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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9371976" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not sure how they did it but the key point is that as far as I know they obtained all the data legally.  The point I was making was that merely obtaining an electronic copy doesn't violate copyright or everyone's browser cache would make them a felon.  Fair enough.  At least I admit you have an interesting perspective.No data set is creative, transformative, or fair use in and of itself.  That would be like calling a book I bought in the book store creative, transformative, or fair use.  Obviously it isn't, but also at the same time that's nonsense because those terms are applied to derivative works.  It's not clear to be the data set is a derivative work.  The question is whether they acquired the data set legally.  As far as I know they did.   They certainly wouldn't have the right to distribute that data set or sell it, but the data set itself - which I admit I haven't really given much thought to - doesn't strike me as critical to the discussion.  I think we both agree they would have had a right to read the data or look at the data.  I always assumed that they just picked a bunch of things on the internet to scan which they could legally read and then did so.  It would be interesting if the terms of service of any of those sites at the time specifically blocked the use of data for machine training, but I doubt it unless there was some blanket prohibition against using the text as the basis of scientific research.  No one was thinking about those things at the time.  No one was regularly saying anything in their terms of service like, "Sign here if you agree when accessing this information not to use it to train an AI."Even then we wouldn't really be talking about copyright violation.  We'd be discussing a breach of contract or theft of services (say you obtained all of NY Times archives without paying them for the access).So then the question is whether creating a value added product from the data they could legally read was a violation of copyright.  And then, I think that gets back to the question of whether the product they made was creative, transformative, or fair use.  But earlier you said: "One can argue the neural network isn't violating any copyrights if it doesn't have anything to copy. So, for the sake of argument, let's not even talk about that."  Whether they should or not is a different question.  What I'm asserting is that it was not a copyright violation, and at the time the law was silent on whether they should get permission to use copyrighted works in that manner.  Again, the law is pretty silent about reading copyrighted works, and focuses on the distribution of them or on derivative works - that is whether plagiarism has occurred.  And in this case they didn't distribute a copy of the works and the derived works are not in the general case plagiarism (and where they are the case in my opinion is against the individual work, not language or image model itself).   Whether or not someone ought to think hard about this and write some laws around this to protect intellectual property holders I'm not sure because I'm not sure in the general case if that actually benefits society or is enforceable, but I have been saying for about two decades that we ought to be more forward thinking and start preparing the law for the inevitable AI revolution when it happens and I do have some thoughts about that.  And look, the inevitable AI revolution has started and we aren't legally ready for it.  Worse is probably yet to come.</blockquote>

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