Comment on OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles
tinwhiskers@lemmy.world 5 months agoOnly publishing it is a copyright issue. You can also obtain copyrighted material with a web browser. The onus is on the person who publishes any material they put together, regardless of source. OpenAI is not responsible for publishing just because their tool was used to obtain the material.
SheeEttin@programming.dev 5 months ago
There are issues other than publishing, but that’s the biggest one. But they are not acting merely as a conduit for the work, they are ingesting it and deriving new work from it. The use of the copyrighted work is integral to their product, which makes it a big deal.
tinwhiskers@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah, the ingestion part is still to be determined legally, but I think OpenAI will be ok. NYT produces content to be read, and copyright only protects them from people republishing their content. People also ingest their content and can make derivative works without problem. OpenAI are just doing the same, but at a level of ability that could be disruptive to some companies. This isn’t even really very harmful to the NYT, since the historical material used doesn’t even conflict with their primary purpose of producing new news. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out though.
SheeEttin@programming.dev 5 months ago
This is not correct. Copyright protects reproduction, derivation, distribution, performance, and display of a work.
Yes, you can legally make derivative works, but without license, it has to be fair use. In this case, where not only did they use one whole work in its entirety, they likely scraped thousands of whole NYT articles.
This isn’t necessarily correct either. I assume they sell access to their archives, for research or whatever. Being able to retrieve articles verbatim through chatgpt does harm their business.