Thursday Sep 3
POLITICSOpenAI

Washington Picks A Side On Fair Use

2SEP
DOJ FAIR USE

The Justice Department told a Manhattan court that training on copyrighted news is fair use. First time the US government has entered an AI copyright case. The argument is national security, not copyright.

DOJ told the judge that licensing every training corpus would hand the biggest labs an oligopoly and slow American science. Reuters says no federal agency had weighed in on any of these suits before.

The filing carries advisory weight only. Judge Stein is not bound by it. But it lands while the consolidated publisher cases sit at summary judgment, which is exactly when a nudge counts.

The Times called it siding with trillion-dollar companies against creators whose work they stole. The Intercept and the Florida and Arkansas papers are in the same consolidated action.

full brief & sources

⚡ Why this matters

  • The US government just argued that model training is fair use. That is a thumb on the scale in every pending AI copyright case.
  • The reasoning is not copyright doctrine. It is national security and compute economics. That framing travels to other cases.
  • If it holds, the licensing market for training data shrinks. Publishers lose their strongest bargaining chip.

🔍 What happened

  • DOJ filed a statement of interest in the consolidated publisher suits against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York.
  • Core line: the United States has a strong interest in the court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law.
  • Second argument: licensing costs would hand the largest tech companies an oligopoly on model training.
  • First federal intervention in the AI copyright wave, per Reuters.
  • A statement of interest is advisory. It does not bind the judge.

💬 Smart takes

  • The New York Times: the administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of countless American creators whose work they stole.
  • The Intercept, itself a plaintiff, framed it as the government telling a court to let OpenAI rip off its articles.
  • Legal watchers note the national-security framing is unusual. Fair use is normally argued on transformation, not on strategic advantage.

🧭 Where this goes

  1. Likelyother AI defendants cite this brief within weeks. Music, book and image cases all get the same argument.
  2. Possiblepublishers pivot from litigation to legislation. A statutory licensing regime becomes the ask.
  3. Wild Cardthe judge rejects the national-security framing outright and says so in writing. That would be worse for OpenAI than silence.

🥄 The Spoon Take

Read the framing, not the verdict. The government did not argue that training is transformative. It argued that losing would be bad for America. That is a policy claim wearing a copyright costume. If courts accept it once, every content-licensing negotiation you are running loses leverage overnight.

🤔 Pushback

Advisory briefs lose all the time. Judge Stein already let parts of these cases past dismissal. A political filing may harden him rather than move him.

·US Government Backs OpenAI in New York Times Copyright Case (Reuters via U.S. News)·Justice Dept. Sides With OpenAI in New York Times Copyright Suit (GV Wire)·Trump Admin Tells Court: Let OpenAI Rip Off The Intercept's Articles (The Intercept)·NY Times Rips Trump's DOJ For Backing AI Companies (Deadline)