[dragonwriter]

> a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing

The amount of the source material encoded does not, alone, determine if it is infringing, so this noun phrase doesn't actually mean anything. I know there are some popular myths that contradict this (the commonly-believed "30-second rule" for music, for instance), but they are just that, myths.

[fallingknife]

But there is the issue of whether there are damages. If my LLM can reproduce 10 random paragraphs of a Harry Potter book, it's obvious that nobody would have otherwise purchased the book if they couldn't read those 10 paragraphs. So there will not be any damages to the publisher and the lawsuit will be tossed. There is a threshold of how much of it needs to be reproduced, and how closely, but it's a subjective standard and not some hard line like if it's > 50%.

[dragonwriter]

> But there is the issue of whether there are damages.

Not if there isn't infringement. Infringement is a question that precedes damages, since "damages" are only those harms that are attributable to the infringement. And infringement is an act, not an object.

If training a general use LLM on books isn't infringement (as this decision holds), then there by definition cannot be damages stemming from it; the amount of the source material that the model file "contains" doesn't matter.

It might matter to whether it is possible for a third party to easily use the model for something that would be infringement on the part of the third party, but that would become a problem for people who use it for infringement, not the model creator, and not for people who simply possess a copy of the model. The model isn't "an infringing object".