Every AI copyright claim in the US, visualized

in May 2020 Media and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters is suing a small legal AI startup called Ross Intelligence, alleging it violated US copyright law by reproducing material from Westlaw, Thomson Reuters’ legal research firm. platform. As the pandemic raged, the lawsuit barely registered outside the small world of copyright-obsessed lunatics more than two years before the AI-generating boom, was the first strike a much bigger war between content publishers and AI companies, now unfolding in courts across the country. The result could make, break, or reshape the information ecosystem and the entire AI industry, and in doing so affect almost everyone on the Internet.

Dozens of other copyright lawsuits have been filed against AI companies over the past two years fast clip. Plaintiffs include individual authors such as Sarah Silverman and Ta Nehisi-Coates, visual artists, media companies such as The New York Times and giants of the music industry such as Universal Music Group. This variety of rights holders have used their work to train often very profitable and powerful artificial intelligence models, which is tantamount to theft. AI companies often defend themselves by relying on which is known as the “fair use” doctrinearguing that the creation of artificial intelligence tools should be considered a situation where it is legal to use copyrighted material without obtaining consent or paying compensation to the rights holders. (Widely accepted examples of fair use include parody, news reporting, and academic research.) This Almost every major AI company involved in the legal battle, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic and Nvidia.

WIRED is following each of these lawsuits closely, and we’ve created visualizations to help you track and contextualize which companies and rights holders are involved, where the cases are being filed, what they’re alleging, and everything else you need to know. :

That first case, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligenceis still winding its way through the court system. The trial, originally scheduled for earlier this year, has been delayed indefinitely, and while litigation costs have already put Ross out of business, it’s unclear when it will end and a closely watched lawsuit against Microsoft are currently pending periods of controversial findingsduring which both sides argue about what information they should convey.