11 ms·

Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors

80 points by hn_acker 3y ago

hn_acker 3y ago
The main excerpt to me: > The only claim under California's unfair competition law that was allowed to proceed alleged that OpenAI used copyrighted works to train ChatGPT without authors' permission. Because the state law broadly defines what's considered "unfair," Martínez-Olguín said that it's possible that OpenAI's use of the training data "may constitute an unfair practice."
- appplication 3y ago
  Is it just me or is that really the main and most consequential claim? Title feels misleading.
  - tailspin2019 3y ago
    Yeah agreed, and also the general direction this is heading in feels a bit strange to me - we can debate the merits of current copyright law - but the indisputable fact is that the training material came from *pirated* copies of these author’s copyrighted works. If we are to believe the much used arguments against piracy that we’ve been fed over the last 30+ years (mainly by deep pocketed media companies) then piracy is stealing and if you take stolen material and use it to produce a profitable commercial service then surely that’s a clear cut case in favour of the copyright owners? Otherwise WTF have we been prosecuting individuals for all these years for pirating movies and music etc? And here’s the injury: the authors did not get paid for their copyrighted work. Whether you agree with the law or not, OpenAI at the very least should have bought a copy of every book they trained on - and that doesn’t even get into the question of whether they even had the right to train on that material even if they had paid for it. They didn’t do that. They used stolen copies instead. I don’t understand how it could go any other way. I do get the judge’s reluctance to decide that every bit of output of ChatGPT constitutes copyright infringement - that’s much harder to argue. I’m not passionately against OpenAI - I pay them money - but I am concerned about this “training material” sourcing issue just being swept under the rug. AI advancements clearly do impact artists, authors and other creators of works… they’ll be even more screwed if we just throw copyright law completely out of the window at the same time.
    - wmf 3y ago
      The piracy argument can be fixed by OpenAI buying one copy of each work. The overall question of whether they're allowed to train on copyrighted material without permission seems much larger and more interesting.
      - salawat 3y ago
        May not be that easy. It may be the case we'll find that (in much the way as tech has made popular ironically) authors/IP creators aren't willing to sell "machine training rights" to their work. A concept that could find itself magicked into existence by artists/publishers.
        KoolKat23 3y ago
        Legally if they sell it, they no longer own it and can't determine how it is used. If they license it, that's a different story (they can make a claim of how I breached terms of use, still no copyright issue though). They have absolutely no say in how I use the book they sold to me. Only if I reproduce that book, the actual physical reproduced work is of concern to copyright law, nothing else (my use of the book I bought from you is of no concern).
        salawat 3y ago
        All it takes is a EULA page in the book they sell you to remedy that; a practice well trod by the tech industry to establish the licensing vs. Assumed First Sale relationship. I find it naive to simply assume that publishers won't play tit-for-tat with those that are trying to indirectly monetize their output. I had hope that a return to First Sale sanity may win the day, but as of late I have a dread we're briskly walking down the path where no one is going to be "selling" in the conventional sense anymore. Not with the stakes at hand.
        KoolKat23 3y ago
        You're 100% and raise a good point.It would only work with digital goods though. At some point people seriously have to realise copyright is just a tool with pro's and con's, a balancing act between differing interests. I agree the principle of first sale should apply even to digital goods. There's some hope in the EU that this is on occasion the case, but much room for improvement everywhere.
finneganscat 3y ago
[dead]
aiisdoomed 3y ago
[flagged]
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Woah, absolutely not.
southernplaces7 3y ago
It's completely unsurprising that the entire train of extremely harsh, heavy handed and heavily-applied arguments about using pirated works and copyrighted materials in any way without their holder's permission get so commonly applied to ordinary people and small players of any kind, only to be swept away in legalese when the creators themselves try to use them against a large well connected industry with deep pockets and lots of lobbying weight. Suddenly those claiming copyright have become unreasonable and legal contortions of all kinds appear from the blue sky to show why there's little basis to their claims. Never mind that much of the learning material for the LLMs of companies such as OpenAI is explained only opaquely and its legal status (pirated or not, fair use or not, etc) is ambigious at best. Considering that these uses of such material involve a huge load of of obviously commercial aims, it's laughable how biased the legal system has been in their favor so far. I personally don't favor heavy handed copyright laws in any context but if they're going to be applied with so much snctimony by corporations, academia and governments, then at least the application should be even handed, instead of so blatantly loaded with apparent exemptions.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  Totally agree. Though if they follow this to the end then there will at least be a legal precedent to point to for all future piracy prosecutions. “As shown in Silverman v OpenAI [2024], copyright is no longer enforceable….”
oarla 3y ago
I have a more general question. Say I read a science fiction book which has descriptions of some futuristic technologies. I get inspired by it and spend lot of my time and energy becoming an expert in the required engineering and technologies and invent a machine/process to make that futuristic technology a reality. If I attempt to commercialize my work, can I get sued for copyright infringement by the author(s) of the science fiction book that originally described this technology?
- nsfmc 3y ago
  i'm pretty sure this is allowed as Transformative Use (in the usa) (unless the science fiction book was full of patented inventions still covered by patent law then i think maybe you're no longer in the clear.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use
- brookst 3y ago
  Copyright protects the expression of an idea, such as a series of words or chords. You’d be fine. Patents protect the implementation of an idea, so you’d be fine. There is no IP protection for the abstract idea of doing something, and that is as it should be.
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    Does that mean you could rewrite, say, Harry Potter from scratch without violating copyright?
    - lostmsu 3y ago
      Yes, but unless you change names it would be a trademark violation.
      - alexey-salmin 3y ago
        Normally that's the case even though at least one of those books was taken down based on (rather dubious imo) violation of rights on derivative works. It was never a verbatim rewrite nor a trademark violation. The Dutch court even proceeded to make a list of similar ideas between two books which I think is explicitly disallowed under the US version of the copyright law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Grotter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Grotter
pfdietz 3y ago
If I memorize a book, am I guilty of copyright infringement?
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Yes if you write it back out again.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    What if I merely demonstrate knowledge that means I've memorized the book? For example, being able to answer yes/no questions about what's on a particular page? The point I'm trying to make here is that in this situation I have a representation of the entire book in my brain. Haven't I copied it into my neurons?
    - nhinck2 3y ago
      Do you profit from people testing your ability to memorise the book and give them the ability to substantially recreate the original work and act in competition to the original author?
      - sebzim4500 3y ago
        Do LLM providers?
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Profiting from the act is not a requirement for it to be copyright infringement.
    - romwell 3y ago
      When ChatGPT gets agency regarding what goes into training data and what doesn't, gets paid minimum wage for the work it does, and can be held liable for violations of the law, your question will be very relevant. Until then...
    - PeterisP 3y ago
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Some more discussion earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39357210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39357210
siliconc0w 3y ago
Though I think that training data is totally a violation of copyright, OpenAI really needs to win. Copyright has been unreasonably extended to the point where it's untenable and if we needed to track down rights holders and negotiate 'training rights' we'd ensure there would be no open models or competition going forward. The rights holders are going to lose this one and it's probably for the better.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  > Though I think that training data is totally a violation of copyright, OpenAI really needs to win. I’d argue that that’s not really how the law is supposed to work.
  - TillE 3y ago
    Ultimately it's gonna come down to new legislation, and there is just absolutely no chance of "big tech gets to exploit every copyrighted work on the planet for free". Definitely not in the US or Europe. Big media companies don't want that, zillions of small creators don't want that, the public at large has no great affection for giant tech companies getting even more power.
    - blackoil 3y ago
      > Big media companies don't want that Big Media isn't worried about you drawing Shrek or Donald Duck at home by hand or by GPT. They won't like you distributing it profitably, but they already have tools against that. They'll also like few billions coming their way but that everyone likes. Small Creator are worried about getting the next gig as AI may take away low end of the jobs, and they are not worried about copyright implications of the LLMs. General Public doesn't like Tech companies but loves the products they make, nobody stopped using early Youtube or Telegram because there was piracy happening.
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    Well, the objection to current copyright laws is that those laws are not how copyright ought to work.
userbinator 3y ago
While I'm not optimistic about AI in general, if they're going to train LLMs I think they ought to use good data, and published books may on average be better for that than scraping the web. Relatedly, I wonder how many humans have ever learned anything from pirated ebooks --- in some countries, I bet that number is close to 100%.
- __loam 3y ago
  How humans do anything is immaterial to this question.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  and they can bloody well pay for that like everyone else. get a license for the content that makes your machine that makes you money. it's that simple.
maronato 3y ago
I think the real issue here is that we’re trying to apply laws made by humans for humans to something entirely new and not well understood: LLMs. This won’t be something we’ll cleanly solve using current regulation.
- wilg 3y ago
  I agree, but of course national legislation is like impossible now due to a certain obstructionist political party.
  - snickerbockers 3y ago
    [assuming you mean America] as long as there're only two parties they're both equally obstructionist.
    - wilg 3y ago
      I do and that's wrong.
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    You should be more clear about the topics of legislation in question. In matters involving internet service providers in the US, the Democratic party in Congress generally doesn't bother to propose internet laws either way, but the Republican party tends to strip away the FCC's regulatory authority and actively oppose attempts to bring a fraction back [1][2]. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ted-cruz-wants-to-stop-the-fcc-from-updating-data-breach-notification-rules/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ted-cruz-wants-t... [2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/fcc-to-halt-sign-ups-for-internet-discounts-as-republicans-threaten-funding/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/fcc-to-halt-sign... Is either party attempting to obstruct regulations on AI training or AI usage? At the moment, I don't think so [3]. [3] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/13/schumer-senate-ai-policy-00115794 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/13/schumer-senate-ai-p...
- snickerbockers 3y ago
  I don't see any reason why LLMs need their own laws, fundamentally it's just another computer program.
bigbacaloa 3y ago
[dead]
naskwo 3y ago
How is this different from the authors of (business book) seeking royalties from (bigtech CEO) because he/she ingested knowledge (training) from this book? Humankind needs to build on top of each other’s knowledge to keep evolving.
- alexey-salmin 3y ago
  Well the first difference is that copyright doesn't protect ideas, only specific texts and their reproduction.
- snickerbockers 3y ago
  Well the biggest difference is that we're not talking about people in this case. We can actually just discriminate against computer programs, they have no rights and they don't even have the agency to act on their own behalf. They're just tools. >Humankind needs to build on top of each other’s knowledge to keep evolving. I agree, but that's never stopped copyright law in the past. What's frustrating is that copyright law is suddenly up for debate now that the copyrights in question predominantly belong to individuals rather than large corporations, an what's really frustrating is that it seems they want to carve out an exemption for this one specific case instead of reforming copyright law.
Aachen 3y ago
> Arguing that OpenAI caused economic injury by unfairly repurposing authors' works, even if authors could show evidence of a DMCA violation, authors could only speculate about what injury was caused That's an interesting angle I hadn't seen coming, but it makes sense: the system isn't reliable enough to output a book proper, so you'd never use it to read a book (can't ask it to output lord of the rings page 47 ... yet), and summaries were always okay to post as far as I know So if I post excerpts of books that neither I nor the querier has a license for when they guess/engineer a search query, even if that (with lots of effort) can amount to the whole book, that's apparently not causing any economic injury to the author. It's not ruled to not be copyright infringement yet, so maybe you can force removal from the market but you can't be awarded damages as I understand it? Separately, I'm a bit surprised the authors haven't done much in the way of discovery and just alleged baselsssly that OpenAI's training process removed copyright notices. The judge says it's unsubstantiated and there's even counter-evidence. Wouldn't it be a simple matter to subpoena a list of works/sources that were used and under which license? That would also be interesting to learn for others working in the field
- alexey-salmin 3y ago
  > Arguing that OpenAI caused economic injury by unfairly repurposing authors' works, even if authors could show evidence of a DMCA violation, authors could only speculate about what injury was caused Funny that inability to prove speculated injuries didn't stop judges from ordering people to pay hundreds of thousands in damages in piracy cases
thinkingemote 3y ago
I wonder if this will lead to Google using Google Books (40 million books) in their LLM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Legal_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Legal_issues
richardjam73 3y ago
I think the real problem with the lawsuit is that it doesn't financially matter. If I want to read a Stephen King novel I'm not going to ask chatgpt for it. Why get a mangled version when you can get a proper copy? It won't affect book sales.

80 points by hn_acker 3y ago

The main excerpt to me: > The only claim under California's unfair competition law that was allowed to proceed alleged that OpenAI used copyrighted works to train ChatGPT without authors' permission. Because the state law broadly defines what's considered "unfair," Martínez-Olguín said that it's possible that OpenAI's use of the training data "may constitute an unfair practice."

appplication 3y ago
Is it just me or is that really the main and most consequential claim? Title feels misleading.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  Yeah agreed, and also the general direction this is heading in feels a bit strange to me - we can debate the merits of current copyright law - but the indisputable fact is that the training material came from *pirated* copies of these author’s copyrighted works. If we are to believe the much used arguments against piracy that we’ve been fed over the last 30+ years (mainly by deep pocketed media companies) then piracy is stealing and if you take stolen material and use it to produce a profitable commercial service then surely that’s a clear cut case in favour of the copyright owners? Otherwise WTF have we been prosecuting individuals for all these years for pirating movies and music etc? And here’s the injury: the authors did not get paid for their copyrighted work. Whether you agree with the law or not, OpenAI at the very least should have bought a copy of every book they trained on - and that doesn’t even get into the question of whether they even had the right to train on that material even if they had paid for it. They didn’t do that. They used stolen copies instead. I don’t understand how it could go any other way. I do get the judge’s reluctance to decide that every bit of output of ChatGPT constitutes copyright infringement - that’s much harder to argue. I’m not passionately against OpenAI - I pay them money - but I am concerned about this “training material” sourcing issue just being swept under the rug. AI advancements clearly do impact artists, authors and other creators of works… they’ll be even more screwed if we just throw copyright law completely out of the window at the same time.
  - wmf 3y ago
    The piracy argument can be fixed by OpenAI buying one copy of each work. The overall question of whether they're allowed to train on copyrighted material without permission seems much larger and more interesting.
    - salawat 3y ago
      May not be that easy. It may be the case we'll find that (in much the way as tech has made popular ironically) authors/IP creators aren't willing to sell "machine training rights" to their work. A concept that could find itself magicked into existence by artists/publishers.
      - KoolKat23 3y ago
        Legally if they sell it, they no longer own it and can't determine how it is used. If they license it, that's a different story (they can make a claim of how I breached terms of use, still no copyright issue though). They have absolutely no say in how I use the book they sold to me. Only if I reproduce that book, the actual physical reproduced work is of concern to copyright law, nothing else (my use of the book I bought from you is of no concern).
        salawat 3y ago
        All it takes is a EULA page in the book they sell you to remedy that; a practice well trod by the tech industry to establish the licensing vs. Assumed First Sale relationship. I find it naive to simply assume that publishers won't play tit-for-tat with those that are trying to indirectly monetize their output. I had hope that a return to First Sale sanity may win the day, but as of late I have a dread we're briskly walking down the path where no one is going to be "selling" in the conventional sense anymore. Not with the stakes at hand.
        KoolKat23 3y ago
        You're 100% and raise a good point.It would only work with digital goods though. At some point people seriously have to realise copyright is just a tool with pro's and con's, a balancing act between differing interests. I agree the principle of first sale should apply even to digital goods. There's some hope in the EU that this is on occasion the case, but much room for improvement everywhere.

finneganscat 3y ago

[dead]

aiisdoomed 3y ago

[flagged]

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Woah, absolutely not.

southernplaces7 3y ago

It's completely unsurprising that the entire train of extremely harsh, heavy handed and heavily-applied arguments about using pirated works and copyrighted materials in any way without their holder's permission get so commonly applied to ordinary people and small players of any kind, only to be swept away in legalese when the creators themselves try to use them against a large well connected industry with deep pockets and lots of lobbying weight. Suddenly those claiming copyright have become unreasonable and legal contortions of all kinds appear from the blue sky to show why there's little basis to their claims. Never mind that much of the learning material for the LLMs of companies such as OpenAI is explained only opaquely and its legal status (pirated or not, fair use or not, etc) is ambigious at best. Considering that these uses of such material involve a huge load of of obviously commercial aims, it's laughable how biased the legal system has been in their favor so far. I personally don't favor heavy handed copyright laws in any context but if they're going to be applied with so much snctimony by corporations, academia and governments, then at least the application should be even handed, instead of so blatantly loaded with apparent exemptions.

tailspin2019 3y ago
Totally agree. Though if they follow this to the end then there will at least be a legal precedent to point to for all future piracy prosecutions. “As shown in Silverman v OpenAI [2024], copyright is no longer enforceable….”

oarla 3y ago

I have a more general question. Say I read a science fiction book which has descriptions of some futuristic technologies. I get inspired by it and spend lot of my time and energy becoming an expert in the required engineering and technologies and invent a machine/process to make that futuristic technology a reality. If I attempt to commercialize my work, can I get sued for copyright infringement by the author(s) of the science fiction book that originally described this technology?

nsfmc 3y ago
i'm pretty sure this is allowed as Transformative Use (in the usa) (unless the science fiction book was full of patented inventions still covered by patent law then i think maybe you're no longer in the clear.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use
brookst 3y ago
Copyright protects the expression of an idea, such as a series of words or chords. You’d be fine. Patents protect the implementation of an idea, so you’d be fine. There is no IP protection for the abstract idea of doing something, and that is as it should be.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  Does that mean you could rewrite, say, Harry Potter from scratch without violating copyright?
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    Yes, but unless you change names it would be a trademark violation.
    - alexey-salmin 3y ago
      Normally that's the case even though at least one of those books was taken down based on (rather dubious imo) violation of rights on derivative works. It was never a verbatim rewrite nor a trademark violation. The Dutch court even proceeded to make a list of similar ideas between two books which I think is explicitly disallowed under the US version of the copyright law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Grotter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Grotter

pfdietz 3y ago

If I memorize a book, am I guilty of copyright infringement?

AlexandrB 3y ago
Yes if you write it back out again.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  What if I merely demonstrate knowledge that means I've memorized the book? For example, being able to answer yes/no questions about what's on a particular page? The point I'm trying to make here is that in this situation I have a representation of the entire book in my brain. Haven't I copied it into my neurons?
  - nhinck2 3y ago
    Do you profit from people testing your ability to memorise the book and give them the ability to substantially recreate the original work and act in competition to the original author?
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      Do LLM providers?
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Profiting from the act is not a requirement for it to be copyright infringement.
  - romwell 3y ago
    When ChatGPT gets agency regarding what goes into training data and what doesn't, gets paid minimum wage for the work it does, and can be held liable for violations of the law, your question will be very relevant. Until then...
  - PeterisP 3y ago

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] Some more discussion earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39357210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39357210

siliconc0w 3y ago

Though I think that training data is totally a violation of copyright, OpenAI really needs to win. Copyright has been unreasonably extended to the point where it's untenable and if we needed to track down rights holders and negotiate 'training rights' we'd ensure there would be no open models or competition going forward. The rights holders are going to lose this one and it's probably for the better.

tailspin2019 3y ago
> Though I think that training data is totally a violation of copyright, OpenAI really needs to win. I’d argue that that’s not really how the law is supposed to work.
- TillE 3y ago
  Ultimately it's gonna come down to new legislation, and there is just absolutely no chance of "big tech gets to exploit every copyrighted work on the planet for free". Definitely not in the US or Europe. Big media companies don't want that, zillions of small creators don't want that, the public at large has no great affection for giant tech companies getting even more power.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    > Big media companies don't want that Big Media isn't worried about you drawing Shrek or Donald Duck at home by hand or by GPT. They won't like you distributing it profitably, but they already have tools against that. They'll also like few billions coming their way but that everyone likes. Small Creator are worried about getting the next gig as AI may take away low end of the jobs, and they are not worried about copyright implications of the LLMs. General Public doesn't like Tech companies but loves the products they make, nobody stopped using early Youtube or Telegram because there was piracy happening.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  Well, the objection to current copyright laws is that those laws are not how copyright ought to work.

userbinator 3y ago

While I'm not optimistic about AI in general, if they're going to train LLMs I think they ought to use good data, and published books may on average be better for that than scraping the web. Relatedly, I wonder how many humans have ever learned anything from pirated ebooks --- in some countries, I bet that number is close to 100%.

__loam 3y ago
How humans do anything is immaterial to this question.
asadotzler 3y ago
and they can bloody well pay for that like everyone else. get a license for the content that makes your machine that makes you money. it's that simple.

maronato 3y ago

I think the real issue here is that we’re trying to apply laws made by humans for humans to something entirely new and not well understood: LLMs. This won’t be something we’ll cleanly solve using current regulation.

wilg 3y ago
I agree, but of course national legislation is like impossible now due to a certain obstructionist political party.
- snickerbockers 3y ago
  [assuming you mean America] as long as there're only two parties they're both equally obstructionist.
  - wilg 3y ago
    I do and that's wrong.
- hn_acker 3y ago
  You should be more clear about the topics of legislation in question. In matters involving internet service providers in the US, the Democratic party in Congress generally doesn't bother to propose internet laws either way, but the Republican party tends to strip away the FCC's regulatory authority and actively oppose attempts to bring a fraction back [1][2]. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ted-cruz-wants-to-stop-the-fcc-from-updating-data-breach-notification-rules/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ted-cruz-wants-t... [2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/fcc-to-halt-sign-ups-for-internet-discounts-as-republicans-threaten-funding/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/fcc-to-halt-sign... Is either party attempting to obstruct regulations on AI training or AI usage? At the moment, I don't think so [3]. [3] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/13/schumer-senate-ai-policy-00115794 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/13/schumer-senate-ai-p...
snickerbockers 3y ago
I don't see any reason why LLMs need their own laws, fundamentally it's just another computer program.

bigbacaloa 3y ago

[dead]

naskwo 3y ago

How is this different from the authors of (business book) seeking royalties from (bigtech CEO) because he/she ingested knowledge (training) from this book? Humankind needs to build on top of each other’s knowledge to keep evolving.

alexey-salmin 3y ago
Well the first difference is that copyright doesn't protect ideas, only specific texts and their reproduction.
snickerbockers 3y ago
Well the biggest difference is that we're not talking about people in this case. We can actually just discriminate against computer programs, they have no rights and they don't even have the agency to act on their own behalf. They're just tools. >Humankind needs to build on top of each other’s knowledge to keep evolving. I agree, but that's never stopped copyright law in the past. What's frustrating is that copyright law is suddenly up for debate now that the copyrights in question predominantly belong to individuals rather than large corporations, an what's really frustrating is that it seems they want to carve out an exemption for this one specific case instead of reforming copyright law.

Aachen 3y ago

> Arguing that OpenAI caused economic injury by unfairly repurposing authors' works, even if authors could show evidence of a DMCA violation, authors could only speculate about what injury was caused That's an interesting angle I hadn't seen coming, but it makes sense: the system isn't reliable enough to output a book proper, so you'd never use it to read a book (can't ask it to output lord of the rings page 47 ... yet), and summaries were always okay to post as far as I know So if I post excerpts of books that neither I nor the querier has a license for when they guess/engineer a search query, even if that (with lots of effort) can amount to the whole book, that's apparently not causing any economic injury to the author. It's not ruled to not be copyright infringement yet, so maybe you can force removal from the market but you can't be awarded damages as I understand it? Separately, I'm a bit surprised the authors haven't done much in the way of discovery and just alleged baselsssly that OpenAI's training process removed copyright notices. The judge says it's unsubstantiated and there's even counter-evidence. Wouldn't it be a simple matter to subpoena a list of works/sources that were used and under which license? That would also be interesting to learn for others working in the field

alexey-salmin 3y ago
> Arguing that OpenAI caused economic injury by unfairly repurposing authors' works, even if authors could show evidence of a DMCA violation, authors could only speculate about what injury was caused Funny that inability to prove speculated injuries didn't stop judges from ordering people to pay hundreds of thousands in damages in piracy cases

thinkingemote 3y ago

I wonder if this will lead to Google using Google Books (40 million books) in their LLM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Legal_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Legal_issues

richardjam73 3y ago

I think the real problem with the lawsuit is that it doesn't financially matter. If I want to read a Stephen King novel I'm not going to ask chatgpt for it. Why get a mangled version when you can get a proper copy? It won't affect book sales.