This, or a lawsuit like it is going to be the SCO vs IBM of the 2020's, to wit: a copyright troll trying to extract rent, with various special interests cheering it on to try and promote their own agenda (ironically it was Microsoft that played that role with SCO). It's funny how times have changed and at least now a louder group seem to be on the troll's side. I hope to see some better analysis on the frivolity of this come out. There may be some commercial subtlety in specific cases that doesn't depend on scraping and training, but fundamentally using public internet data for training is not copying, is fair use, and is better for society as a whole than whatever ridiculous alternative might be proposed.
edit: I'm speaking about training broadly capable foundation models like GPTn. It would of course be possible to build a model that only parrots copyrighted content and it would be hard to argue that is fair use.
edit: I'm speaking about training broadly capable foundation models like GPTn. It would of course be possible to build a model that only parrots copyrighted content and it would be hard to argue that is fair use.