Technology

At the bottom of the document, the Library of Congress approves all recommendations and adopts them as legal defenses against copyright claims. This is established law, not merely recommendations.

Thank you for the clarification.

Their use and nature are distinctly similar to that of a searchable database described in Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust and Authors Guild v. Google (the legal strength is even greater here, since LLM outputs are creative, and do not provide ‘copied’ expressions as a matter of course - fringe cases not withstanding), and as such we have no reason to expect they’d view it differently in the case of an LLM. Training data is a utilitarian precursor to an expressive tool, as repeatedly affirmed as fair use in existing precedent.

This is indeed a complicated subject, and thank you again for your insight. These are very good example cases, because Google's searchable book database is exactly the same as the training databases LLM's use to develop their transform nodes.

The difference between the Authors Guild cases and this one, as I see it, is that Google and HathiTrust are acting to preserve information and art for future generations - there is an inherent benefit to society front and centre with their goals. With LLM's, the goal is to develop a commercial product. Yes, people can use it for free (right now) but ultimately they expect to sell access and profit from it. Also, no one else gets access to their training database, it is kept as some sort of trade secret.

for once, you are correct that this is not established law

Yay!

My perspective is that precedent supports training data for LLM’s as a fair use, and that strengthening copyright in the way proposed does not mitigate the harm being claimed by plaintiffs, and in fact increases harm to the greater public by gatekeeping access to automation tools and consolidating the benefits to already gigantic companies.

I wouldn't want to restrict or gatekeep access to art for genuine fair purpose uses. I agree with the Authors Guild rulings in those circumstances, I just disagree that LLM's are a similar enough circumstance that LLM's deserve the same exemption with how they're developed.

I really have to stress again that the issues and concerns being raised over AI cannot be sufficiently addressed through the use of copyright law.

I agree. Certainly, not copyright law as it exists right now, and even then there are so many aspects of the use of AI that fall well oustide the scope of copyright law.

Ultimately, my gripe is that a commercial business has used copyrighted work to develop a product without paying the rightsholders. Their product is their own unique creation, but the copyrighted work their product learned from was not. The training database they've used is not "research" because it is not scholarly; even if it were research, it is highly commercial in nature and as such does not warrant a fair use exemption.