SocietyAI glossary
Fair use
A rule of US copyright law that allows the use of a protected work without permission in certain cases: quotation, criticism, parody, research. AI companies invoke it to defend training their models on protected texts and images, and courts decide on a case-by-case basis.
In other words
Like the right to quote in schools: copying a paragraph to analyse it is permitted, but photocopying the entire book is not.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- Twenty years on, the same author is still taking on Google over the same books.
In mid-July 2026, Hachette, Elsevier, Cengage and the writer Scott Turow sued Google in a New York court, accusing the group of having trained Gemini on millions of copyrighted works. Turow had already led the battle against Google Books twenty years ago, and had lost it. Here's why the legal question is different this time.
- Journalism takes AI head-on: 3,400 jobs lost in 2025, 500 in the first quarter of 2026
In 2025, more than 3,400 journalism jobs disappeared in the US and UK. 2026 will probably beat that record. Newsrooms are making redundancies, AIs are summarising in their place, and Google AI Overviews is siphoning traffic away from media outlets. Alyriaz is itself a media outlet built on AI. Here is the honest take on what is really changing, from our point of view.