On Feb. 11, 2025, a federal judge granted summary judgment to a copyright holder, determining that a software company’s use of copyrighted content to train an AI legal research tool constituted direct copyright infringement and rejecting the AI tool company’s fair-use defense. Judge Bibas’s opinion departed from the seminal “intermediate copying” cases in Google and Sega and applied the Supreme Court’s “transformative use” analysis from Warhol.
Although we expect the defendant software company to appeal the grant of summary judgment, this opinion is one of the first to evaluate the use of copyrighted content to train and build AI tools.