this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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But if one person buys a book, trains an "AI model" to recite it, then distributes that model we good?
No. The court made its ruling with the explicit understanding that the software was configured not to recite more than a few snippets from any copyrighted work, and would never produce an entire copyrighted work (or even a significant portion of a copyrighted work) in its output.
And the judge specifically reserved that question, saying if the authors could develop evidence that it was possible for a user to retrieve significant copyrighted material out of the LLM, they'd have a different case and would be able to sue under those facts.
I don't think anyone would consider complete verbatim recitement of the material to be anything but a copyright violation, being the exact same thing that you produce.
Fair use requires the derivative work to be transformative, and no transformation occurs when you verbatim recite something.
"Recite the complete works of Shakespeare but replace every thirteenth thou with this"
existing copyright law covers exactly this. if you were to do the same, it would also not be fair use or transformative
Well, except Shakespeare is already public domain.
A court will decide such cases. Most AI models aren't trained for this purpose of whitewashing content even if some people would imply that's all they do, but if you decided to actually train a model for this explicit purpose you would most likely not get away with it if someone dragged you in front of a court for it.
It's a similar defense that some file hosting websites had against hosting and distributing copyrighted content (Eg. MEGA), but in such cases it was very clear to what their real goals were (especially in court), and at the same time it did not kill all file sharing websites, because not all of them were built with the intention to distribute illegal material with under the guise of legitimate operation.
I'm picking up what you're throwing down but using as an example something that's been in the public domain for centuries was kind of silly in a teehee way.
I'd be impressed with any model that succeeds with that, but assuming one does, the complete works of Shakespeare are not copyright protected - they have fallen into the public domain since a very long time ago.
For any works still under copyright protection, it would probably be a case of a trial to determine whether a certain work is transformative enough to be considered fair use. I'd imagine that this would not clear that bar.