Mustafa Suleyman, head of artificial intelligence at Microsoft, falsely claimed that content published on the open web would become “free property” for anyone to use.
When asked if AI companies were stealing intellectual property, he argued that online content has been considered fair use since the 1990s. However, this is legally incorrect as published works are automatically protected by copyright. Fair use is determined by a court, not a social contract.
Microsoft and OpenAI are facing lawsuits over using copyrighted content to train AI models. Suleyman suggested that websites using robots.txt files to prevent content from being raked could be a gray area, but not legally binding. Despite this, some AI companies, including OpenAI, ignore robots.txt files.
Source: The Verge
