What happened
YouTubers initiated legal action against Snap, alleging copyright infringement. The claim asserts Snap utilised AI datasets, originally designated for research and academic purposes, to train its commercial AI models. This action challenges the established understanding of permissible data usage for AI model development, potentially altering the conditions under which such datasets can be integrated into commercial applications.
Why it matters
This development introduces an increased legal and compliance exposure for organisations utilising publicly available or licensed datasets for AI model training. Legal and AI development teams now bear a heightened burden to verify the explicit licensing terms and permissible use cases of all training data. It weakens the implicit control that datasets designated for 'research and academic use' would not be commercially exploited without further explicit consent or licensing.
