No, actually, because that would give access to copyrighted material and place it in the public domain.
The reality is that Meta should be required to pay a fine to the authors or right's holders for every piece of material they accessed illegally.
Again, an LLM itself does not contain copyrighted material. It is basically a collection of facts ABOUT the copyrighted material (mostly 'what word probably follows this other word' but still is not the copyrighted material itself). Placing the LLM into the public domain would not give access to the copyrighted material used to build it.
And while perhaps Meta
should be required to pay a fine to the rights holders for every piece of material they accessed illegally, even locating all of the rights holders would be an impossible task (since even if we can identify the authors of each piece of copyrighted material they infringed upon, we have to track down each author AND if copyright was transferred, such as in the case of a work-for-hire, we have to figure out to whom the copyright was transferred including in cases where copyright may have been transferred multiple times), much less compensating them. In the ideal world, yes, this works. In the real world, where it is often difficult to locate rights-holders for even a
single work, let alone identify all of them for a number of works on this scale, this is simply not feasible. Idealism is great, but in practical cases, it must bow to reality. Deleting every copy of the LLM might be ideal, but is likewise infeasible. If the data exists in more than one place (e.g., backups) someone is going to have a copy somewhere. It's impossible to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
In lieu of $impossible fines, the outcome that is at least reasonably
possible would be the corporate death penalty for Meta with all of its intellectual property assets being forfeited to the public domain. Possible? Sure. Likely? No.
However, the most likely outcome I see based on my observations of how our legal system actually works in my lifetime is that Meta stalls this to death with their lawyers, pays a relative pittance to settle the suit, the class action lawyers get most of the proceeds of the settlement and individual authors can sign up to receive a couple of bucks, and no real punishment happens. It's
not right. It's
not ethical. It's
not fair. But it
is what my cynical self expects to see happen.
