Comment by yokem55
6 months ago
> As much as people bandy the term around, copyright has never applied to input, and the output of a tool is the responsibility of the end user.
Where this breaks down though is that contributory infringement is a still a thing if you offer a service aids in copyright infringement and you don't do "enough" to stop it.
Ie, it would all be on the end user for folks that self host or rent hardware and run an LLM or Gen Art AI model themselves. But folks that offer a consumer level end to end service like ChatGPT or MidJourney could be on the hook.
Right, strictly speaking, the vast majority of copyright infringement falls under liability tort.
There are cases where infringement by negligence that could be argued, but as long as there is clear effort to prevent copying in the output of the tool, then there is no tort.
If the models are creating copies inadvertently and separately from the efforts of the end users deliberate efforts then yes, the creators of the tool would likely be the responsible party for infringement.
If I ask an LLM for a story about vampires and the model spits out The Twilight Saga, that would be problematic. Nor should the model reproduce the story word for word on demand by the end user. But it seems like neither of these examples are likely outcomes with current models.
The piratebay crew was convicted of aiding copyright infringement. In that case you could not download derivates from their service. Now you can get verbatim text from the models that any other traditional publisher would have to pay license to print even a reworded copy of.
With that said, Creative Commons showed that copyright can not be fixed it is broken.