this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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There's a big difference between borrowing inspiration and just using entire paragraphs of text or images wholesale. If GRRM uses entire paragraphs of JK Rowling with just the names changed and uses the same cover with a few different colors you have the same fight. LLM can do the first, but also does the second.
The "in the style of" is a different issue that's being debated, as style isn't protected by law. But apparently if you ask in the style of, the LLM can get lazy and produces parts of the (copyrighted) source material instead of something original.
Just as with the right query you could get a LLM to output a paragraph of copyrighted material, you can with the right query get Google to give you a link to copyrighted material. Does that make all search engines illegal?
Legally it's very different. One is a link, the other content. It's the same difference as pointing someone to the street where the dealers hang out or opening your coat and asking how many grams they want.
Websites that provide links to copyrighted material are illegal in the US. It's why torrent sites are taken down and need to be hosted in countries with different copyright laws .
So Google can be used to pirate but that's not it's intention. It requires careful queries to get Google to show pirate links. Making a tool that could be used for unintentional copyright violation illegal makes all search engines illegal.
It could even make all programming languages illegal. I could use C to write a program to add two numbers or to crawl the web and return illegal movies.
Oh. Linking and even downloading torrents is legal in my place. Hosting and sharing is not. My bad.
From how I understand it is that the copyright holders want the LLM to do at least the same as Google is doing against torrents: it checks so no parts of the source material is in the output.