> the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use but left for trial the question of whether downloading them for this purpose was legal.
The pipeline is something like: download material -> store material -> train models on material -> store models trained on material -> serve output generated from models.
These questions focus on the inputs to the model training, the question I have raised focuses on the outputs of the model. If [certain] outputs are considered derivative works of input material, then we have a cascade of questions which parts of the pipeline are covered by the license requirements. Even if any of the upstream parts of this simplified pipeline are considered legal, it does not imply that that the rest of the pipeline is compliant.
Or is the LLM going to regurgitate the same content with zero attribution, and shift all the traffic away from the original work?
When viewed in this frame, it is obvious that the work is derivative and then some.