The significant step here is anything can do what you say. Because there's no human in the loop looking at source code and learning from it.
You have an autonomous system that's ingesting copyrighted material, doing math on it, storing it, and producing outputs on user requests. There's no learning or analogy to humans, the court is ruling that this particular math is enough to wash away bit color. The ruling was based on the outputs and the reasonable intent of the people who created it and what they are trying to accomplish, not how it works internally.
It's not the first, if you take copyrighted data and && 0x00 to all of it that certainly washes the bits too.
> You have an autonomous system that's ingesting copyrighted material, doing math on it, storing it, and producing outputs on user requests
People are also autonomous systems that ingest copyrighted material, do "math" on it, store it, and produce outputs on user requests.
The real difference is the scale at which a computer can ingest copyrighted material is MUCH greater than what a person can do. Does that make it illegal? Maybe, maybe not.
Am I in a bad sci-fi novel? People aren't machines! How is this a such a difficult concept? LLMs have as much thought as quicksort. I swear to god humans will anthropomorphize everything except ourselves. Do y'all's salaries depend on this or something?
There is no rule that says "If a human can do something, a computer program instructed by a human can do the same thing." Hell that rule doesn't even exist for humans acting as stand-ins. I can't send someone I hire out of the country and have them use my passport. It's why you can watch a movie in a theater but an autonomous system working on your behalf, a camera, can't.
Github made a tool, it's as alive as a hammer. It "learns" as much as your programmable pad lock. Whether or not the human employees of Github are allowed to use copyrighted material to make that tool, and whether the human employees of Github are performing a copyrighted work when users make use of the tool is the legal question.
Normally, if it is legal for a human to do something, I would assume that human could legally use a computer to help do that thing. Are there cases where this isn't true?
You have an autonomous system that's ingesting copyrighted material, doing math on it, storing it, and producing outputs on user requests. There's no learning or analogy to humans, the court is ruling that this particular math is enough to wash away bit color. The ruling was based on the outputs and the reasonable intent of the people who created it and what they are trying to accomplish, not how it works internally.
It's not the first, if you take copyrighted data and && 0x00 to all of it that certainly washes the bits too.