This is a massive strawman argument. No one is saying you shouldn’t have a license to view the content in order to train an AI on it. Most of the information used to train these models is publicly available and licensed for public viewing.
Just because something is available for public viewing does not mean it’s licensed for anything except personal use.
The strawman here is that since physical people benefit from personal use exceptions in the law, machine learning software should too. But why should they? Since when is a piece of software ran by a corporation equivalent to an individual person?
A tangentially related but good example of this sort of thing is BluRays and community movie nights (like setting up a projector in a park).
Most of these movie nights are de facto illegal, as even though you own the BluRay, it is not licensed for public showings, just for personal use. Obviously no one gives enough of a shit to enforce this against small groups, especially if they aren’t making money off it, but if a theater started offering showings of shit the owner just bought on BluRay or UHD disks, it wouldn’t last too long.
Similar thing here. Just because you can access the content to view it yourself doesn’t mean you have the rights to do more than that with it. As an individual, you’re likely fine to break those rules. As a giant fucking corporation, it’s time for you to pay up.
Copyright licensing allows the owner to control how a work is distributed, not how it’s consumed. “Personal use” just means that you can’t turn around and redistribute a work that you’ve obtained. Not that you’re not allowed to consume it in a corporate setting.
Copyright licensing allows the owner to control how a work is distributed, not how it’s consumed.
First of all, that’s incorrect.
Secondly, by default you have zero rights to someone else’s work. If something doesn’t explicitly grant you rights, you have none. If there’s a law or license, and if it’s applicable to you, you get exactly what’s specified in there.
The “personal use” or “fair use” exceptions in some places grant some basic rights but they are very narrow in scope and generally applicable only to individuals.
Consuming is not the same thing as training. A machine is not a consumer, it is a tool.