[mukesh610]

IMO fair use is still not a strong argument for Microsoft. They commercialized the product and made money out of it.

Fair use is only allowed if the work you're doing is purely for the greater good. I might be wrong though, IANAL.

[chrismorgan]

You are wrong, though public interest is certainly the basis of the purpose of fair use doctrine. But the simplest way of demonstrating that fair use still allows commercialisation is probably this example: search engines absolutely depend on fair use if they include any content from the linked pages. (And some countries have even tried to call the act of linking copyright infringement, though they’ve tended to back off at least a little, to requiring at least the title or other content for it to be infringement, and not just the URL.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use, lots of good reading there.

[LtWorf]

Search engines link to the original website

[elondaits]

It might be a problem to treat it as copyright. Copyright applies to reproduction, distribution, public performance... if I go to a library or bookstore and I read books and look at their covers, copyright does not apply. Would an android that walks around learning things be subject to copyright? To what extent does it need a body and mobility to be more like a person and less as a scraper?

It might seem stupid, but I worry that if copyright begins applying to "mining" then the next thing is that it applies to humans watching things.

Of course, if an AI re-creates copyrighted content, copyright should apply. Just like it applies when I redraw and sell the Mona Lisa, but not when I store it in my memory. I would pass on the responsibility to users. I don't fear my use of Github Copilot because it's far from infringing any reasonable copyright... then again, I'm assuming the most likely way to infringe copyright with GPT is to use a prompt that almost explicitly requests it.

[chrismorgan]

Funny thing is that recreations are not necessarily covered by copyright law. The clearest example of this is fonts, where (using imprecise terminology but I think it’ll be clear enough) the US only grants copyright protection to font files, but not the shapes—so tracing a commercial font is perfectly legal, even if you happened to end up with an identical result (though good luck proving to a court that that’s what you did).

[rockemsockem]

I mean, today it's pretty easy to prove that if you're setting out to copy one of these fonts. Just film the whole process and upload it to YouTube.