this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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You don't need to perform "for profit" to get sued for copyright infringement.
Is the Joker image in that article derivative or substantially similar to a copyrighted work? Is the query available to anyone who uses Midjourney? Are the training weights being copied from server-to-server behind the scenes? Were the training weights derived from copyrighted data?
Yes and none of that matters in the slightest. By that logic the Library of Babel is also copyright infringement. By that logic my memory of the movie is copyright infringing even if I don't do anything with it.
You're taking a fictional work and trying to apply real world laws to it?
Copyright assumes that Library of Babel would take up so much space as it'd be impossible to create.
Which is true. Every possible combination of letters, spaces, and characters would never fit on anything in today's universe (be it a 24 TB Hard Drive, or even a collection of thousands of them).
Secondly: any computer-generated work is automatically non-copyrighted as per US Law.
Wut? I'm talking about this website here: https://libraryofbabel.info/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
That is just a website demonstrating the concept of a famous science fiction story. Everything I said above remains true.
No storage can hold that. Its likely a computer generated system.
Any computer generated set of text cannot be copyrighted.
Finding any particular book in that "library" would require an index that is the same length / entropy as a full length book in any case. So its a stupid thought experiment to any information theorist. (I'm a Comp. Engineer by trade and have been taught numerous theoretical comp. sci. problems from Nyquist Frequencies, theories on communication, entropy and other such concepts. So this is actually well within my wheelhouse, training an expertise).
Go search for a book in there that replicates Shakespeare's Hamlet in its entirety. The only way that website could possibly work is if the link you give me has the same entropy / information space as all of Hamlet to begin with.
In the case of copyright law, the Website's code (including its text generating engine and so forth) is subject to copyright. But the Quadrillion-pages of "text" (most of which is random-gibberish) is not copyrightable.