That is a shallow regurgitation of their opinion that has been repeated out of context in headlines, but it misses their point. The Copyright Office's opinion can be better summed up as:
1. Copyright protects work that humans create
2. Humans sometimes use tools to create their works, that is okay
3. Y'all make up your mind whether your AI is some sentient being or whether it's just a tool. We're just lawyers.
If the wind blows and your typewriter falls off a shelf and writes a novel, it isn't subject to copyright either. That doesn't mean that all works written using a typewriter aren't subject to copyright. It means a human must be part of the creative process.
But what if the wind blows, and my laptop falls off a shelf and writes the source code for windows 95, but reindented, with some implementation details and variable names changed?
It’s pretty clear that the “neural networks are just a tool” ruling is going to have to be revisited eventually (and probably soon).
> But what if the wind blows, and my laptop falls off a shelf and writes the source code for windows 95, but reindented, with some implementation details and variable names changed?
Simple. If it wasn't created by a human, it's not eligible for copyright. The law is quite clear about this.
Microsoft gets the copyright to Windows 95 because they wrote it with humans. You wouldn't get it because you didn't write it. Your laptop wouldn't get it because it isn't a human.
> It’s pretty clear that the “neural networks are just a tool” ruling
I think you misinterpreted the above. There is no "“neural networks are just a tool” ruling".
The copyright office never said neural networks were or were not a tool.
They said if a human makes a creative work, and they happen to use use a tool, then it is eligible for copyright. As it always has been.
All they said is what every lawyer already knows, which is that a work has to have an element of human creativity in order to be eligible for copyright.
But, if my laptop’s implementation of windows 95 is not eligible for copyright protection, then I can freely redistribute it because no one can use copyright law to stop me, in a runaround of Microsoft’s copyright on windows 95 (which the laptop generated version is clearly a derivative of).
This is exactly the ambiguity Valve is concerned about.
But the hypothetical world in which your laptop falls off a shelf and randomly writes Windows 95 is a fake one.
LLMs aren't random number generators running in isolation.
They're trained on copyrighted material. If they regurgitate copyrighted material, we know where it came from. It came from the training material.
Valve is rightly concerned that non-lawyers have no clue what they're getting themselves into when using the current generation of AI models. The inability to determine whether an output is a substantial copy of an input is not a free pass to do whatever you want with it, it's a copyright infringement roulette.
There are way too many people in this industry who believe that building a technology which makes compliance impossible is the same thing as making compliance unnecessary.
1. Copyright protects work that humans create
2. Humans sometimes use tools to create their works, that is okay
3. Y'all make up your mind whether your AI is some sentient being or whether it's just a tool. We're just lawyers.
If the wind blows and your typewriter falls off a shelf and writes a novel, it isn't subject to copyright either. That doesn't mean that all works written using a typewriter aren't subject to copyright. It means a human must be part of the creative process.