| Reminder: don't take the terms "Science" and "useful Arts" to mean today's understanding of them. > [the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. ... > Some terms in the clause are used in archaic meanings, potentially confusing modern readers. For example, "useful Arts" does not refer to artistic endeavors, but rather to the work of artisans, people skilled in a manufacturing craft; "Sciences" refers not only to fields of modern scientific inquiry but rather to all knowledge. "Science" refers to knowledge, and conveying that knowledge entails creative expression. Copyright covers expression of knowledge; facts and ideas themselves are not copyrightable. "useful Arts" refers to inventions. Patents cover useful inventions and novel implementations of practical ideas, not creative expression and not unimplemented ideas. (Which is one reason most software patents shouldn't have been granted.) Congress's authority to make copyright law and patent law is conditional on promoting the spread and advancement of knowledge, creativity, and inventions in the long term. The means of achieving that end is short-term restrictions on how people can use others' creative works and useful inventions. But copyright does not prohibit mere usage of someone else's creative works [2]: > To win a claim of copyright infringement in civil or criminal court, a plaintiff must show he or she owns a valid copyright, the defendant actually copied the work, and the level of copying amounts to misappropriation. If the output of an AI model is not similar to any creative work in the training set, then the output cannot infringe on copyright. And even where the training set contains illegally obtained materials, the act of illegally obtaining those materials has nothing to do with including legally obtained materials in the training set. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity#Substan... |