The parent comment I replied to is concerned with "life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent". To alleviate this concern^, "sweat of the brow" doctrine would be required, but it doesn't exist in most jurisdictions. Today in most jurisdictions copyright laws do not care the slightest about an LLM ingesting databases -- phone directories, sport fixtures and results, someone's life work measuring the dimensions of frogs, etc. 100% of the original factual data could be learned by the LLM, and 100% could be output all at once.

^ Of course there are other ways to alleviate the concerns too such as universal basic income, government grants, etc for someone who wants to dedicate their life to measuring the dimensions of frogs, or whatever else their interest may be. There would however be some geopolitical/trade issues involved--a population would have to be comfortable doing the heavy lifting only to have another country simply use the work freely and instead dedicate their lives to something less favourable such as building missiles.

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triceratops 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> To alleviate this concern^, "sweat of the brow" doctrine would be required, but it doesn't exist in most jurisdictions

No, it wouldn't. "Sweat of the brow" applies to collections of facts whose compilation required effort. "Life's work" is a superset of that. Originality and creativity, which are required to copyright something, are also work.

	▲	dhx 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The US government's official position on LLMs is (very simply paraphrased) that LLMs are sufficiently transformative and do not hamper the potential market of authors of training material, therefore, copyright claims arising from training material should not be successful.[1] For original and creative training material, for example, a Harry Potter novel, seemingly the US government is asking the courts to set aside some previous questionable findings such as copyright existing very loosely in the likeness of fictional characters (impacting the likes of fan fiction). Can a human -- or LLM -- create a story about children travelling on a train from New York to a school of magic in the "wild west", with many loose similarities to Harry Potter for those familiar with those books? The US government appears to be saying this is OK, especially with the view that the market for Harry Potter is not diminished by a "wild west magic school" book in its likeness. However, LLMs do sometimes output training data almost 1:1 without sufficient transformation, and these cases may be problematic if they could reduce the market for the original copyright owner. For example, if prompting an LLM with "Translate the first chapter of {book} from American English to British English" reliably did what the user asked, perhaps no one would have a reason to buy the book directly from the author. [1] https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwzqxzbpw/...