The claim that's being allowed to proceed is under 17 USC 1202, which is about stripping metadata like the title and author. Not exactly "core copyright violation". Am I missing something?
I.e., it's some legalese trick, but "everyone knows" what's really at stake.
Ultimately, this is probably going to require congress to create new laws to codify this.
If so, you could argue that your local library returns perfect copies of copyrighted works too. IMO it's somehow different from a business turning the results of their scraping into a profit machinery.
The internet archive also scrapes the web for content, does not pay authors, the difference being that it spits out literal copies of the content it scraped, whereas an LLM fundamentally attempts to derive a new thing from the knowledge it obtains.
I just can't figure out how to plug this into copyright law. It feels like a new thing.
> does not pay authors
Check.
> it spits out literal copies of the content it scraped
Check.
> attempts to derive a new thing from the knowledge it obtains.
Check.
* Is interactive: Check.
* Can output text that sounds syntactically and grammatically correct, but a human can instantly say "that doesn't look right": Check.
* Changing one word in a sentence affects words in a completely different sentence, because that changed the context: Check.
"Give and take", "equal exchange", however people want to put it. I don't mind if someone uses publicly-accessible content and ignores its copyright to make another thing, as long as their result is publicly-accessible and they're prepared to have their copyright ignored in return. If you not only use the result of someone else, but also their process, then be prepared to have your process publicly-accessible too, with its copyright ignored. And so on.
That's why I don't mind "unofficial" translations or subtitles (both copyright violations as soon as they are distributed) appearing on multiple sites. That's why I respect open-source licenses of projects that respect them. That's why I pay for some open-source software even if I don't have to. That's why I give credit to artists even when I use an image that I didn't make myself as profile picture (either from the internet or because I paid for it).
That's also why I don't mind anyone ignoring my copyright as long as it's on "equal" terms ("if you vendor my code and pass it off as yours, that's tacit approval for someone else doing the same thing to you" kind of thing ("someone else" because, at least for code, it won't be me)).
I only gave very specific examples, but I hope I was able to explain what I mean.
The thing that I don't like, is the highly asymmetrical situation we're in with generative AI: because the result (the trained model) is not publicly accessible like a significant part of the content it was trained on; they only release a very limited interface to it.
Does intent matter for the purposes of interpreting the laws here? I'm not criticizing your point, I'm genuinely curious if that matters (outside the context of fair use). I can certainly think of valid use cases that would not be considered fair use.
> The thing that I don't like, is the highly asymmetrical situation we're in with generative AI: because the result (the trained model) is not publicly accessible like a significant part of the content it was trained on; they only release a very limited interface to it.
I'm not sure that I agree with this one, given that most serious LLMs are free or very low cost to use, and in llama and phi-3's case pretty much just given away. Not a small gesture given the substantial expenses required to provide free access to some of these models.
The legal argument is that copying or creating what would otherwise be derivative works solely within a human brain is exempt because the human brain is not a medium wherein a configuration of information constitutes either a copy or a new work until it is set in another medium or performed publicly, whereas the storage of an artificial computer is absolutely such a medium (both of which are well-established law), so that the “learning” metaphor is not legally valid even if it is arguably a decent metaphor for some other purpose, furthermore, learning and then creating something new is often illegal, if the “something new” has sufficient proximity to the source material (that's the prohibition on unlicensed derivative works), and GenAI systems often do that and are (so the argument goes) sufficiently frequently used, and known to the service and model providers to be used. Intentionally to do that that, even were the training itself not a violation, the standards for contributory infringement are met in the provision of the certain models and/or services.
If, during the trial, the judge thinks that OpenAI is going to be found to be in violation, he can order all of OpenAIs computer equipment be impounded. If OpenAI is found to be in violation, he can then order permanent destruction of the models and OpenAI would have to start over from scratch in a manner that doesn't violate the law.
Whether you call that "core" or not, OpenAI cannot afford to lose these parts that are left of this lawsuit.
Arrrrr matey, this is going to be fun.
GitHub's ignored me so far, and Stack Exchange explicitly said no (then I sent them an even broader legal request under GDPR)
And what would connect those two things together?
Also was this code open source? Your stack exchange contributions were open source, so they don't need any ToS-based permission in the first place. They have access under CC BY-SA.
It's not always clear that Stack Exchange always followed the CC license, and if they violated it once, it was terminated. The checkbox you have to click now to access the data dumps might be a violation. The data dumps don't come with copies of the licenses, so that's a violation.
That is exactly why I suggested companies train some models on public domain and licensed data. That risk disappears or is very minimal. They could also be used for code and synthetic data generation without legal issues on the outputs.
We must start with moral and legal behavior. Within that, we look at what opportunities we have. Then, we pick the best ones. Those we can’t have are a side effect of the tradeoffs we’ve made (or tolerated) in our system.
He spends his time amassing power and is well positioned to plow over a speed bump like that.
It seems to me that it shouldn't really affect model quality all that much, is it?
Also, in the amended complaint:
> not to notify ChatGPT users when the responses they received were protected by journalists’ copyrights
Wasn't it already quite clear that as long as the articles weren't replicated, it wasn't protected? Or is that still being fought in this case?
In the decision:
> I agree with Defendants. Plai ntiffs allege that ChatGPT has been trained on "a scrape of most of the internet, " Compl. , 29, which includes massive amounts of information from innumerable sources on almost any given subject. Plaintiffs have nowhere alleged that the information in their articles is copyrighted, nor could they do so . When a user inputs a question into ChatGPT, ChatGPT synthesizes the relevant information in its repository into an answer. Given the quantity of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT would output plagiarized content from one of Plaintiffs' articles seems remote. And while Plaintiffs provide third-party statistics indicating that an earlier version of ChatGPT generated responses containing signifi cant amounts of pl agiarized content, Compl. ~ 5, Plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged that there is a " substantial risk" that the current version of ChatGPT will generate a response plagiarizing one of Plaintiffs' articles.
Have you read 1202? It's all about hiding your infringement.