If said professor offered a service where anyone could ask them for information that is behind a paywall, and they provided it without significant transformation, this would certainly be copyright infringement that the copyright holder would have every right and motivation to take action against.
I think the scale only matters here (probably). Because I will find it hard that a teacher/professor will not be allowed to setup a service where they will teach and provide their knowledge for others. That is basically the concept of teaching. Of course until LLM, we never had this scale before. Millions of potential learners vs the normal hundreds in a classroom session. So that makes the new case interesting
"Teaching" by copying source books word for word, would be copyright infringement; see, for example, the well-known issues around photocopying books or even excerpts.
Also lying on source materials (e.g. telling students that some respected historian denies the Holocaust happened, when it's obviously not the case) is not "teaching" - it's defamation, and the NYT is absolutely right to pursue that angle too.
Using LLMs as general-purpose search engines is a minefield, I would not be surprised if the practice disappeared in the next 20 years. Obviously the tech is here to stay, there is no problem when it's applied to augmenting niche work; but as a Google replacement, it has so many issues
> Teaching" by copying source books word for word, would be copyright infringement; see, for example, the well-known issues around photocopying books or even excerpts.
Incorrect. Educational use helps satisfy one of tests for fair use. Teachers can, in many cases, photocopy copyrighted work without infringing on that copyright.
Educational use is just one of the many factors used to determine whether an instance of copyright infringement is fair use or not, but it is not carte blanche for educators to ignore IP laws just because they're educating.
Teachers can in some very limited cases photocopy very small chunks of copyrighted work. This also varies significantly from country to country; the starting position is that they cannot reproduce works in their entirety.
scale is important here - maybe a better analogy is setting up a paid Spotify clone with all the music sourced from torrents with some slight distortion effect added
