The law hasn’t been settled yet, but I strongly suspect that the courts will rule that when an LLM memorizes an input and outputs something substantially identi

The law hasn’t been settled yet, but I strongly suspect that the courts will rule that when an LLM memorizes an input and outputs something substantially identical, that the copyright of the original is maintained. If not, then we can just bias these models toward memorization, input harry potter books or whatever, and then declare output text that’s 99.95% identical to the input to be public domain. The obvious problem this creates for groups like NetBSD is that there will be copyright trolls that leverage the lack of provenance of LLM output in order to extort people that use these tools.