Reproduction Right

Copyright owners control copying. Making a duplicate—physical or digital—generally requires permission unless a limitation like fair use applies.

17 U.S.C. § 106(1) grants the copyright owner the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords. Temporary or intermediate copies may still implicate this right.

Plaintiffs argue that ingesting works into training datasets creates copies that violate the reproduction right, even if the final model is not a literal duplicate.