Justice Department backs fair use in OpenAI copyright case

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest on Sept. 1 in In re OpenAI Copyright Infringement Litigation, before Judge Sidney Stein, arguing that training large language models on copyrighted text is a “transformative” fair use, per Chat GPT Is Eating the World. The 19-page filing, submitted under 28 U.S.C. § 517 as the case heads into summary judgment, also called plaintiffs’ “market dilution” theory — that AI outputs harm a work’s market merely by resembling its genre — “deeply flawed,” arguing outputs must be assessed separately from training under copyright’s fourth fair-use factor.