California Assembly Bill 412
Myths v Facts
MYTH: This bill helps advance federal copyright law for emerging technologies.
FACT: AB 412 undermines and is preempted by federal copyright law and would be void upon enactment. The bill’s requirements would significantly disrupt the functioning of federal copyright law, particularly the fair use doctrine. As a result, it would face successful legal challenges for violating the Copyright Act and the Constitution and be deemed void.
MYTH: This bill will help courts determine how copyright applies to AI training.
FACT: This bill will do the opposite and disrupt the orderly enforcement of federal copyright law. Federal courts are already applying copyright laws to decide cases and define how, why, and when AI training qualifies as fair use. AB 412’s cumbersome regulation upsets the balance in copyright law, imposing new burdens on fair uses without any basis in federal law.
MYTH: This bill would make compliance easy and straightforward for tech companies.
FACT: Compliance with AB 412 is impossible. It includes a requirement for AI model developers to proactively search for and disclose works with registered copyrights in their training data. Since registration records on file with the Copyright Office are not machine-accessible or machine-readable, there is no way to reliably and efficiently identify copyrighted works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. Therefore, it would be impossible to automate searching these records at the scale required to support the analysis of massive AI training datasets. Even if the registrations were made machine-accessible, they wouldn’t provide enough information for the identification demanded by AB 412.
MYTH: This bill is needed to help copyright holders protect their works.
FACT: Federal rules of civil procedure adequately protect copyright holders and allow them the legal authority to pursue an infringement claim with ample opportunity to prove that defendants used their works. Ongoing litigation against AI developers has proven that the existing legal framework can effectively address copyright concerns without additional legislative intervention.
MYTH: This bill will benefit Californians by improving tech industry procedures.
FACT: The legislation would devastate California’s AI technology ecosystem by stifling competition, reducing innovation in AI development, and forcing AI developers and tech companies out of California. Startups would be particularly vulnerable since they have the most limited resources. This would create a barrier to entry for smaller companies and result in rising consumer costs due to a lack of competition in the field. Both results would be detrimental to California’s creative and technology industries and its overall economy. AI advancements would stall in California, ultimately hurting California jobs and businesses looking to compete with other states.
MYTH: This bill will provide more AI transparency for the public.
FACT: AB 412 doesn’t protect the public interest. The disclosures it requires are designed to serve one commercial sector at the expense of another, with no clear benefit for the public. Its approach deviates substantially from the constitutional purpose of copyright law, which is fundamentally about promoting scientific and creative progress for all.
MYTH: This bill would only affect “Big Tech” companies developing commercial AI.
FACT: This bill has a much larger chilling effect beyond large-scale commercial uses. It applies to all commercial developers in California, regardless of size, and anyone, regardless of commerciality, who “makes a GenAI model available to Californians for use.” That means any scholarly developer whose model is available to Californians would be covered. Many foundational open-source models are developed or improved by commercial entities and then used by non-commercial and research users. This bill, if enacted, will have immediate harmful effects far beyond “Big Tech,” such as disrupting academic research and non-commercial technological innovation for users like researchers, educational institutions, and consumers.
MYTH: Amendments to AB 412 will help prevent future copyright lawsuits.
FACT: This bill will open the floodgates for copyright trolling and shakedown lawsuits. All major AI models have been trained in part on crawls of the open web. Therefore, anyone who has ever posted anything online could potentially bring a claim or lawsuit under this bill. It is a recipe for bad-faith legal actions and trolls to take advantage of, and would have detrimental effects. Amending the bill to apply only to registered works doesn’t help. Hundreds of thousands of works are registered every year, and copyright registration costs less than $100 and can be done online. Thus, the pool of potential trolls created by the bill is enormous.
MYTH: This bill is good for small businesses working on AI Models.
FACT: The bill is especially bad for small AI developers. Requiring them to identify the sourcing of training data is not only onerous, but also would reveal small developers’ trade secrets, removing any competitive advantage over big firms. AB 412 will make it impossible for small firms to compete in the industry.