It doesn't matter if it's a person, or a computer program, or not. This discussion is moot. Is there a substantial reproduction of the works in the output? If not, there's no copyright infringement here.
I don't believe it's copyright infringement either, but I don't believe it should be allowed either.
It used to be that when people bought a piece of land they owned that land from the center of the Earth to the end of the Universe. When planes were invented the laws on who owned the skies had to change or planes wouldn't work.
It's the same here, but in reverse. If LLMs aren't prohibited from learning without permission then people will be forced to hide their works.
Did the trainers illegally access and obtain copyrighted works which are ordinarily protected?
I see multiple questions raised by this suit. Were copyrighted works being illegally stored and distributed by certain sources? Of course they are. Were these illegal sources accessed by the trainers and used to obtain copyrighted works which are not otherwise available for no charge on the public Internet? Are substantial and reproducible copies of these copyrighted works retained within the bowels of the LLM neural nets? Is the LLM able to answer prompts in a way that it would never be able to do, had the copyrighted material not been ingested?
I see the lawsuit addressing several questions at once, and so even a resolution of this suit itself will leave questions unanswered and needing to be kicked upstairs to higher jurisdictions.
xdennis|2 years ago
It used to be that when people bought a piece of land they owned that land from the center of the Earth to the end of the Universe. When planes were invented the laws on who owned the skies had to change or planes wouldn't work.
It's the same here, but in reverse. If LLMs aren't prohibited from learning without permission then people will be forced to hide their works.
NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago
I see multiple questions raised by this suit. Were copyrighted works being illegally stored and distributed by certain sources? Of course they are. Were these illegal sources accessed by the trainers and used to obtain copyrighted works which are not otherwise available for no charge on the public Internet? Are substantial and reproducible copies of these copyrighted works retained within the bowels of the LLM neural nets? Is the LLM able to answer prompts in a way that it would never be able to do, had the copyrighted material not been ingested?
I see the lawsuit addressing several questions at once, and so even a resolution of this suit itself will leave questions unanswered and needing to be kicked upstairs to higher jurisdictions.