Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

> That, plus the fact that Ross was a directly competing product, is what I see as really driving this decision.

The "competing product" thing is probably the most extreme part of this opinion.

The most important fair use factor is if the use competes with the original work, but this is generally implied to be directly competes, i.e. if you translate someone else's book from English to French and want to sell the translation, the translation is going to be in direct competition for sales to people who speak both English and French. The customer is going to use the copy claiming fair use as a direct substitute for the original work, instead of buying it.

This court is trying to extend that to anything downstream from it, which seems crazy. For example, "multiple copies for classroom use" is one of the explicit examples of fair use from the copyright statute, but schools are obviously teaching people intending to go into competition with the original author, and in general the idea that you can't read something if you ever intend to write something to sell in competition with it seems absurd and in contradiction to the common practices in reverse engineering.

But this is also a district court opinion that isn't even binding on other courts, so we'll see what happens if it gets appealed.

I think this is the best takeaway. This case and its outcome is restricted to its facts. Most of the LLM activity today is very different than what happened here.

If close paraphrase can be detected, this ought to be proof enough that some non-trivial element of creativity was involved in the original text. Because purely functional and necessary elements are not protected by copyright, even when they would otherwise be creative (this is technically known as the 'scenes à faire' case) - and surely a "quote" which is unavoidable because it factually and unquestionably is the core of the ruling would have to fall under that.

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Ross evidently copied and used the text himself. It's like Ross creating an unauthorized volume of West's books, perhaps with a twist.

Obscurity ≠ legal compliance.

How is the system inherently generative?

License what? Every available copyrighted work? Even getting a tiny fraction is not practical.

To the contrary, this just means companies can't make money from these models.

Those using models for research and personal use wouldn't be infringing under the fair use tests.

> If the copyright holders win, the model giants will just license.

No, they won't. The biggest models want to train on literally every piece of human-written text ever written. You can pay to license small subsets of that at a time. You can't pay to license all of it. And some of it won't be available to license at all, at any price.

If the copyright holders win, model trainers will have to pay attention to what they train on, rather than blithely ignoring licenses.

Open source model builders are no more entitled to rip off content owners than anyone else. I couldn't possibly care any less if this impacts "democratized access" to bullshit generators. At least if the big boys license the content then the rightful owners get paid (and have the option to opt out).

I don't have either a data center, or every single copyrighted work in history to import as training data to train my open source model.

Whether or not OpenAI is found to be breaking the law will be utterly irrelevant to actual open AI efforts.

> A human brain doesn't need anywhere close to this volume of data, in order to be able to produce good output.

Maybe not directly, but consider that our brains are the product of million of years of evolution and aren't a blank slate when we're born. Even though babies can't speak a language at birth, they already have all the neural connections in place in order to acquire and manipulate language, and require just a few years of "supervised fine tuning" to learn the actual language.

LLMs, on the other hand, start with their weights at random values and need to catch up with those million years of evolution first.

> A human brain doesn't need anywhere close to this volume of data, in order to be able to produce good output.

> I remember talking with friends 30 years ago

I'd say you're pretty old. How many years of training did it take for you to start producing good output?

The leason here is we're kind of meta-trained: our minds are primed to pick up new things quickly by abstracting them and relating them to things we already know. We work in concepts and mental models rather than text. LLMs are incredibly weak by comparison. They only understand token sequences.

We are unbelievably far from that. Everyone who tells you that we're within 20 years of emulating brains and says stuff like "the human brain only runs at 100 hertz!" has either been conned by a futurist or is in denial of their own mortality.

Absolutely! But the question is whether the next step-change in intelligence is just around the corner (in which case, this legal speedbump might spur innovation). Or, will the next revolution take a while.

There's enough money in the market to fund a lot of research into totally novel underlying methods. But if it takes too long, investors and lawmakers will just move to make what already works legal, because it is useful.

> I remember talking with friends 30 years ago about how it was inevitable that the brain would eventually be fully implemented as machine, once calculation power gets big enough; but it looks like we're still very far from that.

Why would it be?

"It's inevitable that the Burj Khalifa gets built, once steel production gets high enough."

"It's inevitable that Pegasuses will be bred from horses, as soon as somebody collects enough oats."

Reducing intelligence to the bulk aggregate of brute "calculation power" is... Ironically missing the point of intelligence.

As long as someone give me the software software to run my business, that person might be in violation of copyright but I'm in the clear.

Simply running my business on illegally distributed copyrighted text/software/movie should not be copyright infringement.

> simply training a model on illegally distributed text should not be copyright infringement

You can train a model on copyrighted text, you just can't distribute the output in any way without violating copyright. (edit: depending on the other fair use factors).

One of the big problems is that training is a mechanical process, so there is a direct line between the copyrighted works and the model's output, regardless of the form of the output. Just on those terms it is very likely to be a copyright violation. Even if they don't reproduce substantive portions, what they do reproduce is a derived work.

I mean, you're right in the abstract. If you train an LLM in a void and never do anything with the model, sure.

But that's not what anyone is doing. People train models so that someone can actually use them. So I'm not sure how your comment is helpful other than to point out that distinction (which doesn't make much difference in this case specifically or how copyright applies for LLM's in general)

> Copyright is not about acquisition, it is about publication and/or distribution. If I get a copy of Harry Potter from a dumpster, I can read it. If a company gets a copy of *all books from a torrent, they can use it to train their AI.

"a person reading" and "computer processing of data" (training) are not the same thing

MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. rendered the verdict that loading unlicensed copyrighted material from disk was "copying", and hence copyright infringement

but the font changes won't be expressed in the (plain text) output of the LLM.