months later a judge ruled that training on books was fair use — even as Anthropic agreed a $1.5 billion settlement over pirated copies, finally approved in 2026.

The picture fragmented by jurisdiction. The UK High Court largely rejected Getty’s claims against Stability AI, while a Munich court found OpenAI had infringed German song-lyric copyrights the same week. The reckoning crossed into culture, too — a Studio Ghibli-style image wave sharpened the question of style and imitation — but its central issue, whether the training itself requires a licence, still has no settled answer.