At this point, what I'm afraid is the justice system will be just an instrument in this all Us vs. Them debate, so their decisions will not be bound by law or legality.
Speculations aside, from what I understood, something like this shouldn't hold a drop of water under fair-use doctrine, because there's a disproportional damage, plus a huge monopolistic monetary gain because of what they did and how they did.
On the other hand, I don't believe that Deepseek used OpenAI (in any capacity or way or method) to develop their models, but again, it doesn't matter how they did it in this current conjecture.
What they successfully did was to upset a bunch of high level people, regardless of the technical things they achieved.
IMHO, AI war has similar dynamics to MAD. The best way is not to play, but we are past the Rubicon now. Future looks dirty.
> from what I understood, something like this shouldn't hold a drop of water under fair-use doctrine, because there's a disproportional damage, plus a huge monopolistic monetary gain
"Something like this" as in what DeepSeek allegedly did, or the web-scraping done by both of them?
For what DeepSeek allegedly did, OpenAI wouldn't have a copyright infringement case against them because the US copyright office determined that AI-generated content is not protected by copyright - and so there's no need here for DeepSeek to invoke fair use. It'll instead be down to whether they agreed to and breached OpenAI's contract.
For the web-scraping it's more complicated. Fair use is determined by the weighing of multiple factors - commercial use and market impact are considered, but do not alone preclude a fair use defense. Machine learning models do seem, at least to me, highly transformative - and "the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors".
Additionally, since the market impact factor is the effect of the use of the copyrighted work on the market for that work, I'd say there's a reasonable chance it does not actually include what you may expect it to. For instance if you're a translator suing Google Translate for being trained on your translated book, the impact may not be "how much the existence of Google Translate reduced my future job prospects" nor even "how many fewer people paid for my translated book because of the existence of Google Translate" but rather "how many fewer people paid for my translated book than would have had that book been included in the training data" - which is likely very minor.
Speculations aside, from what I understood, something like this shouldn't hold a drop of water under fair-use doctrine, because there's a disproportional damage, plus a huge monopolistic monetary gain because of what they did and how they did.
On the other hand, I don't believe that Deepseek used OpenAI (in any capacity or way or method) to develop their models, but again, it doesn't matter how they did it in this current conjecture.
What they successfully did was to upset a bunch of high level people, regardless of the technical things they achieved.
IMHO, AI war has similar dynamics to MAD. The best way is not to play, but we are past the Rubicon now. Future looks dirty.