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Do you think OpenAI doesn’t subscribe?

I too load creative works into all sorts of temporary structures in order to read the paper. I don’t need to license it, I pay for a subscription.

Should I pay more if I memorize the paper? Should I pay more if I read it to my sick friend in the hospital? Should I pay more if I save copies to my own hard drive and grep for words in the files? Should robots have a higher subscription price?

This whole “they copied it into a gpu” doesn’t matter. People read and interpret. Robots read and interpret. I don’t want to live in a world where every specific device and use needs to be licensed. Especially ex post facto. That will suck so hard.

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  Should I pay more if I memorize the paper? Should I pay more if I read it to my sick friend in the hospital?

It's not even close to either of those things. It's "should I pay more if it infinitesimally affects my perception of english grammar or knowledge of a subject". The llm isn't, for any functional purpose, memorizing, it's getting weight updates as it learns from these examples which are teaspoons of information in a sea of trillions of tokens.

How about “they copied it into a terrific text-to-speech engine and sold ads against the resulting podcasts”?

Reading a text has been ruled as performance and a copyright violation.

I think the issue is that LLMs don’t make a copy or distribute a copy. They use the content to create something else. I don’t remember the copyright term for whether is is transformative enough. But it basically says I can’t copy Starry Night, but I can create a painting with the same color scheme and themes as long as it’s different enough from the original.

> This whole “they copied it into a gpu” doesn’t matter. People read and interpret. Robots read and interpret. I don’t want to live in a world where every specific device and use needs to be licensed. Especially ex post facto. That will suck so hard.

I think you already live in that world (though IANAL), there was a ruling that the Glider cheat tool for WoW was a copyright violation even though it was poking around inside the local copy necessarily made in RAM as part of normal usage of WoW.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/01/judges-ruling-that-wo...

a subscription doesn't give you an automatic escape hatch out of copyright law.

here's their ToS, which is pretty clear about what you cannot do: https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428-Term... (relevant parts below)

Without NYT’s prior written consent, you shall not:

...

(2) use robots, spiders, scripts, service, software or any manual or automatic device, tool, or process designed to data mine or scrape the Content, data or information from the Services, or otherwise use, access, or collect the Content, data or information from the Services using automated means;

(3) use the Content for the development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system.

...

(5) cache or archive the Content (except for a public search engine’s use of spiders for creating search indices);

Violating their terms of service doesn't really matter in terms of copyright law though. The statistical properties of that text (which is what the engine snarfs in) aren't protected by copyright.

Full text New York Times articles are available through subscription services other than nytimes.com.

As an example, my local library offers full-text NYT articles through both nytimes.com and ProQuest.

Notably, ProQuest's terms only explicitly ban scraping metadata and developing software or services that "compete or interfere" with ProQuest products:

https://about.proquest.com/en/about/terms-and-conditions

and your local library and ProQuest are also bound by the same laws, even if they have an existing licensing agreement. from the ToS you just linked (note use of the terms "licensor" and "third party", which would be the NYT in this case):

> Restrictions. Except as expressly permitted above, Customer and its Authorized Users shall not:

> Remove any copyright and other proprietary notices placed upon the Service or any materials retrieved from the Service by ProQuest or its licensors;

> Perform automated searches against ProQuest’s systems (except for non-burdensome federated search services), including automated “bots,” link checkers or other scripts;

> Provide access to or use of the Services by or for the benefit of any unauthorized school, library, organization, or user;

> Publish, broadcast, sell, use or provide access to the Service or any materials retrieved from the Service in any manner that will infringe the copyright or other proprietary rights of ProQuest or its licensors;

> Download all or parts of the Service in a systematic or regular manner or so as to create a collection of materials comprising all or a material subset of the Service, in any form.

> Store any information on the Service that violates applicable law or the rights of any third party.

Grandparent is right that people keep conflating copyright and licensing. That term doesn’t allow you to violate the copyright of a licensor, but, it also doesn’t rule out (eg) fair use.

Fair use would have to be blocked via a license, and it’s going to be difficult to argue that someone agrees to a license merely by turning on their radio. Responding to unauthenticated internet requests with content is the internet equivalent of broadcast and similarly the LinkedIn case held that this did not allow LinkedIn to impose terms of service in a contract of adhesion in this fashion.

actually if you had a subscription you might be more screwed than if you crawled it with free access, since having the subscription means agreement to the TOS.

Are you using this knowledge to produce a product that materially undercuts NYT revenue?

That doesn’t matter though. If I licensed material why should it count if I compete or not.

If I watch Lebron James play and use it to develop an athletic training program, does it matter if I play baseball? Or WNBA? Or does it only matter if I play against him in the championship?

Licenses are bound to the purposes specified by the license. So go read the fine print.

Copyright doesn’t allow you to impose a contract of adhesion to viewers of material you’re broadcasting out into the public. I don’t agree to your contract just because it’s coming into my radio, you can’t create a term of service that imposes additional restrictions on what I can do with it. Copyright may apply but that doesn’t give you the right to enforce additional contracts of adhesion simply based on consuming the content.

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