Every AI Copyright Court in the US, Visualized

In May 2020, media and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters sued Ross Intelligence, a small legal AI startup, alleging that it violated US copyright laws by reproducing material from Thomson Reuters’ legal research platform Westlaw. As the pandemic raged, the lawsuit went almost unnoticed outside the small world of copyright flouting. But now it’s clear that the business, launched more than two years before the generative AI boom, was the first strike. a bigger war between content publishers and artificial intelligence companies is now being litigated in courts across the country. The result could make, break or reshape the information ecosystem and the entire AI industry, thereby affecting almost everyone on the internet.

Dozens of other copyright lawsuits have been filed against AI-related companies over the past two years at a rapid clip. Plaintiffs include individual authors such as Sarah Silverman and Ta Nehisi-Coates, visual artists, media companies such as The New York Times, and music industry giants Like Universal Music Group. This wide range of rights holders allege that AI companies have used their work to train highly profitable and powerful AI models in a way that amounts to theft. AI companies often defend themselves “fair use” doctrineIt argues that the creation of AI tools should be considered a situation where it is legal to use copyrighted material without obtaining consent or compensation to rights holders. (Widely accepted examples of fair use include parody, news reports, and academic research.) Almost every major AI company is involved in this legal battle, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Nvidia.

WIRED is closely following how each of these claims unfolds. We’ve created visualizations to help you track and contextualize which companies and rights holders are involved, where cases are filed, what they’re alleging, and everything else you need to know.

That first case, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligencestill going through the court system. Originally scheduled for early this year, the trial has been postponed indefinitely, and while the litigation has already fired Ross, it’s unclear when it will end. Other cases are currently underway, such as The New York Times’ closely watched lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. controversial periods of discoveryduring which both sides argue about what information they should hand over.