This is more about what you can DO with something you legally purchased. Think film rights. If you want to use a song in your movie, you can’t just go to Tower Records and buy the CD. Buying the CD gives you a right to listen to that CD, but it does not give you the right to use it in your movie.
Likewise, this court argues, having legal access to a work does not give you the right to feed it into an LLM as training data.
It’s a bit like the Muppet Show. The Muppet Show was a bunch of puppets singing along with musical pop stars of the day. But because the show was produced before VHS and DVD were a thing, none of the artists had given permission for them to re-release the show on DVD. So re-releasing the Muppet Show was a tedious process of negotiation with every rights holder (made much less tedious by being purchased by Disney).
But I absolutely hear you and am currently training a small LLM on my favorite TV, movies, and music. Have I started the actual training yet? No. I don’t see the need until I’ve filled up this 15TB HDD with training data so I can do it all in one pass.
So it is still legal for me to pirate anything I want as long as i train a small ass AI model on the side with it?
Remember to clone a repo for an AI for plausible deniability.
When ask why your consuming the copyrighted material simply say you’re in the quality control phase.
This would be a separate issue from piracy
This is more about what you can DO with something you legally purchased. Think film rights. If you want to use a song in your movie, you can’t just go to Tower Records and buy the CD. Buying the CD gives you a right to listen to that CD, but it does not give you the right to use it in your movie.
Likewise, this court argues, having legal access to a work does not give you the right to feed it into an LLM as training data.
It’s a bit like the Muppet Show. The Muppet Show was a bunch of puppets singing along with musical pop stars of the day. But because the show was produced before VHS and DVD were a thing, none of the artists had given permission for them to re-release the show on DVD. So re-releasing the Muppet Show was a tedious process of negotiation with every rights holder (made much less tedious by being purchased by Disney).
But I absolutely hear you and am currently training a small LLM on my favorite TV, movies, and music. Have I started the actual training yet? No. I don’t see the need until I’ve filled up this 15TB HDD with training data so I can do it all in one pass.
Seems more narrow than that. If your “AI” just copies the input almost verbatim, then it’s not “transformative”.
Unfortunately they still seem to regard the big players’ consumption as “transformative” enough to not count.