Fair Use Fisticuffs

There’s been a bit of legal wrangling across the pond lately, and it’s all rather illuminating for those of us watching the AI space – particularly if you’re in property, proptech, or just generally interested in how the robots are learning from us (and, apparently, our libraries).

The battleground? Copyright. The charge from creators is simple: “I’ve spent years creating this stuff, and now your AI has hoovered it up, learned from it, and can spit out something uncannily similar – sometimes at will.” The defence, from the likes of Anthropic (Claude’s parents) and Meta (Llama’s stable), is equally straightforward: “It’s fair use, guv. We’re just doing what humans have always done – read, learn and then create something new with a twist.”

So, off to court they went. The result? Both Anthropic and Meta have emerged victorious, with US judges ruling that what these large language models are doing is, in essence, no different to the way a human might absorb a library’s worth of novels, then write their own. The clincher, apparently, was that when prompted, the AIs couldn’t reproduce the original works verbatim – so, not copyright theft, but rather a digital homage.

But, as ever, there’s a twist. Turns out, some of the material fed into these models came from a library that had itself been, shall we say, less than scrupulous in its acquisition of content. So, while the courts have said “fair use” on the output, there’s still a question mark over the legitimacy of some of the input. The upshot? The AI giants are now scurrying to replace any “piratey” content with paid-for or legitimately free versions.

And it’s not just words, either. I drove past one of those Apple cars the other day – you know, the ones bristling with cameras, mapping every street for the next generation of digital maps. It’s the same principle: collect as much data as possible, from as many sources as you can, and feed it into the machine.

For estate agents and property portals, there’s a lesson here. The value isn’t just in the data itself – it’s in how you acquire it, how you use it and, crucially, whether you’ve got the right to use it at all. As AI becomes ever more central to how we search for, market, and manage property, making sure your data is above board isn’t just a legal nicety – it’s a business imperative. Otherwise, you might find yourself on the wrong side of the next fair use fisticuffs.