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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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From 17 USC 101

“Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

Thus an LLM which can reproduce a copyrighted work is a copy of it, regardless of whether it is "generating" it or not.

According to your interpretation a pencil and a blank notebook would be a copy of a copyrighted work - it is entirely possible to use that pencil to write down a copy of the script to a recent Hollywood movie, which means that any blank piece of media is effectively a copy of any copyrighted work which can be expressed upon it.

No, the blank notebook is clearly not a copy of a copyrighted work, until you actually write down the script; the work is not fixed in it. There's no way to get the blank notebook to reproduce the copyrighted work without putting it on the notebook yourself. If you could write "The Fabelmans" at the top of the blank notebook and the rest of the script would appear, THEN you could validly argue the (apparently) blank notebook is a copy of a copyrighted work.

I don't think there's actually a distinction here. From my experience working and experimenting with ChatGPT, actually getting it to write down the original script of something like that without errors or hallucinations is much more involved than just writing the name at the top of the page. You can make ChatGPT recreate a script with a bunch of wrangling but I just don't see as much of a distinction between doing that and just writing out the script with a pen and paper. I don't see a way to get from trained ChatGPT to Actual, Accurate Copy of a Script that doesn't also incriminate blank paper.

I don't think there's actually a distinction here.

That's utterly ridiculous. There's an enormous difference between a device that will display a copy of a work after someone writes the work onto it and one which will do so if you just ask it. For the purpose of copyright law, errors and hallucinations don't matter if the result is close enough; a slightly corrupted copy is still a copy.

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