Google is not producing something that competes with or is comparable to what it's parsing and displaying, which makes it very different.

Google is displaying the exact content and a link to the source, and is functioning as a search engine.

Copying music (or whatever), and then outputting music based on the copied music is not the same thing as a search engine, it's outputting a new "art" that is competing with the original.

Another way to put it, is that you can't use a search engine to copy something in any meaningful way, but copying music to produce more music is actually copying something.

The goal of my post was not to answer what differentiates google search with LLMs and other generative models, it was to respond to the original post above:

> Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works to gain massive profit / massive market capitalizations

The reasons as to why I don't think training on copyrighted data are stated in my other comments replying to people who have made arguments about its immorality.

Googles search engine is not selling derivative works.

If you search for a Disney movie on Google search, it does not try to sell you a film derived from the movie.

They sell you ad space on full Disney movies (re)uploaded by random people who are not affiliated with Disney though: https://www.google.com/search?q=finding+nemo+full+movie

I can also get Disney coloring book pages directly from Google's cache on Google images: https://www.google.com/search?q=disney+princess+coloring+boo...

Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. determined that Google's wholesale scanning and uploading of books is allowed under the first sale doctrine because the University of Michigan library they borrowed the books to scan from paid for them (or a donor paid for them, at some point). Here's a book of bedtime stories available in its entirety: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Picnics_in_the_Wood_and...

In your first two examples, Google is still not providing an alternative to the original content, the people who have uploaded the content are and they are doing so illegally.

Also, Google can and will delist stuff that is violating copyright if you report it: https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview

The Google Books thing is a lot more interesting I think. I guess the idea is that Google is acting as a Library, and they are lending you the book? I'm not sure how I feel about this and I would need to do a lot more research on it before having a strong opinion.

The other big difference here is that you can't use the content linked from Google search as if it were your own. If you Google search "nes emulator in javascript", and you get a link to a Github repo, you can't copy paste the code as if it were your own, and even basing your code on what you have saw could be risky depending on the license of the repo. LLMs are acting as a sort of search engine, pretty similar to how Google search does, but people are using the output from the "search" as if it were their own work that they have full rights to!

No, because crawling the web, ingesting copyrighted content, and ranking them is not a derivative work of that content.

If crawling the web, ingesting copyrighted content, and ranking them is not a derivative work for that content, then using them to change the values of a mathematical expression should also exempt the expression from being a derivative work.

> Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works

In that case the OP should have never posed this irrelevant question because access to the expression isn't giving access to a derivative work.