Q: Is it illegal to publish an AI model trained on content that is illegal/pirated?
Specifically, the popular website musescore.com has scores that are "official" and cannot even be downloaded by subscribers, but musescore developers published the scores online, saying "fire us". Therefore, I am assuming that those files are illegal or pirated. Is it illegal to use these scores to train an AI like ChatGPT, and publish that AI?
A:
Copyright in works generated with AI, and use of copyrighted materials in AI training are hot topics lately. The US Copyright Office has issued guidance on the subject which can be found here:
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
The important legal point is that copyright registration (and enforcement) is available only for "human authorship". Accordingly, if the training includes copying of original works of (human) authorship, that in itself may be considered infringing of those works. As for the works generated by AI, only those portions of the works selected and arranged by a human may be registered.
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