Trump sides with Big Tech in AI copyright debate

President Donald Trump is siding with tech companies in the hotly contested AI copyright battle.

On Wednesday, the president outlined his AI Action Plan in remarks at the AI Summit, an event hosted by the All-In podcast and the Hill and Valley Forum. In announcing the plan, Trump called for a “common-sense application” of AI and intellectual property rules (starting at minute 19:48 in the video).

“You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for,” the president said. “When a person reads a book or an article, you’ve gained great knowledge. That does not mean that you’re violating copyright laws or have to make deals with every content provider.” Notably, he also said, “China’s not doing it.”

The rhetoric reflects the stance big tech companies like Meta and OpenAI have taken when it comes to AI model training and copyright infringement.

AI companies say copyright law is slowing them down

A fierce legal debate is raging that pits copyright holders against AI companies. Authors, musicians, and artists have sued OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and others, claiming the use of their creative works (some of which were pirated) as training data is copyright infringement. For instance, in its suit against Midjourney, Disney called the AI image generator “a bottomless pit of plagiarism.” However, AI companies claim they are protected by the fair use doctrine, which allows the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in specific circumstances.

In its March recommendations for development of an AI Action Plan, Meta said, “the Administration should clarify that the use of publicly available data to train models is unequivocally fair use.” OpenAI similarly argued that “applying the fair use doctrine to AI is not only a matter of American competitiveness — it’s a matter of national security,” in their submitted recommendations. Companies like OpenAI have claimed they need the green light to use copyrighted works without consent to win the AI race against China.

As part of its AI Action Plan, the White House also issued a trio of executive orders about AI, which Trump signed after giving his remarks. There was no explicit mention of copyright issues or fair use in these orders, but Trump’s comments clearly signal that the administration is siding with big tech on this issue. The action plan also calls for easing regulations on tech companies in general. “To maintain global leadership in AI, America’s private sector must be unencumbered by bureaucratic red tape,” said the AI Action Plan.

Fact check: You do have to pay for knowledge

Trump’s comments about not having to pay for gaining knowledge is actually a common argument. Tech companies have claimed that because their AI models are generally learning from the data, they are not subject to copyright laws.

However, many copyright lawyers disagree.

“When the president raises the difficulty of paying for every ‘single article, book, or anything else,’ – that’s legit,” said Justin Hughes, a law professor at Loyola Law School. “But nothing in that is inconsistent with the AI companies licensing large repositories of copyrighted materials – as they are doing, AI companies reaching settlements with certified classes of copyright owners in litigation – as they should, and AI companies paying exemplary damages when they rapaciously copy stuff without permission.”

In a previous interview with Mashable about the Kadrey v. Meta case, Hughes also pointed out that “people pay to learn and they have to buy copies of books to learn.”

Dozens of AI copyright cases are making their way through the courts right now. AI blog ChatGPT Is Eating the World counts 47 active cases. Recently, Anthropic and Meta both won their fair use rulings, but the judge presiding over the Meta case had this to say: “As should now be clear, this ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” and even postulated that “it will be illegal to copy copyright-protected works to train generative AI models without permission.”

It’s unclear how Trump’s copyright remarks will turn into concrete action. But he seems to be out of sync with the U.S. Copyright Office’s position on AI training and fair use, according to a pre-publication version of its AI Copyright Report. That report concluded that fair use likely doesn’t provide a blanket exception for AI companies using copyrighted works. In Congress, Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal recently introduced a bipartisan bill that would ban AI companies from training on copyrighted works and allow people to sue tech companies for the use of their personal data for model training.

And then there’s the possibility that Trump’s stance might change, as Hughes theorized. “I think the president may feel very differently if and when he learns about AI companies training on episodes of The Apprentice without paying a dime.”

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.