from the two-wrongs-don't-make-a-copyright dept

There’s a lot wrong with AI. But bad things happen when we try to use copyright law to fix it. Which is what we just told the Southern District of New York, where OpenAI and Microsoft are defending themselves in several cases alleging that their training violated the copyrights of the works the AI models were trained on. We made a few points .

One overarching point is that what the plaintiffs are trying to do is not what copyright law is for. Copyright gives the holder the ability to control how the embodiment of the work is used (ex: you can’t copy a book without permission, or, as the example we used in the brief, perform a play) but not the ability to control the public from benefiting from its contents. Copyright can control such activities as copying, distributing, or performing a work but NOT reading, watching, listening to, or learning from a work. What OpenAI does with its training is the latter set of activities, not the former.…