New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

But if you create a company that takes the NYT articles, scans the articles for extreme weather information in Dubai and emails your paying customers every time that happens, then you are doing copyright infringement.

Where do you see that they won the case? Can you provide a source because the wikipedia article directly contradicts what you are saying...?

I see they went to the Supreme Court who kicked it back to the Ninth who then re-affirmed their position that HiQ Labs was not in violation of the CFAA.

Not really.

Copyright largely remains about the PRODUCTION of content, not about the CONSUMPTION of it.

Someone who grew up reading Marvel comics being able to make new original comics in that style is perfectly ok. That same person perfectly replicating an Avengers comic is going to land them in hot water.

The focus on infringement really needs to be on what LLMs produce, not their training.

There definitely needs to be something like a secondary pass added which checks output against a vectordb of the training set to avoid too close derivative IP outputs (and ideally checks for jailbreaking or inappropriate content at the same time).

Any production services would need to subscribe to a service like that to stave off litigation on infringement, much like how the oft repeated complaints regarding YouTube copyright infringement eventually dissipated as content tagging was added (and shifted to complaints over too broad application of it).

A generative AI model having read the NYT but producing new original news articles in the style of a newspaper is a very weird argument for infringement.

A human driven service or an automated one that takes current NYT articles and summarizes or reworks them, publishing itself and cutting them out of the ad revenue is more problematic (but also widespread already and generally considered protected).

Services which exactly duplicate their articles would be more clearly infringement, but there's no evidence that's even a fraction of what ChatGPT is doing.

Criminalizing training would set back whatever county did so significantly in global competition for a critical new economic (and defense) trend, and would ultimately only be a minor stop gap for copyright holders as you'd simply see a market for secondhand generated content from foreign models trained on copyrighted data but then producing content that was itself not copyrightable but could be used to train domestic models.

My point is that the scale of how LLMs work doesn't matter with regards to copyright and fair use.

> Problematic though copyright laws are, I see no world where all those protections go away any time soon, and so if the courts don't agree to protect copyright already in this scenario, then it will eventually be legislated to make that happen. AI consuming copyrighted data and producing an output has to be considered a derivative work (or indeed, the model itself will be considered a derivative work) or IP protections are effectively broken.

There's a headline out today about several ex-Google Brain engineers, including a co-author of “Attention Is All You Need”, setting up shop in Tokyo. [1] That's not a coincidence.

> Amid rising questions about the fairness and legality of using publicly available information to train AI models, Japan affirmed that machine learning engineers can use any data they find.

> What’s new: A Japanese official clarified that the country’s law lets AI developers train models on works that are protected by copyright.

> How it works: In testimony before Japan’s House of Representatives, cabinet minister Keiko Nagaoka explained that the law allows machine learning developers to use copyrighted works whether or not the trained model would be used commercially and regardless of its intended purpose. [2]

IANAL so don't know what the implications of this are when it comes to cross-border copyright enforcement. It's hard to imagine Japan rolling back this type of legal safe harbor. It's a boon for attracting AI startups from elsewhere and giving the local tech industry a competitive boost.

What's to stop other venues looking to grow their tech industry to do something similar? And if they do, would it create a race to the bottom type of dynamic at the expense of copyright holders?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-17/ex-google...

[2] https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-exp...