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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

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Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#481

Post by allturtles »

pavlov wrote: post #153
kirse wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessar…

> “Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books?” I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. Even if we agree that machine learning is like human learning, scale commonly matters in law.

I think the Aereo case is an interesting precedent [0] [1]. An individual DVR-ing over-the-air broadcasts with an antenna was fine. A corporation DVR-ing over-the-air-broadcasts for thousands of customers by using thousands of tiny antennas was not fine.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In.... [1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/11/7/18073200/aereo

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#482

Post by brookst »

giaour wrote: post #478
metacritic12 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether one agrees or not with paying creators of the training data, I think the deeper issue here is about societal wealth distribution and who gets paid for X now that X is being done very well by AIs. A less equitable world has Google or billionaires getting paid. A more equitable world has the artists. But I want to argue here that for purposes of this latter question, your proposal of copyright enf…

> Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever? Copyright expires, and new artists will create new (copyrightable) art in the future. Unless your assertion is that generative AI is so good no one will make art without it ever again?

If the proposed system works, I expect those entrenched artists will sue young human artists whose work shows signs of learning from previous art. The vast majority of music, books, and movies have clear influences.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#483

Post by GaggiX »

okamiueru wrote: post #142

I'm hooked on Stable Diffusion. It's the most impressive sudden leaps in technology in my 30 or so years of being old enough to understand it. Much of the power it has, is based on the material it is trained on, and I'm very appreciative of the work and effort that was made in order to make it what it is. And, it's only getting started. That said... I get it. Huggingface are working on a diffusion based model for mus…

Where do you read that Huggingface is training a music model? I think you're confusing it with Harmonai.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#484

Post by Metacelsus »

wolframhempel wrote: post #209

I think the underlying question is one of "degrees of derivation". There's a famous Carl Sagan quote: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” which hints at the problem: Nothing is created in a vacuum. Let's compare what Stable Diffusion does with what Franz von Holzhausen, head of design at Tesla, does. Franz didn't come into existence out of nothing and knew how to design…

>There's a famous Carl Sagan quote: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” which hints at the problem: Nothing is created in a vacuum.

See also the story of Trurl's Electropoet (from the Cyberiad). Trurl first had to simulate a universe to get the poet to work.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#485

Post by Aerroon »

jeroenhd wrote: post #105

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

>AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard

Yes, and then people say "no" or "pay me". End result of this is that the only ones with good AI models are megacorporations that will DRM the heck out of it.

Years later those same artists will complain that they now have to pay $1000 a year to Disney/MS/Adobe to create art. Because these megacorporations can afford to pay for it. They're the ones that will benefit the most from this, because it creates an insurmountable moat for them.

Copyright exists to encourage the creation of more art and to progress science. AI is clearly a helpful step in that direction. Humans learn from others' works. Should we make that illegal too?

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#486

Post by roywiggins »

zarzavat wrote: post #259
errantmind wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> US copyright law only applies in the US This isn't entirely true, due to various entangled trade agreements that require countries to respect each other's intellectual property as a prerequisite. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

They require countries to respect each other's copyrights , not each other's copyright law . The US, for example, does not enforce EU database rights. Moreover, you can in EU copy a book made by a US author who died 80 years ago even if that copyright is still valid in the US. Local laws are enforced by local courts. What the Berne Convention requires is that if I have a copyright in US it will be recognised in Franc…

Trade agreements have been used to require other nations to extend their copyright terms to match the US, eg Canada:

https://cassels.com/insights/copyright-term-extension-in-can...

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#487

Post by prettyStandard »

bruce343434 wrote: post #180
prettyStandard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I am saying. Stop doing that. Train co-pilot, or whatever, to follow the terms of the license.

That's tough when Jimmy is using copilot to generate code for his proprietary company codebase. AI is just a tool, do you also sue the company that sold the paintbrush with which an infringing painting was made?

Microsoft should make it more difficult UX wise to do this.

Microsoft should also provide resources to content creators to find where their work has been used.

This is not complicated.

Generally I'm reluctant to say people are acting in bad faith. It's less tough to say Microsoft is acting in bad faith here.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#488

Post by giaour »

sircastor wrote: post #410
avianlyric wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Yes, that’s exactly what happens when you buy a book, or pay for a music subscription. The work is in the public domain, then global permission to observe and copy the work is already granted. > Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? You don’t need to. It’s impli…

>Yes, that’s exactly what happens when you buy a book, or pay for a music subscription. The work is in the public domain, then global permission to observe and copy the work is already granted. When you buy a book, you’re not paying a licensing fee. You’re exchanging for goods. You’re granted very few rights to own a copy of the work. But they’re almost all to do with distribution. None of those rights is the right t…

> When you buy a book, you’re not paying a licensing fee. You’re exchanging for goods. You’re granted very few rights to own a copy of the work. But they’re almost all to do with distribution. None of those rights is the right to read it.

You are absolutely buying a license to read the material when you purchase a book. That's why books cost more than the paper they're printed on and why pirated books are illegal. The "distribution" rights you refer to stem from the "first sale" doctrine[0], which acknowledges that the first sale (e.g., you buying a new copy of a book) of a physical object embodying a copyrighted work grants limited distribution rights.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#489

Post by Aerroon »

metacritic12 wrote: post #394
jeroenhd wrote: post #105

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

Regardless of whether one agrees or not with paying creators of the training data, I think the deeper issue here is about societal wealth distribution and who gets paid for X now that X is being done very well by AIs. A less equitable world has Google or billionaires getting paid. A more equitable world has the artists. But I want to argue here that for purposes of this latter question, your proposal of copyright enf…

>- Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever?

This is kind of what happened with music, no? In some countries hard drives, SSDs etc all carry an additional tax that is then given to some copyright organization. Of course it's not the artists that mainly benefit from this, but instead it's the people running said organization.

Eg https://www.telecompaper.com/news/spain-approves-new-digital...

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#490

Post by judge2020 »

vb-8448 wrote: post #407
RobotToaster wrote: post #368

> "The Co-Pilot suit is ostensibly being brought in the name of all open source programmers. Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful." Maybe people wouldn't be so a…

> Maybe people wouldn't be so angry about an AI trained on mostly open source code if said AI was open source, and not a proprietary SaaS. Exactly, the point is this one. Open-source doesn't mean liability free, you still have to comply to the license!

You don't if you are creating an entirely new work of art based solely on the knowledge and patterns you've learned from looking at other code, ie. a human learning to code by looking at millions of pages of code on GitHub; whether or not AI can learn in this way is the point of contention for AI art/code/chat generators.
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