Comment by shrubble
6 months ago
Let’s say my AI company is training an AI on woodworking books and at the end, it will describe in text and wireframe drawings (but not the original or identical photos) how to do a particular task.
If I didn’t license all the books I trained on, am I not depriving the publisher of revenue, given people will pay me for the AI instead of buying the book?
Copyright doesn’t cover facts and methods. It specifically covers creative expressions. That’s why patents are different from copyright. If you read some woodworking books and then write your own online tutorial about building a chair using the methods and procedures described in that book, it doesn’t matter that you now compete with the books that you used, provided you didn’t copy the creative elements. How much of a chair design is creative and how much is function is an ambiguous question that might still land you in court, but it won’t be over your right to make the tutorial in the first place.
As the judge noted in this ruling, copyright isn’t intended to protect authors from competition. Copyright doesn’t protect Rowling from other authors writing YA wizard books cutting into her revenue streams. Or from TV producers making YA wizard shows that reduce the demand for books. Copyright doesn’t protect the Tolkien estate from Terry Brooks, or Tracy Hickman or Margret Weiss reducing the demand for Tolkien fantasy by supplanting it with their own fantasies.
The same argument applies to someone who learned from the book and wrote an article explaining the idea to someone else.
If you paid a human author to do the same you’d be breaking no law. Learning is the point of books existing in the first place.
Humans learning, not machines learning is the point of books.