I know this won't happen, of course, I am moreso hoping for laws to be updated to avoid similar kerfuffles in the future, as well as massive fines to act as a deterrent, but I don't dare to hope too much.
Anyways, the laws are mature enough for everyone to work this out in court. Maybe it comes out that they have a legitimate concern, but the way they presented their evidence so far in public has seriously been lacking.
Rather, the actual culprit is almost certainly overfitting. The articles in question were pasted many times on different websites, showing up in the training data repeatedly. Enough of this leads to memorization.
> have all of OpenAI's data for free
Doesn't really fit. Perhaps OpenAI might successfully prevent us from accessing it, but it wouldn't be "theirs" and we couldn't "have" it.
I'm not sure what kind of conversations we will be having instead, but I expect they'll be more productive than worrying about ownership of something you can't touch.
Is that understanding correct?
I haven't exactly drafted this alternative set of laws, but I expect it would look something like this:
If the data is derived from sources that were made available to the public with the consent of its referents (and subject to whatever other regulation), then walling it off would be illegal. On the other hand, other regulation regarding users' behavior world be illegal to share without the users consent and might even be illegal to retain without their consent.
If you want to profit from something derived from public data while keeping it private, perhaps that's ok but you have to register its existence and pay taxes on it as a data asset, much like we pay taxes on land. That way we can wield the tax code to encourage companies that operate in the clear. This category would probably resemble patent law quite a bit, except ownership doesn't come by default, you have to buy your property rights from the public (since by owning that thing, you're depriving the masses of access to it, and since the notion that it is a peg that fits in a property shaped hole is a fiction that requires some work on our part to maintain).