Both Napster and the Pirate Bay founders argued that only users could be held responsible, since it was the user who requested the infringing files. It did not stop the courts.
Anyone could use those tools to download creative common files and linux ISO, but those arguments did not succeed in the legal system. Bittorent as a technology was however not made illegal, as could be seen in games using it to distribute patches.
Napster and the Pirate Bay struggled because the vast majority of content was pirated. You would be hard pressed to say a significant minority of generative ai has any copyright issues, much less copyright issues as blatant as straight piracy.
I’m not convinced any of the output of these generative AI is free from copyright issues. Consider, a ROT13 copy of a book may at first glance look nothing like the original, but distributing digital copies would be clear copyright infringement.
Feature extraction is literally a form of lossy compression. You can prod DALEE to make obvious copies of some of the works it was trained on, but even seemingly novel images could contain enough similarities to training material to be problematic.
Yeah they seem to be applying legal theory like programming code. If what they said about Napster applied to every website then literally every site with user generated content would be instantly wiped off the internet.
> You would be hard pressed to say a significant minority of generative ai has any copyright issues, much less copyright issues as blatant as straight piracy.
Where generative AI ingests copyrighted works in order to work and bases its output on it, then it is copyright infringement, equivalent to 'straight piracy' of all that it ingested, unless it's deemed fair use.
What Google does with its search engine, for example, is fair use, what Napster did was not.
Those tools overwhelmingly supported pirate means, nearly no one was downloading actually legal public domain songs or Linux ISOs from there. I contrast with LLMs and generative AI, people are using them for actual work, not for piracy, which will be seen differently by the courts.
