| > Or to put it simply: using copyrighted material to create a model would NOT be considered fair use. The more I think about it, the more something along these lines seems like it might be the right way to think about it. When you play a DVD, for example, you copy the bits off the DVD, into the memory of your DVD player, and onto your screen; this is all explicitly considered "fair use" copying. But if you then copied those fair-use bits off the screen onto a thousand other screens, that violates copyright. When you, as the human watch the DVD, bits of it get copied into your brain; but you don't then copy the bits of your brain to millions of other people -- they each have to make their own copy. We could make the law for LLMs follow a similar logic: That having an LLM watch a video or read a text is similar to having a DVD player read a DVD or a web browser copy information from a website. It's good for that limited use case, but the resulting copy cannot be copied again without a license. This would allow (say) researchers, or even individuals, to do their own training and so on without a license; but when anyone wanted to create something that they wanted to scale up, they'd have to get licenses for everything. That would fundamentally keep things balanced as they are now with creators and other creators. The big problem isn't that a handful of other creators may be copying their style; that growth in competition is limiting because of the expense of duplication. It's that millions of electronic engines can copy their style. |
If you ripped The Little Mermaid, redrew every frame to combine it with The Fresh Prince of Bell-Air and moved things around in scenes to make it look like Ariel is Will Smith responding to sit-com dialogue, then it'd be fair use, regardless of how many people you show this new version to.
Fair use isn't about how or why you're doing with something. The definitions for fair use are very clearly laid out at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107