Google Is Courting Hollywood Studios for Training Licenses It Does Not Legally Need

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Google has reportedly approached several major Hollywood studios seeking licensing agreements to train its models on copyrighted material in exchange for payment. The timing is the interesting part: it lands the same week the Justice Department filed a brief arguing that training on copyrighted text is already fair use. Paying for what your own government just argued is free suggests the labs value negotiated access to high-quality video corpora, and studio goodwill, more than they trust the legal outcome.