Copyright Violations and Large Language Models

Understand

Language models may memorize more than just facts, including entire chunks of texts seen during training.

• Fair use exemptions to copyright laws typically allow for limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder, but typically for extraction of information from copyrighted materials, rather than {\em verbatim} reproduction.
• This work explores the issue of copyright violations and large language models through the lens of verbatim memorization, focusing on possible redistribution of copyrighted text.
• We present experiments with a range of language models over a collection of popular books and coding problems, providing a conservative characterization of the extent to which language models can redistribute these materials.