> “Changing the equation” by boldly breaking the law.

Is it? I think the law is truly undeveloped when it comes to language models and their output.

As a purely human example, suppose I once long ago read through the source code of GCC. Does this mean that every compiler I write henceforth must be GPL-licensed, even if the code looks nothing like GCC code?

There's obviously some sliding scale. If I happen to commit lines that exactly replicate GCC then the presumption will be that I copied the work, even if the copying was unconscious. On the other hand, if I've learned from GCC and code with that knowledge, then there's no copyright-attaching copy going on.

We could analogize this to LLMs: instructions to copy a work would certainly be a copy, but an ostensibly independent replication would be a copy only if the work product had significant similarities to the original beyond the minimum necessary for function.

However, this is intuitively uncomfortable. Mechanical translation of a training corpus to model weights doesn't really feel like "learning," and an LLM can't even pinky-promise to not copy. It might still be the most reasonable legal outcome nonetheless.