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Comment by delusional | Hacker News Reader

I'm not ignoring it. I'm saying that the axis you're contemplating this problem on isn't correct. It's not about if you can get "any sequence of tokens" or the edit distance between those tokens and the actual tokens of the copyrighted work. The law is not (and should not be) an algorithm with a definite mathematical answer at some fixed point in a continuum.

PI is not copyrighted, because that would be silly, but if you were to find the exact bytes in there to reproduce the next Marvel movie and you started sharing that offset, that would probably be copyright infringement. The fact that neither of those numbers were part of the original work, or copyrightable in isolation, or that "technically everything is present in pi", is immaterial. It's obvious to any non-pedantic human being that you're infringing on the creative work.

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You're still missing the key point. Say that website exists, if someone were to find the exact point in Pi that is the next marvel movie and started sharing the location, is the copyright violation committed by the creator of the Pi website or by the person who found and is sharing the location?

If I give you a prompt that's just the contents of a NYT article and me telling ChatGPT to say it back to me, is ChatGPT committing the copyright violation by producing the article or am I by creating and sharing the prompt?

I will say it again. I am not missing the point, I am refusing the point. The point you are bringing across is not a useful point in matters of law.

There is no reasonable way for us to deliberate on your made up scenarios, because in matters of law the details matter. The website hosting pi could very well be taking part in the copyright infringement, it could also very well not. Our way of weighing those details is the process of the law.

You place the question of PI in a vacuum, asking me if it should be illegal "in principle", but that's not law. The intent, appearance, skill of council, even the judge and jury, will matter if a case had to come up. You cannot separate the idealized question from the messy details of the fleshy humans.

Yes, it's almost like it's a complicated legal question and the content of the required prompt to produce a copyright-infringing response would be something that would interest the judge and jury.

You're saying "it's complicated and lots of factors would come into play", which is the same thing I'm saying. The fact that it spits out copyright-violating text does not necessarily mean ChatGPT is the one at fault, it's messy.

>Yes, it's almost like it's a complicated legal question and the content of the required prompt to produce a copyright-infringing response would be something that would interest the judge and jury.

In what way? You don't seem to know what is decided by a jury or what is decided by a judge. Specifically, what do you think the prompt evidences that it is relevant?

> The fact that it spits out copyright-violating text does not necessarily mean ChatGPT is the one at fault, it's messy.

Actually, that's exactly what it means. There is no defense to copyright infringement of the nature you are discussing. OpenAi is responsible for what it ingests, and the fact that use of its tool can result in these outcomes is solely the responsibility of OpenAI and your misunderstandings otherwise are dense and apparently impenetrable.

How is that person missing the point? You are making a legal argument and apparently without any consideration for the actual law...

They're missing my point because I'm not saying it is or isn't, I'm saying that it's messy and things like the required prompt may sway the judge and/or jury one way or the other. If you provide ChatGPT an entire copyrighted text in the prompt and then go "ah-ha, the response violated my copyright", a judge and/or jury probably won't be very impressed with you. If instead you just ask ChatGPT "please produce chapter 1 of my latest book" and it does, then ChatGPT is not looking so great.

Judge or jury one way or the other on what? You literally have no idea what you are talking about, have any idea how a lawsuit works, and apparently what is decided by a judge vs what is decided by a jury, and you are constantly espousing on legal issues as if it is contributing to anything but furthering other people's ignorance when they don't know better to dismiss your posts.

Your hypothetical is asinine and completely removed from what is at issue in this lawsuit.

And of course now, reading other posters responding to you in this thread, I'm not the only one pointing out how you are only contributing your own misunderstandings.

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