| > You can't blindly sue anyone who uses LLMs.
Correct, that has been established as a strawman that is frequently used on HN. >In an even greater misunderstanding of the American legal system, you're using the Sony case to argue that you would win court cases against LLM users. Not at all. I said this is the only actual path for the companies to survive, if they can thread that legal needle. The users do not get the benefit of this. The FBI spent the better part of 3 decades busting small time pirates reproducing VHS tapes using perfectly legal (as per the case I quoted) tape decks. Notice, not everybody has won this challenge, the Sony case merely shows you how high you have to jump. Many companies have been found liable for producing a tool or service whose primary use is to commit crimes or other illegal acts. Companies that literally bent over backwards to comply with the law still got absolutely screwed, see what happened to Megaupload, and all they did was provide an encrypted offsite file storage system, and complied with all applicable laws promptly and without challenge. Absolutely nothing stops the AI companies from being railroaded like that. However, I believe that they will attempt a Sony-like ruling to save their bacon, but throw their users under the bus. >the established precedent is in fact the opposite of what you want to do, Nope, just want to sue the code pirates. Everyone else can go enjoy their original AI slop as long as it comes from a 100% legally trained model and everybody keeps their hands clean. >and are now trying to back up and reduce that claim No, I literally just gave the Sony case as an example of reducing the claim into the other direction. The companies may in fact find a way to weasel out of this, but the users never will. Another counter-example, btw, not that you asked for one, is Napster. Napster was ordered by a court to shut down their service as it's primary use was to facilitate piracy. While it is most likely OpenAI et al. will try to Sony their way out, they could end up like Napster instead, or worse, end up like Megaupload. >everyone is guilty of infringement until proven innocent. Although you are saying this in plain language, this is largely how copyright cases work in the US, even though, in theory, it should be innocent until proven guilty. However, that exact phrase is only meaningful in criminal cases. It is much more loose in civil cases, and the bar for winning a civil case is much lower. Usually in a copyright case, the copyright owner is usually the plantiff (although not always!), and copyright owner plantiffs usually win these cases, even in cases where they really shouldn't have. >Continuing this discussion feels pointless. Yes it really does. Many people on HN clearly think it is okay to copyright-wash through LLMs, and that the output of LLMs are magically free of infringement by some unexplained handwaving. You still have not explained how a user can have an LLM reproduce a copyrighted work, and then distribute it, and somehow the copyright owners cannot sue everyone involved, which is standard practice in such cases. |
This is where your entire argument falls apart. You can't sue people just for using a tool that has the capability to violate copyright: you actually have to prove they did so. While it's technically true that you don't need to meet the bar of "proof" for civil cases, you're still not in luck: the bar is "preponderance of evidence," which you don't have if you're just blindly suing people based on using an LLM (and zero actual evidence of infringement). Using an LLM isn't illegal, so evidence that they used an LLM isn't evidence of anything that matters to your case: aka, you have nothing.
All of your other examples similarly fall apart. For Napster cases, the RIAA had to show people actually violated copyright, not that they just had Napster installed or used it for non-copyrighted works. And again, you're trying to motte-and-bailey your way out of your original claim that you could blindly sue LLM users, as opposed to training companies who make the models. You couldn't sue Megaupload users who used Megaupload for random file storage — you could only sue Megaupload for knowingly not complying with copyright law.
You really just don't understand the legal system. I'm not going to respond to this thread anymore. If you think you have a free money cheat code, go ahead and try to use it — you'll fail.