[ben_w]

I don't see how it really helps?

We could pass laws requiring models to demonstrate their training sets irregardless of how the training is distributed; and conversely if this is a community-led project, those also have copyright issues to deal with (wikipedia for example).

I suspect there's also a problem in that, e.g. ten million student essays about different pages of Harry Potter can each in isolation be justified by the right to quote small fragments for critical purposes, but the collection together isn't because it quotes an entire book series.

[brookst]

I think you’re doing away with the fairness exception for criticism?

Copyright is intended to reward investment in creative works by giving sole license to distribute. It is not intended to create a monopoly on knowledge about the work.

If I can ask an LLM (or person!) “what’s the first sentence in Harry Potter?” And then “what’s the second sentence?” and so on, that does not mean they are distributing the work in competition with the rights holders.

We have gone way overboard with IP protections. The purpose of copyright is served when Rowling buys her 10th mansion. We do not need to further expand copyright to make it illegal to learn from a work or to remember it after reading.

[ben_w]

> I think you’re doing away with the fairness exception for criticism?

Perhaps, but it's more an example of the problem: something can be fine at small scale, but cause issues when everyone does it. Tragedy of the commons, but with words.

(From an even more extreme point of view, consider that an image generating AI trained on nothing but photographs taken from drones flying and androids walking all over the place would be able to create photo-realistic images of anything, irregardless of if even one single human artist's works end up in the training set, which in turn means the current concerns about "did the human artists agree to this use" will be quickly made irrelevant because there were none in the training set in the first place).

"Quantity has a quality all its own", whoever really said it first.

> Copyright is intended to reward investment in creative works by giving sole license to distribute. It is not intended to create a monopoly on knowledge about the work.

Sure, but laws change depending on economics. I can easily believe AI will lead to either much stronger or much weaker copyright laws.

Depends who is wielding the power when the change comes.

> If I can ask an LLM (or person!) “what’s the first sentence in Harry Potter?” And then “what’s the second sentence?” and so on, that does not mean they are distributing the work in competition with the rights holders.

Isn't that a description of how BitTorrent works? And The Pirate Bay is kinda infamous for "distributing the work in competition with the rights holders".

> We have gone way overboard with IP protections. The purpose of copyright is served when Rowling buys her 10th mansion. We do not need to further expand copyright to make it illegal to learn from a work or to remember it after reading.

I agree, and was already in favour of radical changes to copyright rules well before LLMs.

(That said, it's more complex because of how hit-driven lots of things are, which means that while nobody needs to defend Rowling's second billion, having looked at the distribution of book sales in the best-seller lists… most of them will/would have need/ed a second source of income to keep publishing).