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I don't think this case is about GPU copying, since that's not what's alleged in the complaint. Mostly, they are alleging that Silverman's book was in a trainin

by ejz 3y ago

I don't think this case is about GPU copying, since that's not what's alleged in the complaint. Mostly, they are alleging that Silverman's book was in a training set that contained an unauthorized copy. I wrote this post in a way that was meant to be brief, clear, and honestly a little snarky. If I was writing a brief, I'd have gone through a more detailed analysis, but I think fails for a number of reasons, including fair use for the copying, transformative use for the AI system, and frankly a lack of damages because the LLM isn't distributing copies of her work (which is one reason they are trying to establish Silverman as a lead plaintiff in a class action suit). I glossed over a lot of this discussion to keep the post brief. But of course, this post is not legal advice, it's just a quick (and hopefully fun!) blog. I am much more knowledgeable about patent law than copyright law, by the way, and acknowledge any flaws in my post. Most importantly, I wanted to highlight what I view as a real difference between what copyright holders want from copyright and the policy goals of copyright. What I believe they want is a patent, but what they have is a copyright. They are intended to achieve very different policy goals and as such have different structures.

twoodfin 3y ago
The fundamental problem: a) Training the model involved making a non-transient copy of Silverman’s work (e.g. in an encoded form into the GPU). b) That copy was not a fair use. The purpose of the copy was to train an ML model to generate similar content. OpenAI offers commercial access to the resulting generation mechanism, and indisputably some of what people are paying for is content generation to compete with creators like Silverman. If OpenAI were only training models for research purposes they’d have a much stronger case for fair use.

by ejz 3y ago

twoodfin 3y ago

The fundamental problem: a) Training the model involved making a non-transient copy of Silverman’s work (e.g. in an encoded form into the GPU). b) That copy was not a fair use. The purpose of the copy was to train an ML model to generate similar content. OpenAI offers commercial access to the resulting generation mechanism, and indisputably some of what people are paying for is content generation to compete with creators like Silverman. If OpenAI were only training models for research purposes they’d have a much stronger case for fair use.