alt Hacker News> If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it?
If you do not understand this make sure that you always operate within a framework of people who do because this soft of misunderstanding can cause you a world of grief.
Because you are the person shipping it, and as such regular liability applies. If I'm not the author of a book, and make a lot of copies and distribute those I'm liable for the content of that book, regardless of whether or not I hold the copyright to it. Conversely, if the original author sues because they feel their work infringes then that too is a liability that stems from the distribution.
And 'distribution' is a pretty wide term, not unlike 'interstate commerce', lots of things that you might not consider to be distribution can be classified as such in court.
Different laws do not come in packages, they apply individually, and sometimes they apply collectively but it isn't a menu where you can pick the combination that you think makes the most sense.
Oh, I do understand it - laws are contradictory and can do whatever people shout out the most that they should do (but they don't always work that way). I just think that it is extremely bad when laws work this way.
Technically when you select "copy image" instead of "copy image url" and paste that to a friend you're often committing copyright infringement. Do I think this is reasonable? Absolutely not. The same goes for this - the author should hold liability, so make the person who ends up causing the work to exist the damn author.
But nooo, we can't have that. Instead we need to have these convoluted exceptions that don't at all work how the real world works, so that lawyers can have even more work.
Besides, if we go by "the law" then we already have a court case where training an AI model is protected by fair use. But obviously that isn't satisfying enough for people, so they keep talking about how it's stealing (refer to my first sentence).
Also, this situation is going to get funny when some country decides that AI generated content does get copyright protection.