DPG Media v. HowardsHome

AI training and copyright

Can AI be trained on protected works?

Closer to freely allowed

A robots.txt that blocks named AI bots was not shown to be a general machine-readable opt-out

Holding

Publishers sued a media-monitoring service that used their headlines, snippets and thumbnails. The court dismissed all claims: the limited use fell within the quotation and press review exception, and the publishers had not shown that their robots.txt, which excluded specific AI bots, was an express machine-readable reservation against text and data mining in general.

An early test of what a valid opt-out looks like under the EU data mining exception.

Sources

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