Comment by mattigames
15 hours ago
Copyright was build to protect the artist from unauthorized copy by a human not by a machine (a machine wildly beyond their imagination at the time I mean), so the input and output limitations of humans were absolutely taken into account when writing such laws, if LLMs were treated in similar fashion authors would have had a say in wether their works can be used as inputs in such models or if they forbid it.
This reply doesn’t seem to relate to either of the points I made.
Yes it does, the spirit of the law matters in many one cases. A fair ruling would have declared that authors must be able to forbid the usage of their work as training data for any given model because the "transformative" processes that are being executed are wildly beyond what the writers of the law knew were even possible at the time of the writing of such laws.
> Copyright was build to protect the artist from unauthorized copy by a human not by a machine (a machine wildly beyond their imagination at the time I mean), so the input and output limitations of humans were absolutely taken into account when writing such laws
Copyright law was spurred by the spread of the printing press, a machine which has ability to output full replicas. It does not assume human-like input/output limitations.
> A fair ruling would have declared that authors must be able to forbid the usage of their work as training data for any given model because the "transformative" processes that are being executed are wildly beyond what the writers of the law knew were even possible
Copyright's basis in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Declaring a transformative use illegal because it's so novel would seem to run directly counter to that.
To my understanding it's generally the opposite (a pre-existing use with an established market that the rightsholder had expected to exploit) that would weigh against a finding of fair use.
The spirit of the law matters, but there are limits to how much existing statutes can be stretched to cover novel scenarios. Seems to me like new laws may be necessary to keep up (whatever the people would prefer them to be).
I made two points:
- It is not accurate to describe training as “encoding works into the model”.
– A model cannot recreate a Harry Potter book.
Neither of these have anything to do with “the spirit of the law”.
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