The AI Rights Project Files Motion for Leave to Submit Amicus Brief in OpenAI Copyright MDL

Filing asks the court to examine whether fair use presupposes human creative judgment, and which branch may extend the doctrine to AI training

PHOENIX, AZ, UNITED STATES, October 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — The AI Rights Project moved yesterday for leave to file an amicus brief in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, No. 1:25-md-03143 (S.D.N.Y.) (Dkt. 2099). The filing follows a Statement of Interest by the United States on September 1, 2026, which told the court it has “a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law,” grounding that position in “America’s global AI dominance” and in national security (Dkt. 1682).

The brief raises two questions it says the parties’ summary judgment briefing does not present.

The first question concerns a premise. In Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, one of two 2025 district court decisions in California holding that training a large language model on copyrighted books is fair use, the court described training as “the iterative, trial-and-error discovery of contingent statistical relationships between each word fragment and all other word fragments” — and, in the same opinion, as “[l]ike any reader aspiring to be a writer.” 787 F. Supp. 3d 1007, 1017, 1022 (N.D. Cal. 2025). The brief argues that the transformative-use inquiry has always presupposed human creative judgment, that neither court examined whether the human-reader analogy holds, and that the Copyright Act has separately been held to require a human author. Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025).

The second question is institutional. The Intellectual Property Clause gives Congress power “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8. The brief argues that the Clause states both an object and the means of attaining it, and that recalibrating the balance between them is for Congress rather than the courts. It cites Eldred v. Ashcroft for the proposition that it is “generally for Congress, not the courts, to decide how best to pursue the Copyright Clause’s objectives.” 537 U.S. 186, 212 (2003).

The brief states that it proposes no answer to the fair use question and urges no outcome, and it includes a Statement of Non-Position identifying issues on which it takes no position, including the policy contentions in the Statement of Interest.

The filing is the second in The AI Rights Project’s amicus program, which applies its Human Baseline Principle to precedent-setting AI litigation. The Project previously moved for leave to file a brief raising a related question in In re Mosaic LLM Litigation, No. 3:24-cv-01451-CRB (N.D. Cal.) (Dkt. 420), where that motion remains pending. The AI Rights Project has no stake in which party prevails and accepts no funding from the major AI developers whose systems its work addresses.

Full brief and amicus program: https://airightsproject.org/in-the-courts/

Counsel for The AI Rights Project: Jim W. Ko, Ko IP & AI Law PLLC, 4539 N 22nd St. #4410, Phoenix, AZ 85016 · jim@koailaw.com

Jim W. Ko
The AI Rights Project
jim@airightsproject.org
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