Fair use.
most other places use fair dealing which is more restrictive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing
Unless all LLM are a ruthless parody of human intelligence, which they may be, the legal issues will continue.
- Addenda -
For the interested parties, the law states the following [0].
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
So, if you say that these factors can be flexed depending on the defendant, and can be just waved away to protect the wealthy, then it becomes something else, but given these factors, and how damaging this "fair use" is, I can certainly say that training AI models with copyrighted corpus is not fair use in any way.
Of course at the end of the day, IANAL & IANAJ. However, my moral compass directly bars use of copyrighted corpus in publicly accessible, for profit models which undermine many people of their livelihoods.
From my perspective, people can whitewash AI training as they see fit to sleep sound at night, but this doesn't change anything from my PoV.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
> In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
> * the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
> * the nature of the copyrighted work;
> * the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
> * the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Another weird carve-out for copyright law in the US: parody. Honestly, I don't know if other jurisdictions allow parody in the same protected manner.
Germany: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51a.html (Though this explicit carve-out is a recent development, though generally speaking parodies were allowed even under the previous version of the law.)
Nope :-), just a normal citizen, but sometimes I am curious enough to look up a law, plus sometimes I need to refer to/look up some law in my day job as a civil engineer, too.
When you need to do that, it's not too hard to stumble upon the existence of that page through some web searches, plus the German Wikipedia often links to that page, too (as well as to some alternative platforms run by private entities, which sometimes provide some added value, e.g. buzer.de provides change history since 2006, too, other pages link relevant court decisions, etc. etc. – but gesetze-im-internet.de is the official page run by the federal government itself).
The nature of copyright and plagiarism boils down to paraphrasing, and so long as LLMs sufficiently paraphrase the content it's an open question whether it's copyright infringement and requires new law/precedent.
So the fact they are earning money is a red herring unless they are reproducing the exact same content without paraphrasing (with exception to commentary). E.g. they can quote part of a work while commenting on it.
Where they have gotten into trouble with e.g. NYT afaik is when the LLM reproduced a whole article word for word. I think they have all tried hard to prevent the LLM from ever doing that to avoid that legal risk.
How many books can you read, understand and memorize in T time, and how many books an AI can ingest in the T time?
If we're down to paraphrasing, watch this video [1], and think again.
Many models, given that you ask the correct questions, reproduce their training set with great accuracy, and this is only prevented with monkey patching, IIUC.
So, it's still a big mess, even if we don't add copyrighted corpus to the mix. Oh, BTW, datasets like "The Stack" are not clean as they claim. I have seen at least two non-permissively licensed code repositories inside that dataset.
I am curious about the video, but am not compelled to spend 24 min watching it when you haven't summarized its thesis for me. The title of the video makes it seem adjacent at best to the points I was making. (Some automated flagging system =/= actual law)