Fair use

Fair use is a piece of US copyright law that permits using protected material without asking, in limited circumstances. Courts weigh several factors, and the one that keeps showing up in AI cases is whether the new use is transformative: does it do something genuinely different from the original, or does it just substitute for it? AI companies argue that training a model on text, images or music is transformative, because the model learns patterns rather than storing copies.

Two things make this a shaky shield. First, if the output competes commercially with the material it learned from, the transformative argument weakens considerably. Second, fair use is American. Europe has its own rules, and a German court ruling against an AI music generator in 2026 stated plainly that the US doctrine does not apply there. So a company can be on solid ground in one country and liable in another for the same model.