alt Hacker NewsI think you've basically got the legal theory. Training a neural network isn't prohibited by copyright law so if you can legally get your hands on something (e.g. by sending a GET request to someone with rights to serve the contents of their web page, or by buying a book) without signing a contract to not train on it, you can train on it.
But the American AI companies only let you query their models if you first sign a contract to not train on the output.
It's hypocrisy and unfair, but I think there's a strong legal argument for it.
Of course China can simply decline to assist in enforcing that contract... But I would expect US courts to do their best to.
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The penalties for breach of contract are much less than for copyright infringement. Breaching contracts and paying the penalties is often a viable business strategy. You're supposed to make the other side whole for any losses they incurred due to you not following it.
> It's hypocrisy and unfair, but I think there's a strong legal argument for it.
That right there is the problem.
> but I think there's a strong legal argument for it.
Maybe today. I doubt it tomorrow. Legal and not legal, largely, has to answer to the population sooner or later. Ultimately, humanity decides legality. And I don't think the frontier labs will get a pass from humanity in the midterm, let alone the long term. I think you'll see the rules change towards something more "intent" driven. And there's absolutely no difference in intent between Frontier labs and everyone chasing them.
Frontier labs just want the door closed behind them, as do their investors, because they know the money will never be recouped if others can do the same magic tricks.
Eh, I think you've done a pretty good job summarizing a collection of settlements with a few narrow bench rulings for seasoning. I'm not sure I follow you to it being a coherent legal theory. Buying a book in a bookstore is sure legal, and excerpting from it for e.g. literary criticism is pretty settled. Downloading every torrent of all e-books ever is pretty clearly illegal (or at least it fuckin would be if I did it). Pretty sure like, multiple labs have been popped for that though.
Situation right now seems more like a fragile detente: if you got a Hill staffer drunk and hounded him long enough he'd probably be like "God damnit the market will fucking tank if we don't get these two IPOs out north of a trillion. And don't even get me started on how I'm going to sell Chinese AI to a Senate that still calls people Nipponesians when no one is looking. We're doing the best we can alright, get off my back man."
We have a situation, but it's not exactly A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster.
> to someone with rights to serve the contents
Now THAT'S doing some heavy lifting lmao. The vast, vast, VAST majority of the original datasets were from pirated books and the like. Also, arguably a robots.txt is the exact mechanism to follow to do the mass GET-ing, yet the AI cos choose time and time and time again to simply ignore it and be as abusive as they possibly fucking can