Does this imply that distributing open-weights models such as Llama is copyright infringement, since users can trivially run the model without output filtering to extract the memorized text?
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
Additionally that if you download a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing (even without using the LLM, assume you can extract the contents directly out of the weights) then it might as well be a .zip with a PDF in it, the model file itself becomes an infringing object whereas closed models can be held accountable by not what they store but what they produce.
I'm not so sure about this one. In particular, presuming that it is found that models which can produce infringing material are themselves infringing material, the ability to distill models from older models seems to suggest that the older models can actually produce the new, infringing model. It seems like that should mean that all output from the older model is infringing because any and all of it can be used to make infringing material (the new model, distilled from the old).
I don't think it's really tenable for courts to treat any model as though it is, in itself, copyright-infringing material without treating every generative model like that and, thus, killing the GPT/diffusion generation business (that could happen but it seems very unlikely). They will probably stick to being critical of what people generate with them and/or how they distribute what they generate.