Re: Proposal -- Interpretation of DFSG on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Models

Stefano Zacchiroli <[email protected]> writes:

> AFAIK this legal theory has not been tested in court yet. But the big
> commercial players (who, remember, have vetted interests in being
> copyright absolutists) believe in it so much, that they go as far as
> offering legal indemnity promises to users of their LLMs who encounter
> legal issues due to the use of generated output.

I think that this analogy is generally not a good one: commercial
players do not have vetted interest in being copyright absolutists, on
the contrary: commercial players do what's in the best interest of their
shareholders, normally profits.  If there is low commercial risk in
doing something, and some commercial gains, that's what should be done,
modulo bugs in implementation and changing external factors.

This motivation better explains many actions related to software
licensing better than any legal theory.

Another example is the practice to drop copyright years from copyright
notices.  Some commercial players do this because they save developer
time, and believe that the likelyhood that a copyright claim will have
commercial effects depending on the presence or lack of the copyright
year is low.  This is more true if you are a large commercial player:
then you can use other arguments to win your case, even if the other
side would have a valid argument in a missing copyright year.

The copyright absolutist approach would be to look at laws and prior
cases and recommend what is the safest and most conservative approach.
As far as I know, that is still to do increment copyright years.

Comparing the situation to LLM outputs here, commercial players have a
vetted interest in being able to offer LLM products, and that depends on
good models (trained on good inputs) being legally distributable.  So
they make the legal idemnity promise to be able to end up in court with
copyright holders and take the fight there, and assumes that they will
reach a commercially beneficial deal in the end.  I don't think they
reason that they necessarily have the legal right to do what they do,
that's not particulary relevant for making commercial decisions.

/Simon

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