Is it legal to upload a paid research report or article into ChatGPT to summarize it for internal use?
This question touches on two blind spots:
- One, we’ve already paid for it,
- Two, its internal use.
Let’s say someone on your team has a paid subscription to an expensive industry report. They want to be efficient, so they upload it to an AI tool to get a quick summary to share with their team. You have already paid for this report. It’s just for internal use, so it seems pretty harmless?
Here’s the problem.
That paid report is governed by a license, essentially a contract, and that contract might not allow you to copy, process, or analyze that report with an AI system. And the moment you upload that file; you are making a new copy. So that act of copying, if it’s not allowed by your license, is a breach of contract and a potential copyright infringement.
You might hear: what about fair use in this case? Well, it could potentially be fair use. That is a legal argument, but that is a very high-risk gamble for a business. As we’ve discussed in a previous video, fair use is a fact specific and uncertain doctrine. It’s not a clear rule. It’s a four-part legal test that is decided on a case-by-case basis by courts.
The key takeaway here is that internal use does not mean it’s safe. Internal use is not legal defense. The license you bought almost never includes the right to use it in an AI tool unless you’ve actually negotiated that use.