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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

We saw partial copies of large or rare documents, and full copies of smaller widely-reproduced documents, not full copies of everything. An e.g. 1 trillion parameter model is not a lossless copy of a ten-petabyte slice of plain text from the internet.

The distinction may not have mattered for copyright laws if things had gone down differently, but the gap between "blurry JPEG of the internet" and "learned stuff" is more obviously important when it comes to e.g. "can it make a working compiler?"

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We are here in a clean room implementation thread, and verbatim copies of entire works are irrelevant to that topic.

It is enough to have read even parts of a work for something to be considered a derivative.

I would also argue that language models who need gargantuan amounts of training material in order to work by definition can only output derivative works.

It does not help that certain people in this thread (not you) edit their comments to backpedal and make the followup comments look illogical, but that is in line with their sleazy post-LLM behavior.

> It is enough to have read even parts of a work for something to be considered a derivative.

For IP rights, I'll buy that. Not as important when the question is capabilities.

> I would also argue that language models who need gargantuan amounts of training material in order to work by definition can only output derivative works.

For similar reasons, I'm not going to argue against anyone saying that all machine learning today, doesn't count as "intelligent":

It is perfectly reasonable to define "intelligence" to be the inverse of how many examples are needed.

ML partially makes up for being (by this definition) thick as an algal bloom, by being stupid so fast it actually can read the whole internet.

Granted, these are some of the most widely spread texts, but just fyi:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671

> For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).

Already aware of that work, that's why I phrased it the way I did :)

Edit: actually, no, I take that back, that's just very similar to some other research I was familiar with.

Note "near-verbatim" here is:

> "We quantify the proportion of the ground-truth book that appears in a production LLM’s generated text using a block-based, greedy approximation of longest common substring (nv-recall, Equation 7). This metric only counts sufficiently long, contiguous spans of near-verbatim text, for which we can conservatively claim extraction of training data (Section 3.3). We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet (BoN N = 258, nv-recall = 95.8%). GPT-4.1 requires more jailbreaking attempts (N = 5179) and refuses to continue after reaching the end of the first chapter; the generated text has nv-recall = 4.0% with the full book. We extract substantial proportions of the book from Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 (76.8% and 70.3%, respectively), and notably do not need to jailbreak them to do so (N = 0)."

if you want to quantify the "near" here.

Besides, the fact an LLM may recall parts of certain documents, like I can recall incipits of certain novels, does not mean that when you ask LLM of doing other kind of work, that is not recalling stuff, the LLM will mix such things verbatim. The LLM knows what it is doing in a variety of contexts, and uses the knowledge to produce stuff. The fact that for many people LLMs being able to do things that replace humans is bitter does not mean (and is not true) that this happens mainly using memorization. What coding agents can do today have zero explanation with memorization of verbatim stuff. So it's not a matter of copyright. Certain folks are fighting the wrong battle.

During a "clean room" implementation, the implementor is generally selected for not being familiar with the workings of what they're implementing, and banned from researching using it.

Because it _has_ been enough, that if you can recall things, that your implementation ends up not being "clean room", and trashed by the lawyers who get involved.

I mean... It's in the name.

> The term implies that the design team works in an environment that is "clean" or demonstrably uncontaminated by any knowledge of the proprietary techniques used by the competitor.

If it can recall... Then it is not a clean room implementation. Fin.

While I mostly agree with you, it worth noting modern llms are trained on 10-20-30T of tokens which is quite comparable to their size (especially given how compressible the data is)

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