fair use

fair use (countable and uncountable, plural fair uses)

1. (copyright law) A doctrine in intellectual property law that permits one party to make use of another party's protected intellectual property (such as a copyright or trademark) under narrowly defined circumstances.

   Coordinate term: fair dealing (counterpart in various Commonwealth countries; stricter but akin)

   1. Use of another party's intellectual property that is protected by this doctrine.
      • 2023 August 19, Alex Reisner, “Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI”, in The Atlantic‎^[1]:

        Many commentators have argued that training AI with copyrighted material constitutes “fair use”

      • 2025 June 25, Lee Chong Ming, “Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said”, in Business Insider‎^[2]:

        Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use, a legal doctrine that allows certain uses of copyrighted works without the copyright owner's permission.