Tag Archives: fair dealing

This is where I found myself this morning. You see, I have published over 4000 articles and others have been Ising them to train their fake AI systems. Training LLM settings and so forth. As such (and according to law and at https://hwlebsworth.com.au/feeding-the-machine-how-us-courts-are-drawing-the-line-on-ai-training/) we see ‘Feeding the Machine: How US courts are drawing the line on AI training’ where we see “The accelerating development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has forced courts to grapple with novel and unsettled questions of copyright law. Central among these is whether the use of entire copyrighted works to train large language models (LLMs) without the author’s consent constitute infringement of those works.” Which works in my favour and it comes with “The datasets used to train AI models often contain digital copies of media such as web pages, books, videos, images and music. These media are often the subject of copyright protection, which means that their use to train AI models requires permission from the copyright holder. Permission is required because AI models must ‘copy’ the protected material at least temporarily to undertake the training process.” You see, from May 11th until now my articles have been used for ‘AI training’ at least 33,750 times and a lot more before that. As such I see an opportunity for me, myself and I (as such I am a sneaky trinity) so as we are given “The Interim Report then went on to discuss Australia’s ‘fair dealing’ regime, which allows certain uses of copyright works without the need for license from the copyright owner, but only for certain specified purposes, such as research or study, criticism or review, or parody or satire. The Interim Report seeks feedback on expanding this regime to include fair dealing for the purpose of text and data mining, which could more squarely legitimise AI training activities in Australia.

Where the Australian ‘fair dealing’ regime only applies to certain permitted purposes, some other countries, such as the United States (US) have a broader ‘fair use’ doctrine, under which any use of copyright material may be permissible provided that it is considered fair, without reference to legislatively-permitted purposes.” So, as I see it, money should be coming my way. And as the article in HWLE lawyers state. The setting of “In June 2025, the US District Court for the Northern District of California issued two decisions in Bartz v Anthropic PBC (Bartz) and Kadrey v Meta Platforms Inc (Kadrey), that directly addressed this question. While these rulings suggest that US courts may accept fair use as a defence to AI training, their scope is narrow. Both were decided at the summary judgment stage, and as the Judge in Kadrey noted, ‘the consequence of this ruling is limited […] to the rights of these thirteen authors‘. Accordingly, the significance of these rulings remains provisional, with the scope of fair use in the context of AI training to be more clearly defined as further cases are determined.” So, to get it clear, those are American judgements, but they have a much broader setting of ‘fair dealings’ then Australia has and my thought process is a little bit in the setting of “You can either hand me a generous settlement, or if needed I will get it through the law”. The second setting s long and optionally tedious. But as I am looking at closer to 50,000 transgressions the taximeter starts adding up. Now, I have no faith in 50,000 times 1.5M, which would be nice, but is ludicrously unrealistic. But the idea of $25,000,000 per corporation seems realistic. You see

“In Bartz, Anthropic the developer of the ‘Claude’ LLM, assembled a centralised digital library of books containing both lawfully acquired works, scanned from purchased physical copies, and unlawfully obtained works downloaded from unauthorised torrent websites. Authors alleged that their books were included without permission and were used both to train Anthropic’s models and for other purposes. Alsup J considered the two uses separately, ultimately holding that the use of works for training constituted fair use. However, Alsup J found that the use of pirated copies to build Anthropic’s centralised library was not justified under fair use, rejecting Anthropic’s argument that such copies should be treated as training data, and denying summary judgment on that issue.”

And:

“In Kadrey, Meta trained its ‘LLaMA’ AI models on datasets including those obtained from ‘shadow libraries’ such as Library Genesis and Z-Library. These datasets were downloaded via torrenting, incorporated into the training process, and discarded thereafter; unlike Anthropic, Meta did not maintain a persistent digital library. Thirteen best‐selling authors alleged that this constituted copyright infringement on a class‐wide basis. Chhabria J also found the training to be fair use, but adopted a more cautious approach, observing that ‘future evidence of substitution or harm to licensing markets, particularly where works are unlawfully obtained‘ could warrant a different conclusion.”

So we get to “While both courts concluded that the training uses fell within the scope of fair use, their reasoning diverged in certain aspects. Alsup J emphasized the transformative purpose of training and discounted speculative claims of market harm, whereas Chhabria J stressed the potential for market harm arguments and evidence to alter the analysis. These decisions have no binding effect in Australia, where there is no general fair use defence. Nonetheless, they highlight the emerging tension between protecting incentives for human creativity and facilitating technological innovation; a tension likely to intensify as generative AI becomes further integrated into creative and commercial practice.”

As such, I felt really good this morning. As this shows that I might be heading to a nice bank account. And as it happens to go (source: AP News) we get “A federal judge approved a landmark $1.5 billion copyright settlement requiring Anthropic to pay thousands of authors roughly $3,000 per book for using pirated digital libraries to train its Claude AI model”So as I see it (a flawed analogy) 50,000 times $3,000 get me $150,000,000 which sounds really nice. I reckon that this is where the art of seeing the diplomatic bounty comes into play. It seems that more than one transgressed on my work and would it be so wrong to go for $25,000,000 per transgressor? Of course, the long road would be more rewarding, but that seems like a greed driven way. I feel more for easy (well rewarded) solutions. And there are upsides to entering retirement with a somewhat fat wallet. Retirement comes across as a lot more fun that way. 

But I am getting ahead of myself, next step will be getting an impartial party (what a weird name for a lawyer) to check Grok, xAI, Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI, MetaAI, MicrosoftAI (always happy to knock coins out to their coffers), AWS AI (and others) to see whether their training data reveals the presence of “www.lawlordtobe.com” because that starts to process as I currently see it.

Well, that mental joyride was fun to have, but I did say the class actions would be prudent in 2026, I might as well join that cause for the benefit of poor little me and I have caused. I might be one of the people that refers to a church mouse as a decadent rich bitch. One must always keep humour about the premises.

Have a great day.