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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> therefore so should software, is a non sequitur.

it's not. Why isn't photoshop being sued as copyright infringement? People can reproduce infringing works in it easily enough.

How is pressing buttons in photoshop different to pressing buttons in chatGPT?

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> How is pressing buttons in photoshop different to pressing buttons in chatGPT?

It's not! That's the entire point. The liability is with the people, not the software. The software isn't being sued! You can't even do that, because the software isn't people. Software isn't humans. The people developing ChatGPT incorporated other people's copyrighted works into their product, and they're the ones being sued.

Reproductive tools (like photoshop or photocopiers) require a human in the loop and a previous instance of the copyrighted material to reproduce copyrighted content. They don’t ship with copyrighted content inside of them. ChatGPT contains a compressed representation of all NYTimes articles and will freely reproduce them when queried. That’s the key difference. Similarly it would not be an issue to sell a database tool that could store news articles but it would be an issue to sell one pre-loaded with all NYTimes articles ever written.

It is exactly the same. You can absoutely be sued for copyright infringement in your example.

https://www.adobe.com/legal/dmca.html

Just because you produce an infringing work doesn't mean it will be discovered and then a legal case made.

Correct. But the person using the software is charged. Not the software itself. The NYT is trying to push liability onto the software (ChatGPT-cannot be sued) instead of the software’s users (you and me-can be sued). I feel this is the correct interpretation.

No. They are suing the people who made the software. They are not suing the software. You can't sue software. Software isn't a person.

This is just pedantry.

Would NYT be suing Adobe (the people who made the software), if one of their users utilized Photoshop to produce an image that violates copyright? I don’t think so.

No. They would sue Adobe if Adobe put images that violate copyright into Photoshop and let users insert them from a dropdown menu. Your comparison is incorrect and bad.

The comment I replied to was saying “they are suing the people who made the software,” nothing about “putting images” or publishing them or anything like that.

My comparison addresses exactly that, as Adobe is the company that made the software (in this specific example, Photoshop).

You cannot retroactively switch up your argument to something entirely different and then claim that my comparison was incorrect and bad.

I've replied consistently to everyone in this thread, to the point of monotony. I haven't switched anything. I've replied so consistently and repetitively, with the same statements, that it's actually grating. This is the second time someone has tried the "you switched what you've said" argument tactic, even though it's very clear the only thing I've talked about is liability of the creators of the software, not the software itself. You have either not fully read my comment that you are replying to, or are misunderstanding it thoroughly enough in order to pretend that I've said the opposite of what I've said.

I don't owe you any further replies, but I wanted to make this clear to anyone else skimming the thread.

But photoshop doesn’t, for example, come with unlicensed National Geographic photos that it gives you as a starting point for you to create an infringing work.

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