Ray Seilie was recently quoted in Bloomberg Law’s article, “Reddit Gives Content Hosts an Upper Hand Against AI Scraping (1),” as he examined the legal implications of Reddit’s successful defeat of Perplexity AI Inc. and SerpApi LLC’s dismissal bid in the case Reddit Inc. v. SerpApi LLC.
In the aforementioned case, the court dismissed the bid in part due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s broad language, specifically the provision stating that circumventing a website’s technological protections allows “any person injured” to sue over a violation. Notably, this decision only extends to companies that have bypassed technical barriers, as Reddit accused Perplexity of circumventing its security measures to access valuable copyrighted material. However, this decision still fails to answer whether AI companies are permitted to use copyrighted material to train or develop their systems under “fair use.”
“These anti-circumvention laws are a plausible way to stop the gathering of what’s clearly copyrightable material,” Ray first explains to Bloomberg Law, going on to share, “Strategically, what these companies are realizing is that the fair use issue is actually a really difficult battle.”
Ray notes that there is uncertainty in the current legal landscape regarding fair use, with dozens of cases pending. He illustrates, though, that one judge already found AI training to be highly transformative, and therefore fair use, despite concern about using works gathered from pirated libraries.
He continues on to note that while Reddit successfully used DMCA in this instance, a long-term decision is still needed. He stresses to Bloomberg Law that there is not a “long-term, durable decision” on what qualifies as fair use when AI companies use copyrighted materials to train their systems. “It could result in short-term victories,” Ray emphasizes. “But ultimately, we’re going to need to face the AI reality head-on at some point,” he concludes.
