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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think the Times has a far better case for presenting mechanical copies (including with mechanical alteration) than it does with model training.

The tool building of model training is more likely to be fair use than the use of the tool to provide mechanical copies of copyirght-protected material that competes directly with the original in the market.

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What makes you think that? The most relevant case is probably MAI Systems, where even a copy of a licensed program into RAM for an unlicensed use (diagnosis and repair by a third party) was deemed a violation.

Congress took the ruling seriously enough to carve out a fair use exception for that use. I don’t think there’s any comparable exception here, especially when the ultimate purpose is to build a commercial product capable of producing works (news reports) in precisely the same market as the original works.

Fair use only covers very limited circumstances which probably does not include selling a subscription (ChatGPT+). If you’re selling a repackaged reproduction of someone else’s copyrighted works, that’s never protected by fair use.

But you generally can't copyright the underlying facts, only the creative expression in the article/work itself. If they can get it to extract just the facts and how they relate to one another, that wouldn't really be protected by copyright. They might try to bring back the "Hot News" doctrine though.

The models not only were trained on copyrighted works, but when prompted will substantially and repeatedly reproduce copies of creative work (not just facts). That's infringement. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23788741/sarah-silverman-o...

My naive reading of it sees that it only applies for time-sensitive facts. Considering the training times required, and knowledge cutoffs, could this apply?

But you can't copyright the underlying facts nor the style of writing, just the literal words used in your article. If you can't point to a sequence of words in the original that's in the later work, that later work isn't "derivative".

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