INTRODUCTION
Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is permeating the world of legal information management, and at the intersection of copyright and genAI there are many new questions being raised. AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, DALL-E and Gemini can generate new text and images when prompted to do so by users, and the outputs can be creative and impressive. These programmes have been trained on large datasets, and it is only now that the courts are starting to examine whether these tools may have infringed copyright. For example, in the US courts there are multiple actions brought by authors against OpenAI relating to the unauthorised use of copyrighted text, and in both the US and UK Getty Images has brought proceedings against Stability AI for copyright infringement. The outcomes of these actions are eagerly awaited around the world, as they will start to form a new foundation of direction and case precedent in the genAI arena. But what does all this have to do with legal information professionals and law librarians?
LEGAL INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS AND COPYRIGHT
Keeping up to date with developments in copyright law is essential for law librarians and legal information professionals. As curators of print and digital resources, and providers of frontline information services, we play a vital role in ensuring that our organisations and users are compliant with developments in copyright law. Not only do we need to understand copyright laws in order to provide services to our end users, but we must also be familiar with the contracted terms of any licenced subscription content we manage which is available via third party platforms and websites. Whenever possible we should play a part in helping to negotiate those licensing terms with a publisher or agent. And indeed, many legal information professionals are already positioned at the forefront of the procurement process and are actively involved in the resource selection process, not to mention the practical aspects of rolling out a new resource, providing training to end-users and advising on how content can be shared and used. Because of this, we need to keep abreast of changes in copyright law, changes in market practice in digital resource management and, in this evolving world, we now also need to be able to advise on how content held in the resources we are responsible for can be used (or not) with artificial intelligence tools.
It is crucial for us to understand the responsible use of resources, and to explain and guide our users in compliant ways to re-use information resources in their day-to-day work. Our aim should be to achieve the balance between protecting rights holders, who have created original content, with utilising content as widely as possible – all the while complying with the law.
COPYRIGHT BASICS
Copyright is a legal right that gives the creator of an original work exclusive control over how their work – such as books, music and software – is used. These rights will typically include reproduction, distribution, renting/lending, adaptation and performance of a work. UK copyright law is set out in the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) which came into force from 1 August 1989.
Copyright protection is automatically created. It is not necessary to apply or pay a fee; there is no register of copyrighted works in the UK; and copyright protection starts as soon as a work is created. The duration of copyright generally lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, but it varies depending on the type of work, how long ago the work was created or published, and who authored the work. Once copyright has expired, anyone can use or copy the work.
In the context of legal information managers and law libraries, the main types of works that are encountered are books and journals in both print and electronic format, and online databases such as Westlaw and Lexis+. There will also be significant material published online by government departments and covered by Crown copyright. However, depending on the type of law practised by the lawyers at the organisation, it is entirely possible that law librarians may well encounter other materials such as maps, sound/music recordings, artistic works or films.
COPYRIGHT EXCEPTIONS
For a law librarian in the workplace, there are a number of relevant exceptions to UK copyright law that permit people to use limited amounts of copyright material without the owner’s permission. Where an exception is relied upon there are a number of points to consider, such as fair dealing, whether the exception applies to only non-commercial purposes, or other restrictions.
Some key exceptions relevant for legal information professionals are:
Parliamentary and judicial proceedings (CDPA 1998 s. 45)
This exception allows the use of copyright material for judicial proceedings and specifically permits copying and use of works for this reason. Law librarians may be asked to provide copies of case law or legal commentary for use in litigation support (e.g. court bundles), and this exception ensures that where copying is related specifically to judicial proceedings, it does not infringe copyright.
Non-Commercial research and private study (CDPA 1998 s. 29)
The s. 29 exception permits individuals to copy limited extracts of works for their own non-commercial research or private study. The copying must be ‘fair dealing’. Unhelpfully there is no statutory definition of fair dealing but the courts have identified a number of factors that can be taken into account to determine if a particular dealing was fair, including asking questions such as ‘does the usage harm the market for the original work?’, and ‘is the amount of the work taken reasonable and appropriate?’.
Information professionals may use this exception, however, it’s worth noting that within a law firm setting, even where copying of materials is for private study, it could be argued that everything that a law firm does is for profit, so even when material is requested from the law library for private study this still may be seen as a commercial purpose, and therefore poses issues as an unauthorised copy.
Criticism, review and quotation (CDPA s. 30)
The criticism exception allows the use of short extracts for the purposes of criticism, review or quotation, so long as the copying is fair dealing, acknowledgement is given, and the work has been made available to the public.
Note that there are other exceptions available in the CDPA 1998 and legal information managers should make themselves aware of the exceptions that are relevant for their own law library and their own organisation.
LICENSING BASICS
Licensing is the process by which the owner of copyright grants permission to another party, allowing them to use their work under specified conditions, and in addition it allows creators to monetise their own work. This is typically formalised through a legal agreement, which outlines the scope, duration and limitations of the use. Licences can be exclusive or non-exclusive and may cover various rights such as reproduction, distribution or public display, as well as compensation. This allows the licensee to exploit the intellectual property for commercial purposes without infringing the owner’s rights, and it is an important mechanism for the dissemination and use of creative works, while it also ensures that the creator is compensated and that the end user is accessing the content lawfully.
For legal information professionals, licensing provides the backbone for a law library’s access and use of digital content. In short, entering into a licence agreement is a way of being able to arrange lawful access to more content for end users. Licence agreements are the foundation for defining the scope of permitted use, ensuring compliance and helping with managing end user expectations. This in turn supports organisation risk management, as failure to comply can result in a breach of contract, legal liability or termination of access to that service.
With that in mind, information professionals need to carefully review and negotiate licence terms to ensure that they align with the organisation’s operational needs. For example, a licence may prohibit sharing content outside of a list of authorised users, or may prohibit using any content in AI tools, and this could impact workflows.
TYPES OF COPYRIGHT LICENCES
There are different types of licences. Some are issued directly by the rights holder, and others are issued by someone authorised to act on their behalf. For example, there are collective agencies such as the Copyright Licensing Agency or NLA Media Access that act on behalf of rights owners and these issue licences which permit copying, which would not otherwise be allowed.
Information professionals will usually encounter non-exclusive licences in the workplace. This means that the copyright holder will normally licence use to more than one licensee, for example a licence agreement for using an online database. These types of licences are available to anyone who is willing to accept the licence terms and pay the associated fees.
When licences are negotiated for non-exclusive access to content, which is a common scenario for information professionals (e.g. for online services like Westlaw or Lexis+), the cost of the licence is not the only matter that must be negotiated. Defined terms such as ‘permitted user’ or ‘authorised user’ are important, too, as they will state how authorised users can use and redistribute content. Also to be agreed will be terms about how the content can be shared, the duration of the agreement, terms to define remedies to a breach of contract, and how to terminate the agreement along with notice periods.
We can also encounter licences which are not negotiated, for example, those that are called ‘shrink wrap licences’. The term ‘shrink wrap’ is used because you can see the key terms for the licence within a cellophane wrapping, and as soon as you tear open the wrapper you are deemed to have accepted those terms. The most common example of these non-negotiated licences in law libraries is a CD attached to a print book. The other commonly encountered licences which are not negotiated are ‘click-use licences’, where you simply have the option of clicking on a button stating ‘I accept’ on a website page licence before accessing the content on the next screen.
CONTRACT LAW VERSUS COPYRIGHT LAW
For information professionals, it’s important to have a basic understanding of contract law to understand the licensing agreements that are put in place, as well as a basic understanding of copyright law. There may be instances where copyright exceptions can be overridden by contracts and other instances where this is expressly forbidden (Paul Pedley’s book, Practical copyright for library and information professionals, has a good overview on this topic in chapter 4, where it walks through some practical scenarios).
THE ROLE OF THE LEGAL INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Copyright and licensing questions raised by our end users can range from a straightforward query about whether a journal article can be shared with a third person, to more complex questions such as redistributing content for a seminar with multiple attendees, through to questions about sharing content with an outside third-party client. Having a familiarity with copyright law, the collective licences issued to the organisation (such as a Copyright Licensing Agency licence), and the subscription licences for online databases, will help any information professional answer commonly asked questions.
Often, we are the licence negotiators so we will field the queries because we know the terms of the agreement and understand why they were worded in a particular way. As well as arming ourselves with the knowledge about copyright and our organisation’s licences, we also need to provide information confidently and credibly to our end users. Many law libraries have created FAQs (frequently asked questions) or intranet pages so that end users can self serve on basic questions about re-use of content. Information professionals will be well placed to answer the more complicated questions, and queries about lesser-known resource content, and should be able to provide creative solutions to allow users to re-use content in the way they envisioned.
Protecting the copyright of documents has been a big issue since the arrival of the photocopier, but new tech in the shape of AI has now complicated things further
LEGAL INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS AND GENAI
The rapid emergence of genAI tools is reshaping how content is created, accessed and used, and this poses new challenges for copyright and licensing in law libraries and beyond. As these new technologies become embedded in legal research workflows, legal information professionals must navigate an ever more complex landscape of issues about copyright, contractual restrictions and ethical considerations. We are increasingly looking at wider issues such as the training data used for large language models and ownership of AI-generated content. Furthermore, we also find ourselves involved in discussions about practical issues, such as managing digital resources which are rolling out their own proprietary AI capabilities (for example The Lawyer’s ‘Ask The Lawyer’, and the FT.com’s ‘AskFT’); and supporting legal professionals who are relying on what can still be unreliable tools that can hallucinate. The use of these new tools require that every output must be checked and verified before it can be relied upon, and we may need to advise on how the outputs can be shared, if at all.
In addition, the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council on harmonised rules on artificial intelligence and amending certain Union legislative acts) has introduced some measures that require general purpose AI (GPAI) models to make public which sources they have used as training data. Copyright rightsholders monitoring these developments may subsequently challenge unauthorised use in court if it comes to light that their works have been used to train AI models without permission.
COPYRIGHT AND GENAI
There are several key issues that highlight the evolving intersection of genAI, copyright, and licensing in the legal information domain which information professionals should be aware of.
The legality of training data: AI models are often trained on large amounts of content which may have been scraped from websites. Where this involves the use of copyright materials without the authorisation of the owner it raises copyright infringement issues, if the training process involved copying all or substantial parts of a work. A case in point is the pending action of Getty Images v Stability AI.
Contractual restrictions: Licensing agreements may prohibit the use of licensed content in AI tools, even if copyright law permits it (e.g. through data mining exceptions).
Market substitution: AI generated content has already started to compete with website content, and website owners are seeing a reduction in traffic to their own websites, with a subsequent knock-on effect to advertising-generated income. A common example of this is when running a search on a search engine, the resulting information displayed at the top of the screen may be an AI summary of the actual search results, and users may not scroll beyond the AI summary to the individual websites, which gain revenue from clicks to their sites.
Licensing AI outputs: AI-generated outputs must be assessed to see if they can be legally shared or stored. For example, outputs from a genAI tool that sits within Lexis+ or FT.com need to be reviewed not just for veracity but also for re-use.
Authorship and ownership: The courts and copyright offices have already ruled that works which have been generated by an AI without human input are not eligible for copyright protection – for example, the US District Court for the District of Columbia held in Thaler v Perlmutter that copyright requires works to be authored by a human.
Bias replication: AI outputs may inadvertently replicate bias inherent in the content the model has been trained on, and this can raise ethical concerns.
Plagarism: AI outputs may inadvertently replicate copyrighted content raising issues around plagiarism, the attribution on ownership of outputs, as well as ethical and legal concerns.
Infringement: Using AI tools to generate or summarise legal texts could expose organisations to liability, if these tools rely on unlicensed data.
CONCLUSION
The legal landscape in relation to AI and copyright is evolving at pace and it requires constant monitoring to keep on top of potential issues coming down the track. There are many ongoing legal cases and regulatory reviews looking at these questions, and one case judgment could quickly introduce new approaches that will need to be considered.
Organisations using AI tools are at risk of opening themselves up to liability if they do not have checks and balances in place to review how AI tools are being used in the workplace. We are at a tipping point where legal professionals are becoming more comfortable using genAI in their day-to-day tasks but may not understand the copyright considerations at play. We eagerly await clarification of some of these issues from the courts.
Legal information managers, as stewards of print and online resources, already need to understand and to work with copyright and licensing issues. It therefore makes sense for us to have a hand in developing policies for using AI which includes procurement (ensuring licensing terms are aligned with organisational needs from the start of the agreement), to training (educating end users in how content can be used) through to compliance frameworks (to mitigate organisational risk).
At this time, we are perhaps experiencing a certain level of ‘AI-fatigue’ from reading so much hype in the press about artificial intelligence, and from trialling new tools in the workplace, so we may well feel like we need a break from it. But right now it is vital that we monitor those developments that might and probably will impact our work, perhaps in ways we have not yet foreseen.
Resources for copyright law
o Graham Cornish, Copyright: Interpreting the law for libraries, archives and information services (Facet Publishing, 2019)
o Copinger and Skone James on Copyright (Sweet & Maxwell, 19th ed 2024. Copinger has some useful content in the ‘Materials’ section in volume two which includes tables of the Parliamentary debates, and repealed statutes
o Laddie, Prescott and Vitoria: The Modern Law of Copyright (LexisNexis Butterworths, 5th ed 2018, with a new edition due out 2026)
o Paul Pedley, Practical Copyright for Library and Information Professionals (Facet Publishing, 2015)
o UK government IPO <www.gov.uk/business/copyright> Accessed 18 August 2025
