Comment on š¤ Interesting
mechoman444@lemmy.world āØ2ā© āØweeksā© agoA copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy and distribute a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
The explanation above comes from the Big Law Dictionary app, which is available on the Google Play Store for Android.
Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. If ideas could be copyrighted, it would be absurd. I donāt even know how that could realistically be enforced.
This is the problem with so many people talking out of their backsides on this platform. They donāt know what these legal terms actually mean or how they function. They see something they donāt like and immediately start making claims about it.
LLMs do a lot of things that deserve criticism. Copyright isnāt necessarily one of them.
If a company developing or operating an LLM is committing copyright infringement, then it should be prosecuted. If it has violated the law and hasnāt been held accountable, that is a separate issue that should be remedied. But that is a completely different argument from claiming that LLMs are inherently infringing copyright.
An LLM uses training data to generate novel responses. That means it produces new output rather than copying source material verbatim. Simply using publicly available information to learn patterns is not, by itself, copyright infringement. If a company unlawfully obtained private or copyrighted material, or reproduced protected works in a way that violates copyright law, then it has broken the law and should be prosecuted.
But the existence of an LLM, by itself, is not copyright infringement.
So, moving forward, this can go one of two ways: either you concede that you were incorrect, or you double down and make even more absurd claims. Either way, I donāt knowā¦ Iāve had this argument so many times on this platform that itās ridiculous.
As of right now, there are multiple lawsuits against major LLM developers. In some of those cases, the courts have ruled that training on publicly available data can qualify as fair use.
At this point, not a single court has issued a final ruling in favor of a plaintiff holding that LLM training itself is copyright infringement.
I genuinely donāt know what else Iām supposed to do to prove this to you people.
balsoft@lemmy.ml āØ2ā© āØweeksā© ago
Merely training an LLM on copyrighted material without holderās permission (and then distributing the weights or selling access to inference on those weights) is a violation of copyright law if it were to be applied consistently (ignoring the fair use argument, which Iāll get back to). That is, if you applied any other computational process in this way, the result would be a derivative work. The reason itās ādifferentā this time is that the people violating the law are richer than those who wrote the law in the first place, not because of any legal argument.
If a court ruled that itās āfair useā, that actually lends more credence to the idea that LLM weights are a derivative work - āfair useā is a defense for copyright infringement that only makes sense in this case if the new work is an unauthorized derivative of the original.
Whether itās actually fair use or not is another question (I can see the fair use argument for open-weight non-commercial models, not so much for commercial offerings).
BTW, Iām not even necessarily anti-AI (at least the open-weight, local models). I use a local model in my job almost daily, and also I think itās mostly good that the entirety of FOSS corpus is available for download in a compressed and easily remixable form. Iām just pointing out the hypocrisy of the legal system which applies its already unjust copyright law (and most other laws) only against poor people.
mechoman444@lemmy.world āØ2ā© āØweeksā© ago
I will admit that it is an interesting argument. As far as I can tell from some toilet-bowl research, that appears to be the tack some of the lawsuits are taking.
My counter would be this: if someone reads ten thousand books and then writes their own story, they are not committing copyright infringement.
In the same sense, someone who paints in the style of Michelangelo or Studio Ghibli does not pay royalties to either of those entities.
It is, in my opinion, a weak argument, even if it is a legally valid one.
balsoft@lemmy.ml āØ2ā© āØweeksā© ago
mechoman444@lemmy.world āØ2ā© āØweeksā© ago
The conclusion doesnāt follow from the premises. Being fixed in a tangible medium is a prerequisite for copyright protection, not a test for derivative works. To show that LLM weights are derivative, you would have to demonstrate that they recast, transform, or adapt the protected expression of specific copyrighted works. Whether neural-network weights satisfy that standard is precisely the legal issue currently before the courts, so it is not āby definitionā settled. The distinction between human neurons and digital weights addresses fixation, but it does not establish that the weights themselves contain copyrightable expression.
More importantly, both humans and LLMs generate novel responses by drawing on what they have previously learned. A human uses patterns encoded in neural connections to formulate thoughts, while an LLM uses statistical patterns encoded in its weights to generate text. In both cases, the underlying information influences the output rather than being reproduced verbatim. The distinction between biological neurons and machine weights does not, by itself, answer the copyright question. The relevant legal issue is whether the resulting output or the weights themselves contain protectable expression from the original works, not whether the learning system is biological or computational.
Your final sentence also makes an unsupported leap: āā¦making it a derivative work of the training material by definition.ā Nothing in the statutory definition of a derivative work says that any fixed artifact produced after analyzing copyrighted material is automatically derivative. That conclusion is asserted rather than demonstrated. A derivative work must recast, transform, or adapt the protected expression of an existing work. Simply being created through exposure to copyrighted material is not sufficient.
As an aside, I agree that trade dress can, in limited circumstances, protect a companyās distinctive visual identity under trademark law. However, that is a separate area of law from copyright and does not materially affect the point I was making. My example concerned copyright royalties for learning and creating in a similar style, not trademark claims based on consumer confusion.
Moreover, I think Iāll end the discussion here. You and I are both unqualified to truly determine or judge whether this is copyright infringement. Weāll see what the courts ultimately decide.
On a personal level, I honestly couldnāt care less how it turns out. AI and LLMs donāt impact my life in any meaningful way, so I donāt have a personal stake in the outcome.
My main concern is that many people donāt really understand copyright law itself. Itās not as simple as saying, āI made this, therefore itās protected.ā Thatās simply not how copyright works.