Publishing a derivative work of something you scraped is not permitted. The question is whether LLMs are derivative works, which has not been settled in courts yet.
For eg stable diffusion I actually dove a bit deeper on this:
The LAION dataset is -in itself- almost indisputably legal: It contains URLs of images, and tags describing those images[1]. To be sure: _It does not contain actual images_. People have made this mistake before, and LAION quite correctly reply that they don't have them. [2]
Stable diffusion's models are much smaller [3] than the LAION dataset which they use as their source. Again, the models do not contain images.
This is pretty suggestive that SD models should not be considered derivative works. Of course sometimes funny things happen in court, so we can't be sure until a court actually decides.
I don't currently run my own GPT or LLAMA, but those should have similar properties. (in fact, OpenAI appears to claim so.)
[1] https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/ (if you look for the files in any of the variations, you'll see it's in the order of terrabytes)
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkapb7/a-photographer-tried-...
[3] https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-... : see under "files and versions", it's sd_xl_base_1.0.safetensors. File size is 6.9 GB
In total, the fields in the LAION dataset are:
image_path
caption
NSFW
similarity
LICENSE
url
key
status
error_message
width
height
original width
original height
exif
md5
Note that LAION is a metadata dataset, it's not an image generation model itself. (But it has been used to train one)
If you take a PNG of Mickey Mouse, and create a similar vector graphic that is a fraction of the size, that would still be derivative.
They are settled by specialist technical judges with advice of dozens of specialists explaining the tech in detail.
Check out Google vs Oracle the lawsuit about whether an API is copyrightable for some examples of how the rulings are very much based on deep understanding.
The only downside is the process is slow and needs both a plaintiff and defendant willing to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to settle the case in court. It also takes many months of time.
Alternatively they could mean "judges should stay away from X" but that is nonsensical given the courts being arbitrage...
or are you suggesting abolishing copyright? because I'm all for it
Or, if I came across a copy of Unreal Engine, what would stop me from using it and not paying Epic a dime?
2. Unreal lawyers costing you more in legal fees than you can afford