AI, Copyright & Content Creation: What a Recent Court Ruling Means for You

Update: June 26, 2025 — Another Win for AI Developers

Just days after the Anthropic ruling (see original post below), Meta scored a legal win of its own. A federal judge dismissed most claims brought by 13 authors, including Sarah Silverman, who alleged that Meta's LLaMA models infringed on their copyrights. The court found that the plaintiffs failed to show that Meta’s models produced outputs “substantially similar” to their original works—undermining a key requirement for copyright infringement.

Although Meta’s use of the books was deemed fair use, this finding was based on the plaintiffs’ failure to show meaningful market harm—not on a blanket endorsement of Meta’s training practices. Notably, one claim—that Meta may have unlawfully distributed copyrighted works via torrenting—was not dismissed and will proceed.

Together, these back-to-back rulings—for Anthropic and Meta—signal a growing judicial recognition that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use, especially when plaintiffs fail to present strong, specific evidence. But both judges emphasized that fair use is fact-dependent, and stronger claims in future lawsuits could change the outcome.

As U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria wrote:

“These plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”

Translation: the AI copyright wars are far from over—but for now, the courts are leaning toward developers.

AI, Copyright & Content Creation: What a Recent Court Ruling Means for You

A recent federal court ruling is reshaping the conversation around AI and copyrights, and it could significantly influence how businesses and agencies like Harry leverage AI in content creation.

In Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that using copyrighted books to train Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law. The case was brought by several authors who claimed their works were used without permission. While parts of their lawsuit will still proceed to trial (more on that below), this decision marks a pivotal moment in how AI training is viewed legally.

What This Means for Content Creation

The judge found that training an AI model is “exceedingly transformative”—comparable to how a human learns by reading books and then applying that knowledge in new ways. For those of us using tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Jasper, or others to assist with social copy, blog writing, creative development, or brainstorming, this ruling provides legal reassurance: AI-generated content that is original and not a copy of existing work is likely to be protected under fair use.

That said, not everything was given a legal green light. While the training process itself was cleared, the court took issue with Anthropic’s storage of over 7 million pirated books in a centralized library. That part of the case moves to trial this December.

As Barron’s recently put it, Alsup’s ruling gives AI companies a path to copyright law compliance when they are training language models on a large body of copyrighted books.

“So long as they buy the books, digitize them and destroy the physical copies, they can use that data to train their models. This doesn't absolve past behavior like Anthropic's book piracy, but it does provide a clear way forward.”

Bottom line? How AI models are trained and where their training data comes from still matters. A lot.

For clients and partners, it is important to ensure that the AI tools being used in your campaigns are sourced responsibly and built ethically. Our agency only works with reputable platforms that comply with legal standards and industry best practices for data use.

Why This Matters to You

Whether you're launching a product, sharing your thought leadership, or building an engaged online community, AI is likely part of your content creation toolkit. This ruling gives companies confidence to continue using AI tools—if they’re used responsibly and with transparency.

At Harry, we stay on top of evolving regulations and legal cases to make sure the content we produce on our clients’ behalf stays on the right side of both creativity and compliance.

If you have questions about how we use AI, please get in touch. We’re happy to talk it through.