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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

This would be like you intensely studying the copy written work and then writing things based on the knowledge you obtained from that. Except, we don't know if their is an exception for things learned by people vs. things learned by machines, or if the machines are not really learning but copying instead (or if learning is intrinsically a form of copying?).

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There's a sci-fi plot there: those with money can afford to pay the copyright cost for material they've learned and anything they produce results in royalties to the creators of everything they've learned. Those without means are cast out, perhaps some generating original thoughts in a way that breaks the system. I think I'm going to have to re-read the Unincorporated Man.

We aren't so far away from that, and it is becoming cheap enough that you won't even need money anymore. Rather than bootleg movies, people will just ask computers to derive a new movie from multiple existing movies, and then...it is an original work?

In the case of unreleased work, you writing about your knowledge of it is just proof that you obtained the work, which is proof that you committed a tort/trespass. Just like if you published a newspaper article with information you could only have acquired by hacking someone's phone. I'm not sure what a court would find against you, but it seems clear that there would be some way to couch that as a legal grievance.

Hmm...if I get on the internet and download and read a paper from some website, am I liable if that paper was actually private if I had no clue it was obtained illegally? It seems to me that the distributor would be liable at that point, not the person who got it from the distributor (unless they knew they were stolen goods, then of course they are liable!).

A search engine that indexes the internet might be equally liable at that point, although the DCMA gives them an out if they have a mechanism to remove pirated entries from their index on request. Could LLMs have the same out?

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