> but training an AI isn't a violation of copyright
How it's not? Copyright means that you, the author, owns the rights to a software, a song, a book, etc. and you give permission in form of what is usually formalized in a license to other people to use your copyrighted work in some ways. You decide what people can do with your copyrighted material, and what it's not expressively allowed in your license it's not permitted. Moreover everything you create (even this comment!) as by default a copyright, and if you don't say anything the copyright is intended to be exclusive (i.e. you can't do anything with it).
Now, unless your license doesn't expressively say that you are granted the permission to use that copyrighted material to train an AI model you can't. To me it's clear, I don't know how someone could think of the opposite. What copyright has for example a webpage? If it doesn't have a license associated with it that is compatible with scrapping it and training an AI model that operation is illegal.
Otherwise you are saying that it's a crime for me to download a book from the internet, but it's not a crime to take such book and use it to train an AI model then then has all the knowledge that is present in that book? Does make sense to you?
Of course there is the argument of "fair usage", but could we consider "fair" taking systematically entire software to train on it AI models?
And before you say "but humans can study a software", it's because the license of such software allows it, but the key is that it allows humans, in no way you could for example state that the GPL license allows it to be used as a training source for AI models without the consequence of any of the output of such AI models being considered derivative work.
How it's not? Copyright means that you, the author, owns the rights to a software, a song, a book, etc. and you give permission in form of what is usually formalized in a license to other people to use your copyrighted work in some ways. You decide what people can do with your copyrighted material, and what it's not expressively allowed in your license it's not permitted. Moreover everything you create (even this comment!) as by default a copyright, and if you don't say anything the copyright is intended to be exclusive (i.e. you can't do anything with it).
Now, unless your license doesn't expressively say that you are granted the permission to use that copyrighted material to train an AI model you can't. To me it's clear, I don't know how someone could think of the opposite. What copyright has for example a webpage? If it doesn't have a license associated with it that is compatible with scrapping it and training an AI model that operation is illegal.
Otherwise you are saying that it's a crime for me to download a book from the internet, but it's not a crime to take such book and use it to train an AI model then then has all the knowledge that is present in that book? Does make sense to you?
Of course there is the argument of "fair usage", but could we consider "fair" taking systematically entire software to train on it AI models?
And before you say "but humans can study a software", it's because the license of such software allows it, but the key is that it allows humans, in no way you could for example state that the GPL license allows it to be used as a training source for AI models without the consequence of any of the output of such AI models being considered derivative work.