While it’s true that knives and guns have both legal and illegal uses, it’s another straw man in this context, irrelevant to both neural networks and copyright law. In the case of neural networks, you’re distributing the copied material along with the tool, in the form of network weights, thus breaking the law by distribution whenever the network can reproduce significant portions of any of its individual training samples, or whenever you didn’t have legal permission to use the source training material.
> If you understand that the model is a tool, and that as a tool it can be used to generate activity that can violate laws and be used for other perfectly legal activities, then as a broad principle the distribution of said tool is not a violation of said laws
That statement is incorrect, the logic is flawed. Just because a tool has both legal and illegal uses does not necessarily have any bearing whatsoever on whether the tool’s distribution is legal. Tools that are illegal to distribute can have legal uses, and that does not make them legal to distribute.
Making statements and assuming the truth without reason and evidence nor examples to back it up. Logical fallacy of begging the question.
You are talking in circles. My last response here.
What are you talking about? What I said there wasn’t an assumption, it’s a fact about our laws. Murdering someone with a gun and breaking copyright law distributing copyrighted material are covered by two completely separate and independent laws. Breaking or not breaking one of the laws does not imply anything about other laws. Your statement of “broad principle” is the assumption here that claimed that not breaking one implied you were not breaking the other, which is completely and utterly false. You really really should read up on copyright law before asserting things, and maybe the laws surrounding knives and guns too if you want to use them as examples. Your comments have repeatedly and consistently demonstrated a lack of understanding of the laws we’re discussing.
Cars, phones, guns, knives (practically anything) can be used to generate activities that break the law. They are perfectly legal to distribute. The onus on the legality of the activity lies with the end user.