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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it, though? What's the copyright status of the output of these tools?

If this is regular output of the LLM, I'm not sure, but given that the author proclaims that this is reverse engineered, then they are not allowed to redistribute it under their own license terms. The terms of service are also pretty clear on this not being allowed, which makes it extra hard to defend (section 3.3):

> You may not access or use, or help another person to access or use, our Services in the following ways:

...

3. To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law. [1]

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms

How can you tell what regular output is? Is there a special output when you successfully jailbreak? Is there a meaningful distinction between jailbroken prompts and hallucinations? Are certain prompts against the terms of service? If so, is it easy to determine if they are? Who determines this? If you produce output that is against the terms of service, does that change the copyright status of the works?

I'd love to see this go to court.

The terms of service are between Anthropic and one of their subscribers. So Anthropic can maybe cancel their contract.

This doesn't affect what copyright law allows or does not allow.

Also I think Anthropic very much suppports gathering data by whatever means possible. That should work both ways.

It does make a difference. If this text was generated by the LLM, then by those same terms you are allowed to publish the data. But given that it is reverse engineered, you are not allowed to do so.

Note that even in the normal case, there are restrictions. You'd have to validate that the generated output is not copyrighted. Which in this case may not be trivial.

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