That argument doesn’t fly, because they didn’t have the copyright to begin with. What would be the defense there? “Yes, we broke the law, but while taking advantage of it, we also (unsuccessfully) took measures to prevent other people from breaking that same law through us”.
If the main value came from redistribution, I agree. But that’s not the case. They don’t intend to make any money in that way.
No, the copyright clause was broken when they copied the works without having the right to do so. They would have violated copyright even if they just downloaded (without permission) all those works and threw them away immediately. Furthermore, copyright covers transformations to the work, it doesn’t matter if they transformed the work or are redistributing it without change. They violated copyright. Period.
If you break into a home, rob the contents, and kill the owners, you’re not going to be tried just for breaking in, you’re going to be tried for everything.
Is this really the case? They only have no copyright for distributing it. But let's assume they bought a copy for personal usage (which they did in some cases), then this is similar to hacking companies Amazon-account and complaining about the e-books they legally use for internal purpose. I mean, it's not forbidden to base your work on copyrighted material, as long as it's different enough.
No, they don’t have the copyright to download it either. It’s in the name: the right to copy (other things are also included, such as adaptations and performances).
> let's assume they bought a copy for personal usage
If it’s for personal usage, then training a commercial LLM does not apply. When you buy a DVD of a movie you have the personal right to watch it at home, you don’t have the right to play it on the street.
No one is memorizing a book for the purpose of regurgitating it to someone that wants to read it without paying for it.
It's a thought experiment that only works if you don't think about it.
If you design a black box using copyrighted text that can parrot the text back, it _must_ break copyright by definition.
Theoretically a person who read and memorized a book and then typed out copies for people would be violating the copyright, but so few people can do that, and it's so cumbersome that it just doesn't matter much. The copyright holder could sue if they found out the person were distributing copies, but it's just not realistic. Certainly not for a large number of books.
But AI memorization scales, and it's possible to have an AI write out unlimited copies of different books to a large number of people. And how did the AI get a full copy in the first place?
And how’s that working out, considering the submission we’re on?
> how is the fact that the possibly have portions of copyrighted works "memorized", however do not reproduce it breaking copyright law?
I can’t believe this needs to be repeated so often, but machines are not people. Memorising a book is not the same thing as copying a PDF.
Furthermore, it’s not about the LLM training, it’s about how the companies who make them got the data in the first place.
>Furthermore, it’s not about the LLM training, it’s about how the companies who make them got the data in the first place.
This conflating two different issues, though. I agree that whether or not using copyrighted material to create the models is still an open question. But someone using hundreds of prompts to extract a paragraph of a well-known work (and some additional nonverbatim equivalents) is not the AI company breaking copyright in and of itself. In fact, the books they used were extremely common (GOT, The Hobbit, Harry Potter); AI companies could make the argument that the books were not even directly trained on, but in user-generated posts made online about the material.