I think that we can run a perhaps silly thought experiment.
Suppose that I have a nearly perfect memory and I could remember all the books I read. Suppose also that I have a million year life span so I could read 7 million books. Then, what happens if at the end of all of those years, or at any earlier moment I answer questions from people and I exploit commercially the knowledge I gathered reading those books? Would my reading those books be study or copyright infringement? Remember the nearly perfect memory hypotheses.
Of course it's a bit silly because the time to train a LLM and the time I need to read all those books is different by orders of magnitude and that changes the perspective. Who would complain with me today if their heirs lose some money on 7 million AD? Who would even notice that I started that million years long endeavor. Who's going to be there to ask me questions by then? Humans? Birds? Lizards? And I can say that I am studying like everybody else before me, but does an LLM study? And I am sure there are many other nuances.
Anyway, I don't think that scanning is any different than photons hitting my retina. The difference is in what happens next: the faithfulness of memory, the amount of knowledge, the speed of accumulating it. After all a huge amount of quantity can become quality.
Can I pay for a movie, hit record, sleep in the theatre and play it back when I get home? I pinky promise that I will close my eyes while recording. Its still the same photons hitting my own camera retina.
Many of us here are software developers by choice or hobby and we know it better than regular folks that scale changes everything and can break our assumptions and business if you design something for wrong scale.
Yet why do we still want to insist that a human and machine are the same and same rules apply when it comes to AI, though we know they operate at different speed and scale?
This is a bit of a trick question. The law is explicitly written to make this illegal. If it was not explicit, it most likely would be legal by time shifting precedent.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319B
The illegal part would be reciting the stuff you memorized to other people. Copyright doesn’t prevent you from making a copy as long as you don’t distribute it afaik.
Copyright is about exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution.
An LLM is just a really, really big, really, really elaborate "choose your own adventure" book.
You aren't a book.
> Suppose also that I have a million year life span
But that's what makes the usual analogies with humans fail from the start. The laws were made with the assumption that they apply to humans which are a known quantity. This breaks down when you apply them with system with vastly increased (and ever increasing) capabilities.
> Anyway, I don't think that scanning is any different than photons hitting my retina.
If I ask you 10 years from now to give me a completely accurate depiction of what your retina registered yesterday at 5:52 PM, will you be able to? And can you give me a copy?
The thought experiment falls apart immediately by the mere fact that—even given all the other fantastical abilities such as perfect memory and impossible lifespan—you can still only answer one question at a time. As has been repeated ad nauseam, scale puts an hard stop on the comparison of LLMs to humans.
Let’s switch up your scenario. Let’s say the subject isn’t a human with machine-like qualities but instead a computer with human-like limitations. All the books were fed to that one computer, and for technical reasons it cannot be duplicated and can only answer one question at a time. Suddenly the infringement isn’t as problematic and the ways to commercially exploit that data are minimal.
Furthermore, even with perfect memory it would take time to read all those books, you’d never keep up with everything released in a single year. Nor would you be able to reproduce everything perfectly due to required time and lack of ability (perfectly recalling a painting or photograph does not mean you have the skills to make an exact copy).
All these comparisons are silly and useless anyway (though in your particular case I think you are arguing in good faith). Computers are not human. If a person was caught killing animals of an endangered species and used as a defence “but what about the natural predators in that habitat? I’m just doing the same as them”, we’d rightfully see through the bullshit and scoff at such an obviously flawed comparison.
TLDR: It's just like a human, if a human were fundamentally different.
How is it different than reading the book, and writing down a copy, and publishing it as your work? Even without selling it, but then on top, selling it too. It isn't. There is no thought experiment that absolves the copyright and citation laundering.
And the systematic nature of the excerpt service makes the excerpts different from fair use quotes. A reference quote is not a service that can reproduce the entire work, and the reference quote cites the actual source of the insight/wisdom/research/poetry/etc.
The only thought experiment is why might someone even try to excuse this activity? I can think of a few.