Comment by drdaeman

> I agree with that, however that doesn't make the output copyrightable then.

It could be - databases are copyrightable. It's long established that if you put some effort into categorizing and processing information, you get rights for that work. Basically, you can get rights a phone book or a map, even if individual bits are not copyrightable. You can also get rights on a compilation or a catalog of other copyrighted works - although original authors' rights remain. But - there's a legal trick to avoid a liability even if you infringe: fair use doctrine.

> where they can take any content they want, put it into the mixer without caring about copyright and then what comes out of it is somehow copyrighted.

Yes. It's not a legal fantasy, though - that's what they had actually pulled off, as far as I understand it (and, again, IANAL, just a layman who's interested in this stuff a little bit). They argued their work is so highly transformative to allow fair use doctrine to shield from liability on copyright infringement claims. And courts seemed to agree, making this fantasy a reality. Just because that's how legal system works.

Model is still a derived work (AFAIK there's no legal way to clear that) of all the books and articles and whatever else is copyrightable (plus a ton more of non-copyrightable stuff), but there's no liability for training on all that stuff, because courts had ruled - and that happens on a case-per-case basis - that it falls under fair use.

And there's the difference: now Anthropic argues that copying the behavior verbatim is not transformative enough to shield Alibaba from liability by invoking fair use. Now it's up to the courts (if they sue and don't just do the PR dances) to check it out.

Disclaimer: first, I'm not a legal expert, and second - I'm not arguing whether anything is right or wrong, just mapping what happened or being argued to what I know about copyright.