I don‘t think killing the us is the only thing that could happen.
You can’t steal something and avoid punishment just because you don’t sell in the country where the theft happened.
I don‘t think killing the us is the only thing that could happen.
You can’t steal something and avoid punishment just because you don’t sell in the country where the theft happened.
You absolutely can depending on the countries involved. A recent extreme example is hackers in NK stealing cryptocurrency. A more regular one is Chinese manufacturers stealing designs. If the countries where the theives live and operate won't prosecute them there is no recourse. The question for multinationals is if continuing to operate in the EU is worth giving up their models, and if the countries they are headquartered in care or can be made to.
If those countries still like to enforce their IP in the EU I guess they will.
Tit for tat.
NK isn’t really a business partner in the world.
But China is, and western countries including those in the EU have frequently ignored such things. Looking closer this really only affects diffusion models which are much cheaper to retrain. The exception is integrated models like Gemini and gpt-4v where retraining might reasonably cost more than the fine. Behemoths like google and openai won't bail over a few 100M, unless they see it is likely to happen repeatedly, in which case they would likely decouple the image models. But there is nothing to say some text database that is widely used isn't contaminated as well. Maybe only China will produce models in the future. They don't care if you enforce their IP.
Edit: After more reading. Clearview AI did exactly this, they ignored all the EU rulings and the UK refused to enforce them. They were fined tens of millions and paid nothing. Stability is now also a UK company that used pi images for training; it seems quite likely they will try to walk that same path given their financial situation. Meta is facing so many fines and lawsuits who knows what it will do. Everyone else will call it cost of business while fighting it every step of the way.