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by eschaton 6 days ago
It is misrepresentation for gain, that gain does not need to be monetary to be material. For example, it can be reputational.

It also is copyright infringement, because what the LLM “generates” are actually portions of its training set, which were covered by copyright. Just passing through an LLM does not remove that copyright from that work.

1 comments

No, you are wrong.

In German and French (roman) legal systems this is a "Vermögensdelikt", and explicitly about material damage and gain. Yes, common law can be more broad (in canada it isn't really, it just also includes service, btw.), and yet it clearly does not meet the definition, as there is a damaged/defraued party and fraudulent/gaining party. We are not talking about somebody usurping somebody else reputation, after all.

You misuse a technical term that is well established since antiquity.

You do not know what this word means. If you want to argue about semantics, look up the definition. This works especially well for legal terms as laws define them.

(That said, IANAL and there are very many different legal systems and I am not ruling out there exists one that is competently different - laws can be changed a will, after all.)

It is also obviously not copyright infringement, because this is simply not how copyright works, at all. I cannot and will explain of all copyright here. Instead I will point this out: Every code produced by a human who read copyrighted code would fall under your definition.

No, you are wrong. You are either willfully misunderstanding what I’m calling fraud, or you are misinformed as to what “material gain” means in many legal systems.

With respect to the former, “fraud” is a shorthand for “fraudulent misrepresentation,” which is what you’re doing when you take someone else’s IP and try to contribute it to a project without securing the right to do so. It can be read as implicit in the attempt to contribute to the project that you have secured this permission (or do not need to, because the work is original to you). Whether the code came out of an LLM or was copied from another project or Stack Overflow doesn’t matter, it’s that you’re misrepresenting the rights you have that’s the fraudulent part.

For the latter, I specifically pointed out that the gain from fraudulent misrepresentation need not be monetary. The gain can be reputational or any other sort of benefit. For example, someone pretending to a fictional person to gain access to a space they otherwise wouldn’t is still committing fraud.

Finally, you’re wrong about whether the output of an LLM infringes copyright of material in its training set. Just running a copyrighted work through an LLM does not remove the copyright on that work if reproduced by the LLM.