this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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I had a similar thought. If LLMs and image models do not violate copyright, they could be used to copyright-wash everything.
Just train a model on source code of the company you work for or the copyright protected material you have access to, release that model publicly and then let a friend use it to reproduce the secret, copyright protected work.
btw this is happening actuallt AI trained on copyrighted material and it's repeating similar or sometimes verbatim copies but license-free :D
This is giving me illegal number vibes. Like, if an arbitrary calculation returns an illegal number that you store, are you holding illegal information?
(The parallel to this case is that if a statistical word prediction machine generates copyrighted text, does that make distribution of that text copyright violation?)
I don't know the answer to either question, btw, but I thought it was interesting.
In case of illegal numbers, intention matters. Because any number could be converted to different numbers, for instance through 'xor encryption' different 'encoding' or other mathematical operations, which would equally be illegal if used with the intention to copy copyright protected material.
This was the case previously. You cannot simply reencode a video, a big number on your disk, with a different codec into another number in order to circumvent copyright.
However, if big business now argues that copyright protected work encoded in neuronal network models is not violating copyright and generated work has no protection, then this previous rule isn't true anymore. And we can strip copyright from everything using that 'hack'.