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Comment by Tao3300 | Hacker News Reader

If I read it and memorize it, my brain has made a copy.

Not as far as copyright law is concerned. If you then use your brain to write it back down—or sing it as a song in Central Park—now you have created a copy under the law.

Right. But the comment above said the issue is with the copy made for training. The "read it and memorized it" copy, not the "write it back down" copy.

That copy didn’t go into a human’s brain. It went into GPU memory. It’s a copy under the law, no different from copying a Taylor Swift mp3 onto a flash drive.

Whether that copy was fair use is the key question.

If I buy a license to listen to a Taylor Swift mp3, I can copy it onto a flash drive (or anywhere I like to use it). And that’s fine until I distribute copies to others.

Yes, and if OpenAI had a license to use the Times’ works as model training material this would be a non-issue, of course.

There's really not a "license" in that sense for text. There's not some magical way you can use copyright to protect a probability model of the words you make, because that's style and style is not copyrightable (nor are the underlying facts the NYT reports).

I didn’t buy a license for Taylor Swift that explicitly allows me to copy to a flash drive. Or to listen with only one ear, etc.

I bought a license to listen and use.

> That copy didn’t go into a human’s brain. It went into GPU memory.

But as you point out in the router case above, it's transient.

Great, can I offer you as a service to billions of people?

Sorry, but I don't expose my endpoints to just anyone.

Is that a challenge I should respond to?

somehow highly doubt "my brain makes copies too so copyright law is invalid" won't clear the legal bar for invalidating their lawsuit.

Probably not. But it still feels like a weird place to be. Presumably they had subscription access to be able to scrape the content in the first place. It seems strange to be bringing the hammer down on information obtained from reading that content and the conversation stemming from it: I mean isn't that the whole point of the press? Inform people and get them talking? Why is it different that it's also informing LLMs and getting them talking?

Anyway, I've always been a bit prickly about IP stuff ever since a troll lawyer threatened me over a TI-BASIC game when I was like 14. I'm also sure I'm completely wrong-headed about this whole thing and overly anthropomorphizing the LLM.

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