Piracy of content is against the law. All other analogies such as looking at paintings are not at issue here. The content was pirated and there are laws against that, whether we agree with it or not.
So, if the plaintiff can prove the content was pirated, then the use of that content downstream is tainted.
> So, if the plaintiff can prove the content was pirated, then the use of that content downstream is tainted.
Has that been tested in court?
This is quite an interesting case.
Obtaining the book in the first place[0] appears to be quite a clear case of copyright infrigement.
The question of whether a work derived from the book is infringment is pretty complex, and there's a wide range of tests that get applied to determine that.
But is it necessarily true that if you obtained the original work via copyright infringement and then created an otherwise non-infringing derived work, your derived work is nevertheless infringing due to the provenance of your copy of the original work?
>then the use of that content downstream is tainted
What does that mean exactly? That's why I used the "looking at a stolen painting" example.
Sure, pirating materials is illegal. But I don't think that's the big implication that people are getting at here. Is it legal to sell original works derived from perceiving stolen materials? Seems to me that it is.
In this case the correct analogy would be you brought a stolen painting into your house, looked at it for a while, and then produced your derivative work.
Surely you see the issue here? Receiving stolen property?
Numerous questions of law or fact common to each Class arise from Defendants’ conduct:
whether ChatGPT itself is an infringing derivative work based on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted books;
whether the text outputs of ChatGPT are infringing derivative works based on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted books;
It's not a simple case of "you used our copyrighted materials", it's "you're infringing on our copyright by producing works derived from materials that you used."
That assumption is the reason why it's a shady argument for infringement. There's other ways to get a summary of a book than reading it, like asking a friend who's read it to give a summary
So, if the plaintiff can prove the content was pirated, then the use of that content downstream is tainted.