NeutralOrganization

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Digital Rights Organization

The 35-year-old digital-rights group has argued in courts and to the Copyright Office that AI training is fair use — warning that stretching copyright to kill AI tools would hurt creators and researchers more than it helps them.

Organization

Wikipedia eff.org

In their words

Done right, copyright law is supposed to encourage new creativity. Stretching it to outlaw tools like AI image generators — or to effectively put them in the exclusive hands of powerful economic actors who already use that economic muscle to squeeze creators — would have the opposite effect.

— Kit Walsh — EFF Deeplinks, 2023

Biography

Founded in 1990, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world — a veteran of the crypto wars, the DMCA fights, and every major internet copyright battle since. When generative AI ignited a wave of infringement suits, the EFF took a position that startled some allies: the scraping and training at the heart of the technology is, in its view, lawful fair use.

Copyright is the wrong weapon

In an April 2023 essay, “How We Think About Copyright and AI Art,” senior attorney Kit Walsh argued that analyzing images to build a model is an analytical use akin to search-engine indexing — “not likely to violate copyright law” — and that outlawing generators would concentrate them in the hands of the most powerful companies. The EFF filed comments with the US Copyright Office in 2023 and briefs in cases like Kadrey v. Meta, consistently warning that expanding copyright to stop AI training would boomerang on artists, fans, researchers, and archivists.

When the Copyright Office’s 2025 draft report leaned against fair use for AI training, the EFF called it an error; when Judge Alsup ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic that training on books is transformative fair use, the EFF said the court got it right. The group is no AI cheerleader elsewhere — it fights algorithmic surveillance, police face recognition, and automated decision-making — but on the creative-industries question it holds that the harms artists fear are labor-market problems that copyright law cannot fix, only monopolize.