[electricmonk]

IANYL - This is not legal advice.

As you may be aware, a counter-notice that meets the statutory requirements will result in reinstatement unless Meta sues over it. So the question isn't so much whether your counter-notice covers all the potential defenses as whether Meta is willing to sue.

The primary hurdle you're going to face is your argument that weights are not creative works, and not copyrightable. That argument is unlikely to succeed for the the following reasons (just off the top of my head): (i) The act of selecting training data is more akin to an encyclopedia than the white pages example you used on Twitter, and encyclopedias are copyrightable as to the arrangement and specific descriptions of facts, even though the underlying facts are not; and (ii) LLaMA, GPT-N, Bard, etc, all have different weights, different numbers of parameters, different amounts of training data, and different tuning, which puts paid to the idea that there is only one way to express the underlying ideas, or that all of it is necessarily controlled by the specific math involved.

In addition, Meta has the financial wherewithal to crush you even were you legally on sound footing.

The upshot of all of this is that you may win for now if Meta doesn't want to file a rush lawsuit, but in the long run, you likely lose.

[8note]

I think the counter on those arguments is that LLM owners want to avoid arguing that the model is a derivative work of the training data.

If the LLM is a specific arrangement of the copyrighted works, it's very clearly a derivative work of them

[electricmonk]

I was not suggesting that an LLM itself consists of an arrangement of the copyrighted works comprising the training data, but that the specific selection of the copyrighted works comprising the training data is part of what differentiates one LLM from another. A strained but useful analogy might be to think of the styles of painting an artist is trained in and/or exposed to prior to creating their own art. Obvious or subtle, the art style an artist has studied would likely impact the style they develop for themself.

However, to address your point about derivative works directly, the consensus among copyright law experts appears to be that whether a particular model output is infringing depends on the standard copyright infringement analysis (and that’s regardless of the minor and correctable issue represented by memorization/overfitting of duplicate data in training sets). Only in the most unserious legal complaint (the class action filed against Midjourney, Stability AI, etc.) is the argument being made and that the models actually contain copies of the training data.

[sillysaurusx]

I just want to say that I appreciate the legal analysis. Thanks for your time.

If you ever come up with more hypothetical arguments in favor of NNs being copyrightable, please let me know. Or post them somewhere.