Patreon, GEMA, and the Korean Cartoonists — Everyone Is Building a Legal Argument Against AI at Once

Jack Conte built Patreon so musicians could survive the internet. Now he's running a platform with three million monthly active users, and last week he used it to take a formal position on the question that's defining AI's legal future: Patreon has rejected "fair use" as a valid justification for training AI on creator content, and is calling for direct compensation. That isn't a lawsuit. It's a policy stance from a major creator infrastructure company — which means it will show up in contracts, in terms of service negotiations, and eventually in legislation. The move landed quietly relative to its significance.

The legal geography of this fight is shifting fast, and the shifts are happening simultaneously on multiple fronts. A German court ruled that non-commercial AI training data qualifies as a scientific research exception to copyright infringement, carving out a narrow but real exemption. Days earlier, a European court sided with GEMA — Germany's music licensing body — over OpenAI, finding that training on copyrighted works without permission is infringement. In Seoul, the Korean Cartoonist Association held its first Webtoon Forum of the year, organized specifically around generative AI's impact on creative workflows and legal rights. These events aren't connected by any single case or ruling. They're connected by the same underlying pressure: the people whose work trained these models are done waiting for a theory of fair use to protect them.

In the United States, the Trump administration's AI legislative framework runs in the opposite direction. Federal preemption to block state-level AI laws, copyright disputes routed through existing courts rather than any new mechanism, no new safety mandates. One post summarizing the framework called it "a bet that the bigger risk is losing the AI race" — which is an honest description, but also a choice to let the courts absorb an enormous amount of institutional pressure rather than build any new infrastructure for it. Meanwhile, publishers and record labels have pivoted their legal strategy to target the pirate sites that allegedly supplied AI companies with the bulk of their training data. It's an indirect attack, but a shrewd one: if you can establish that the training pipeline ran through stolen content, you sidestep the fair use debate entirely.

On X, the ambient frustration has a sharpness that institutional statements don't capture. "AI is the largest copyright infringement in the history of the world," one account wrote, invoking Bruce Lee and Jack Dempsey to make a point about homage and attribution — that the entire tradition of influence and learning in human creative work comes with acknowledgment, and AI offers none. A YouTube commenter, watching Disney go after ByteDance over Seedance 2.0's Spider-Man and Star Wars generations, put it more bluntly: "Ah so it's ok when it's done to small artists but not when it's a multi-million dollar company." That double standard — big IP enforced, small IP ignored — is becoming the emotional core of creator-side arguments, and it's more durable than any legal theory.

The Thaler v. Perlmutter ruling from the D.C. Circuit in 2025 — that purely AI-generated works are ineligible for copyright protection due to lack of human authorship — keeps resurfacing in these conversations as an underappreciated constraint. If AI outputs can't be copyrighted, the companies building on those outputs have a liability problem that compounds over time. The legal architecture being built right now, in courts from Munich to Seoul to Washington, is less about resolving any single dispute than about establishing which rules will govern the next decade of creative production. Patreon's stance, GEMA's ruling, and the Webtoon Forum's existence all point the same direction: creators are done arguing about whether the law should protect them and have started building the institutions that will force it to.