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> If I've "learned" Harry Potter to the level where I can reproduce it verbatim, the reproduction would be a copyright violation.

By your logic anyone with good enough memory violates copyright law just by act of remembering something.



No, because you don’t actually violate copyright law until you produce and distribute copies.

It’s perfectly legal to memorize a book, type up a copy from memory, and to even print out a copy that you keep for yourself. But as soon as you start trying to sell or distribute copies, even for free, now you’re breaking the law as written.


No - it's the reproduction, not the memorization.


So training AI on copyrighted data isn’t a problem unless it spits out the data verbatim. Correct?


Close.

It isn't a problem until it spits out a similar enough copy.

Copyright violation doesn't have to be verbatim; taking a 4k movie and reencoding it to 320x200 before distribution isn't legal.


It's reproduced in the memorizer's neural connectome.


That was actually the case in music until a decade ago or so. Led to ridiculous lawsuits (for example Ed Sheeran’s).

Previously, artists needed to prove they hadn’t heard the song that they were accused of infringing. That was virtually possible because there’s a lot of music you could hear anywhere, even just a car driving by. Artists continuously lost these court cases.

Nowadays the burden of proof is luckily no longer on the defendant. But I think that only changed a decade ago or so, thanks to some efforts by music industry lawyer Damien Riehl. I know, ridiculous.


Memory? No.

Reproduction? Yes.

If you write down a sizeable quote, that can be a copyright violation.


This doesn’t seem true. I mean, it might be true if memory could be seen or manipulated, but what would you bring into a court of law to prove that I remembered something too clearly?


I don't see that point in the original comment. Remembering copyrighted content ≠ reproducing a verbatim of it.




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