https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/06/openai-chatgpt-customers-copyright-lawsuits Well, this sort of answers one of the questions that keep coming up. But it doesn't say how they plan to prevent potential copyright violations from happening from ChatGPT or related tools. Actually I don't know if they are even going to try and prevent it at all, just that they will cover any legal costs if litigation occurs and you are a paid user. I'm a bit skeptical. If they announced that they had implemented certain algorithms to detect and filter out any output that might be a copyright violation to help reduce litigation ever even happening, it might be a good sign. But it doesn't seem like it, or at least they didn't think it was significant enough to announce.
I'd venture that they don't anticipate the copyright lawsuits to carry much weight. As in litigation will be directed at the AI companies and not their clients. Or--and this is much more likely--the business model has been "proven" to be sustainable and profitable to absorb litigation. Kind of like manufactures that prefer to pay the cost of liability rather than recall a defective product because it's cheaper.
That was one of my thoughts as well, but it's really unknown how a jury/court would rule on this, especially since OpenAI is now one of the 'big bad money grabbers', and with punitive damages who knows if the model will be sustainable. Another possibility is that they envision that most lawsuits won't result in injunctions or loss of 100% royalty but maybe they think the courts will just weigh how significant the plagiarized passages or images are to the derivative work and grant the original author a proportional percentage. Then OpenAI is really just also helping 'file' the licensing fees. But I don't know if courts have or will rule that way. Huey Lewis felt that Ray Parker Jr. plagiarized 'I Want a New Drug' with 'Ghostbusters' and his comment was something like "we were approached to do a song but at the time I told them our music wasn't for sale." But after his successful lawsuit and the damages he received he said "but I was wrong, because essentially they did buy it from us".
I remember hearing 'I Want a New Drug' for the first time and thinking: "Man, this guy totally ripped off that Ghostbusters song."
