If a human knows a song "by heart" (imperfectly), it is not considered copyright infringement.
If a LLM knows a song as part of its training data, then it is copyright infringement.
But what if you developed a model with no prepared training data and forced it to learn from it's own sensory inputs. Instead of shoveling it bits, you played it this particular song and it (imperfectly) recorded the song with it's sensory input device. The same way humans listen to and experience music.
Is the latter learning model infringing on the copyright of the song?
I see where you are coming from in trying to identify the source of the copyright. This would be important information if a human wanted to sue another human for re-producing copyright material.
However, does that apply here? Nobody hears a human humming a song and asks if they obtained that music legally. Should it be important to ask an AI that same question if the purpose of listening to the song is not to steal it?
If you want an exception to copyright, you're going to want to start looking at a section 107 (of the copyright act) exception: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107
The reason someone walking down the street and humming a song is not a violation is because it very clearly meets all of the tests in section 107.
The biggest problem with feeding stuff through a black box like an LLM is it isn't easy for a human to determine how close the result is to the original. An LLM could act like a Xerox machine, and it won't tell you.
Possession copyright material is not inherently infringing on a copyright. Disseminating copyright material is unless you meet section 107. AI runs afoul of section 107 when it verbatim shares copyright material from its dataset without attribution.
Technically, the AI doesn't run afoul. The person disseminating the copyrighted material does.
Mere knowledge is irrelevant only because we don't (yet) have a mechanism to pry open one's brains and inspect the copying of songs within different parts of one's brain. Otherwise, mechanistically, besides one using silicon and other using wetware, they're pretty much doing the same thing.
That is copying. If not the song itself, at the least a close derivative work.
No it isn't. You can feed whatever you want into your LLM, including copyrighted data. The issues arise when you start reproducing or distributing copyrighted content.
That's currently the subject of considerable legal debate.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/10/tech/sarah-silverman-open...