> If it contains the copyrighted material, copyright laws apply.
Not so fast! That hasn't been tested in court or given any sort of recommendation by any of the relevant IP bodies.
And to play devil's advocate here: your brain also contains an enormous amount of copyrighted content. I'm glad the lawyers aren't lobotomizing us and demanding licensing fees on our memories.
I'm pretty sure if you asked me to sit under an MRI and recall scenes from movies like "Jurassic Park", my visual cortex would reconstruct scenes with some amount of fidelity to the original. I shouldn't owe that to Universal. (In a perfect world, they would owe me for imprinting and storing their memetic information in my mind. Ad companies and brands should for sure.)
If I say, "One small step for man", I'm pretty confident that the lot of you would remember Armstrong's exact voice, the exact noise profile of the recording, with the precise equipment beeps. With almost exacting recall.
I'm also pretty sure your brains can remember a ginormous amount of music. I know I can. And when I'm given a prediction task (eg. listening to a song I already know), I absolutely know what's coming before it hits.
A better analogy is memorized poems or music and I think there's actually considerabe case law on whether performing songs infringe on the author's copyright.
Movies are maybe less intuitive because most people won't reproduce a movie. There supposedly are people with "photographic memories" for example. And infringement is possibly not so much the capacity as what is actually done. Someone with a photographic memory could duplicate a movie but unless they actually do their capacity is not infringement. But you also have to consider that if it was viewed "lawfully" in the first place then the copyright holder has decided to let people view them. So the act of a brain seeing Jurassic Park is what the copyright holder authorized. Generally I don't think copyright holders have agreed to have LLM ingest their works.
Plays and opera are maybe more similar, because people to copy productions etc. But those don't feature encryption so the blob of unknown data doesn't feature in the analogy.
> considerabe case law on whether performing songs infringe on the author's copyright
But then you're no longer talking about "contains copyrighted material" you're talking about "actively reproduces copyrighted material in an immediately recognizable form".
> Generally I don't think copyright holders have agreed to have LLM ingest their works.
Aren't you essentially speculating about whether or not the training data was obtained in compliance with IP law?
The law should allow for training, but not reproduction. That would be compatible with the world that seems to be emerging.
You can train on Disney, but you can't produce Disney outputs.
Likewise, if you create some new IP using AI, the US will confer copyright so long as there was sufficient user input (eg. inpainting, editing, turning it into a long-form movie, etc.) Those new, sufficiently novel works should also be copyrightable.
Copyright should compel people to make good stuff and reward them when they do so. But it shouldn't hinder technological progress. There's a balance that can be struck.
> I'm glad the lawyers aren't lobotomizing us and demanding licensing fees on our memories.
Don't give Disney any ideas!
On a more serious and maybe paranoid note, I'm pretty confident that once we have the technology to apply DRM to people's brains, they will. After all, every time we remember something copyrighted we are stealing their valuable IP.
Not so fast! That hasn't been tested in court or given any sort of recommendation by any of the relevant IP bodies.
And to play devil's advocate here: your brain also contains an enormous amount of copyrighted content. I'm glad the lawyers aren't lobotomizing us and demanding licensing fees on our memories.
I'm pretty sure if you asked me to sit under an MRI and recall scenes from movies like "Jurassic Park", my visual cortex would reconstruct scenes with some amount of fidelity to the original. I shouldn't owe that to Universal. (In a perfect world, they would owe me for imprinting and storing their memetic information in my mind. Ad companies and brands should for sure.)
If I say, "One small step for man", I'm pretty confident that the lot of you would remember Armstrong's exact voice, the exact noise profile of the recording, with the precise equipment beeps. With almost exacting recall.
I'm also pretty sure your brains can remember a ginormous amount of music. I know I can. And when I'm given a prediction task (eg. listening to a song I already know), I absolutely know what's coming before it hits.