> the state of a person's brain is outside of copyright
It clearly isn’t. Which is why clean-room reverse engineering always requires at least two people. Or why a musician that accidentally recreates a chord progression they heard years ago but don't remember the source might still get sued.
No, you're missing the very distinction I'm trying to highlight.
When I read and remember some text, possibly also learning from it, I'm not making a copy and I'm not creating a derivative work. The state of my brain is outside of copyright. Only at the point where I create a new representation based on what I have read I may be violating someone's copyrights.
But is it the same for an AI? Is the act of reading, remembering and learning (i.e. adjusting model weights) not in itself tantamount to creating a derivative work?
Is it actually? If we could fully pull out the state of your brain, and understand that you stored a copy of a copyrighted work, I think you could be on the hook for licensing it, paying fees every time you remember the work as a performance of it.
The state of your brain is moot wrt copyright as you cannot distribute your brain.
Copyright is to the exclusive right to make copies, it is the exclusive right of distributing them.
As a simple example reading a book aloud in your home or singing in the shower is not copyright infringement; not even if you record it.
If you sell tickets to these performances or stream them on twitch it becomes copyright infringing.
Similarly it cannot be in violation of copyright for GitHub to train copilot on any random code they can legally access. It can be in violation to sell access to the model trained in this way.
It clearly isn’t. Which is why clean-room reverse engineering always requires at least two people. Or why a musician that accidentally recreates a chord progression they heard years ago but don't remember the source might still get sued.