It seems like you’re working under the core assumption that the trained model itself, rather than just the products thereof, cannot be infringing?
Generally if someone else wants to do something with your copyrighted work – for example your newspaper article – they need a license to do so. This isn’t only the case for direct distribution, it includes things like the creation of electronic copies (which must have been made during training), adaptations, and derivative works. NYT did not grant OpenAI a license to adapt their articles into a training dataset for their models. To use a copyrighted work without a license, you need to be using it under fair use. That’s why it’s relevant: is it fair use to make electronic copies of a copyrighted work and adapt them into a training dataset for a LLM?
You also seem to be assuming that a generative AI model training on a dataset is legally the same as a human learning from those same works. If that’s the case then the answer to my question in the last paragraph is definitely, “yes,” since a human reading the newspaper and learning from it is something that, as you say, “any intelligent rational human being” would agree is fine. However, as far as I know there’s not been any kind of ruling to support the idea that those things are legally equivalent at this point.
Now, if you’d like to start citing code or case law go ahead, I’m happy to be wrong. Who knows, this is the internet, maybe you’re actually a lawyer specializing in copyright law and you’ll point out some fundamental detail of one of these laws that makes my whole comment seem silly (and if so I’d honestly love to read it). I’m not trying to claim that NYT is definitely going to win or anything. My argument is just that this is not especially cut-and-dried, at least from the perspective of a non-expert.
Electronic copies are copies. Copying the story is a copy. You need a license to copy someone’s work. You unconditionally do not need a license to learn from it and use that knowledge for any purpose you wish. There are no laws that could possibly be interpreted to require this.
Derivative works are copies using substantial portions of someone else’s original work. You need a license to adapt a book into a movie because you’re copying their whole story, characters, etc. You don’t need a license to tell a similar story from a similar idea because you are not. Literally everything that has been created in the past 10,000 years is built on the ideas of others. Everything is a derivative work if you think learning from an article is. You’re allowed to summarize copyrighted material and present your own interpretation of it to others. You’re allowed to do so commercially. It isn’t copying.
The New York Times owns their articles. They own their specific packaging of the facts inside. They don’t and unconditionally can’t own the facts themselves. Nothing they own is being copied. Having files in memory is not copyright infringement. It’s the literally guaranteed result of publishing anything digitally.
There is nothing that OpenAI is doing that any law in existence even loosely implies might need a license.
You don’t need a license to learn from a story, but if learning requires you first to make an enduring copy of the story on your laptop then you could be violating copyright.
And neural nets generally require a local enduring copy of their training data, which means they too could be violating copyright.
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It seems like you’re working under the core assumption that the trained model itself, rather than just the products thereof, cannot be infringing?
Generally if someone else wants to do something with your copyrighted work – for example your newspaper article – they need a license to do so. This isn’t only the case for direct distribution, it includes things like the creation of electronic copies (which must have been made during training), adaptations, and derivative works. NYT did not grant OpenAI a license to adapt their articles into a training dataset for their models. To use a copyrighted work without a license, you need to be using it under fair use. That’s why it’s relevant: is it fair use to make electronic copies of a copyrighted work and adapt them into a training dataset for a LLM?
You also seem to be assuming that a generative AI model training on a dataset is legally the same as a human learning from those same works. If that’s the case then the answer to my question in the last paragraph is definitely, “yes,” since a human reading the newspaper and learning from it is something that, as you say, “any intelligent rational human being” would agree is fine. However, as far as I know there’s not been any kind of ruling to support the idea that those things are legally equivalent at this point.
Now, if you’d like to start citing code or case law go ahead, I’m happy to be wrong. Who knows, this is the internet, maybe you’re actually a lawyer specializing in copyright law and you’ll point out some fundamental detail of one of these laws that makes my whole comment seem silly (and if so I’d honestly love to read it). I’m not trying to claim that NYT is definitely going to win or anything. My argument is just that this is not especially cut-and-dried, at least from the perspective of a non-expert.
Electronic copies are copies. Copying the story is a copy. You need a license to copy someone’s work. You unconditionally do not need a license to learn from it and use that knowledge for any purpose you wish. There are no laws that could possibly be interpreted to require this.
Derivative works are copies using substantial portions of someone else’s original work. You need a license to adapt a book into a movie because you’re copying their whole story, characters, etc. You don’t need a license to tell a similar story from a similar idea because you are not. Literally everything that has been created in the past 10,000 years is built on the ideas of others. Everything is a derivative work if you think learning from an article is. You’re allowed to summarize copyrighted material and present your own interpretation of it to others. You’re allowed to do so commercially. It isn’t copying.
The New York Times owns their articles. They own their specific packaging of the facts inside. They don’t and unconditionally can’t own the facts themselves. Nothing they own is being copied. Having files in memory is not copyright infringement. It’s the literally guaranteed result of publishing anything digitally.
There is nothing that OpenAI is doing that any law in existence even loosely implies might need a license.
You don’t need a license to learn from a story, but if learning requires you first to make an enduring copy of the story on your laptop then you could be violating copyright.
And neural nets generally require a local enduring copy of their training data, which means they too could be violating copyright.
Isn’t copyright only an issue when a copy is sold?
No. For example, most people who pirate software, movies, and music do not sell anything. But they are still violating copyright.