This chapter explores the most significant legal challenge facing generative AI (GenAI) companies: the wave of copyright infringement lawsuits based on unauthorized copying of copyrighted works for model training. It establishes copyright law as the dominant legal battleground, compelling GenAI entities to rely almost entirely on the affirmative defense of fair use.

The analysis reveals two critical flaws in the industry’s fair use claims, challenging the notion of “GenAI exceptionalism”: The Legal Argument is that unlike prior cases of transformative use (e.g., Google Books), GenAI’s core function is shown to exploit the expressive quality of high-quality training material. The Substantive Argument put forth to justify GenAI’s fair use would, if consistently applied, logically grant every human the same right to copy and consume any copyrighted work without payment.

The chapter proceeds to systematically dismantle eight of the most common “substantive arguments” favoring GenAI, concluding that these claims either crumble under scrutiny or serve as thinly veiled demands for an exceptional right to corporate-scale content piracy.

This chapter will delve into the relationship between intellectual property (IP) and human-computer interaction (HCI), examining how intellectual property rights and limitations influence the design process, drive technological progress, and shape user experiences.The chapter provides detailed discussions of the three main types of IP providing recognition and/or financial benefit for what people invent or create: patent, copyright, and trademark.

When Ezra Pound launched his writing career in London in 1908, English copyright was governed by an Act of 1844, which required registration of works at Stationers’ Hall in order for copyright to be secured. The Act was soon replaced, however, by the Imperial Copyright Act of 1911, under which copyright protection was extended to works upon creation without the need for registration. Notable among the changes effected by the Act of 1911 was the extension of the term of copyright to life plus fifty years (subject to certain exceptions). Previously, the law fixed the term of copyright at either forty-two years from first publication or the life of the author plus seven years, whichever proved the longer. Two provisions allowed for compulsory licenses as a limitation on copyright.