And that would be completely legal, just like any random guy on deviantart can draw something in the style of e.g. Picasso without getting into trouble (unless of course they claim it was painted by picasso, but that should be obvious).

Huh? What does being non profit have to do with it? Private companies are allowed to learn from copyrighted work. Microsoft and Apple, for example, look at each other's software and copy ideas (not code, just ideas) all the time. The fact Linux is non-profit doesn't give them any additional rights or protection.

They're not gatekeeping llms though, there are publicly available models and data sets.

Thanks for your response

Always happy to discuss copyright. :-) Our IP laws are long overdue for an overhaul in my opinion. And the only way to make that happen is for as many people as possible to discuss the issues. I plan to spend the rest of my life creating copyrighted work, and I really hope I don't spend all of it under the current rules...

The US copyright and trademark laws state that a work only has to be 10% differentiated from the original in order to be legal to use

The law doesn't say that.The Blurred Lines copyright case for example was far less than 10%. Probably less than 1%, and it was still unclear if it was infringement or not. It took five years of lawsuits to reach an unclear conclusion where the first court found it to be infringing then an appeals panel of judges reached a split decision where the majority of them found it to be non-infringing.

Copyright is incredibly complex and unclear. It's generally best to just not get into a copyright lawsuit in the first place. Usually when someone accuses you of copyright infringement you try to pay them whatever amount of money (in the Blurred Lines case, there were discussions of 50% of the artist's income from the song) to make them go away even if your lawyers tell you you're probably going to get a not guilty verdict.

I really haven't seen AI like MidJourney creating exact replicas of works

I don't have a source to cite, but I did read an article that showed a bad faith actor deliberately trying to use ai to copy images directly, and while the results weren't exact replicas, they were reasonable facsimiles of the original, to the extent that if a human has created it without ai, it would have been blatant copyright infringement, despite not being quite identical.

I wish I had the examples on hand to show, but it was months ago, and unfortunately I have not the skills nor time to retrieve it.

I like to exchange my economy points for things

I don’t think you realize how boomer Japan is regarding technology in the new Millennium. Their industry tech is always on the curve (especially robotics), but their lifestyle tech is just…god it was like going back 10-15 years in time. They still had as many flip phone commercial and plans as smartphone ones back when I was living there in 2018. Stores in Ginza, one of the most expensive places in Japan, would have “cash only” signs because they didn’t want to learn how to set up a card machine. The older population has really been holding them back.

They’ve had to digitize a lot of stuff due to Covid (thank god) but me and most people I knew were issued actual paper paycheques we’d have to physically take to the bank for payday. The lines at the bank on the 15th or 25th of the month in Tokyo were something else.

Because you paid for that book?