7 am thoughts: any commercial entity offering licensed data which is feasibly web-scrapable must be feverishly reviewing their licensing agreements to assure they’re protected against misuse by ChatGPT, et al.
Any contract lawyers in the house?
Discussion
Although software licensing ain’t nothing new to the world, corrupt causalities are.
And are those contract lawyers using AI for their reviews? 😉
This would include almost every single music streaming service, though I would say it's probably already too late to lock the gates
Imagine all the companies using ChatGPT for commercial use with all the unknown IP issues related to creating derivative works of copyrighted material.
I don't often confess this in public, but I am a contract lawyer....
There will be a time element to this; my understanding is that ChatGPT works from a copy of the internet that's two years out of date (this the info will be out of date also). Secondly, if the data is scrapable that suggests it's not paywalled or in a walled garden; if freely available it's likely to be in public domain. If not public domain per se, but registered as a patent for example, then the idea may be public, but protected legally by patent law. Trade secrets already have very strong extra legal protection in most jurisdictions.
Short answer is that I don't think anyone will have begun thinking about this in enough detail and we probably need some case law to set precedents, where people start suing GPT and Sam for plagiarism!
Thanks for your perspective.
I should have said “internet-accessible,” rather than web-scrapable. While I don’t see OpenAI being anything but extremely careful about this, my question is more directed at what (perhaps irrational) fear will motivate.
Wild times.
I"d agree there is a fairly strong chance of parties whose IP may be being infringed looking to sue. This raises interesting questions about who they would sue though; likely not the developers, and the AI itself doesn't yet have legal personality so can't be sued. I reckon they would file suit against the company that owns and controls the AI (assuming it's a company; I don't know enough about the corporate structure above Chat GPT to opine just yet).
It's an analogous problem to 'whom do I sue if I get hit by a self driving car'
Wild times indeed