Live data from Hacker News

AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

571–580 of 705 posts

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

#571
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's surprising that so many people on this site side with the Luddites. The back pressure ML is generating is at this point too strong for anything to make any difference. Anyone who attempts to stop it will just be practicing self-sabotage.

It's surprising that so many people on this site side with the Luddites This is too reductive. The back pressure ML is generating is at this point too strong for anything to make any difference. This is wrong, regulation can make a difference. Anyone who attempts to stop it will just be practicing self-sabotage. This is a prospect worth evaluating organically. Learning the potential is much different from accepting s…

> This is wrong, regulation can make a difference.

Regulation is per country or bloc. With ML the value of defecting is so high that any regulation you impose on it which restricts its utility will amount to self-sabotage.

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

#573
post #569
post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What assumptions are you referring to? It doesn’t seem like you understand Copyright Law, so that’s why I keep trying to explain it. Under Copyright Law, you have to acquire material legally, and it’s illegal to distribute copies you made to other people. If you’re executing a NN algorithm in your mind, or via pen & paper, then you are copying from the training samples, because that’s what the algorithm does. During…

So we are in agreement that it is not violating copyright laws to run the algorithm on copyrighted works to produce the model, because if it is, my thoughts could be illegal too. In the end only actions such as reproducing the work and distributing it can be a violation. In other words, the end user of the model is the one to be held responsible if they reproduce and distribute the copyrighted material.

You have to acquire the source material legally. You can be in violation of copyright for copying music you didn’t buy. If you acquire work legally, you’re legally allowed to make backup copies for yourself, if you don’t distribute it. You can be in violation of copyright if you distribute something you don’t have the copyrights for.

Thoughts are never illegal wrt US Copyright Law. It’s a straw man to insist on making this point.

> In other words, the end user of the model is the one to be held responsible if they reproduce and distribute the copyrighted material.

No, this is false because it is the creators of the model that 1) did not legally acquire the source material and 2) distributed the network that contains latent copies of the source material that end users can use to reproduce works from.

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

#574

> 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. The open source movement is won…

It kinda is, but from what I’ve seen the developers against this are highly egotistical and having a meltdown that the skills that make them special and on some level famous are becoming obsolete

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

#575

If your AI is capable of reproducing part or whole of a bit of content it was trained on, then your AI is subject to copyright. Training an AI to create derivative works, does not absolve you of violating the copyright of the authors your AI is building derivative works from. If this is too much of a legal burden for you, then don’t train your AI on work it may create derivative forms from. It’s a pretty simple probl…

You seem to be very confident that you know exactly how the law is going to be interpreted in this case. If I were you I'd moderate that confidence a bit to cover the possibility that you are not in fact the top legal scholar you seem to think you are.

I could see this go either way. There's the argument you put forth, and then there's the argument that a text to image model is a transformative work. You can use copyrighted works and make money off your product and still have a transformative work. The Google books case is, of course, good reading on the subject.

My main point is that it is not at all clear which way the law will go on this.

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

#576
post #573
post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we are in agreement that it is not violating copyright laws to run the algorithm on copyrighted works to produce the model, because if it is, my thoughts could be illegal too. In the end only actions such as reproducing the work and distributing it can be a violation. In other words, the end user of the model is the one to be held responsible if they reproduce and distribute the copyrighted material.

You have to acquire the source material legally. You can be in violation of copyright for copying music you didn’t buy. If you acquire work legally, you’re legally allowed to make backup copies for yourself, if you don’t distribute it. You can be in violation of copyright if you distribute something you don’t have the copyrights for. Thoughts are never illegal wrt US Copyright Law. It’s a straw man to insist on makin…

> You have to acquire the source material legally. You can be in violation of copyright for copying music you didn’t buy.

This is incorrect. As another poster mentioned, it is not illegal to read a stolen book. It is only illegal to steal the book.

Secondly the source material is acquired legally since it is open to consumption on the open internet.

Thirdly model does not contain “latent copies of the source material”. By using a simple test (currently legal standard) that if I showed you the node weights and counts of the network no person even trained in the art can identify it to a specific piece of work. Therefore it is at best a derivative, reasonably distinct.

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

#577
post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're right. I was confusing them. The disconnect between the discussion and approach to training music models and image models still applies, although the hypocrisy I implied does not. Harmonai are approaching it sensibly. Huggingface and most other image diffusion models developers are not.

You might be interested to know then that Harmonai and Stability AI (creators of stable diffusion) are tightly connected. I think Harmonai is actually part of stability, but it's a bit murky.

https://twitter.com/StabilityAI/status/1605012677188718592?t...

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

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? The difference is that I buy books, pay for visiting museums and buy music in several formats, or pay it accepting to receive advertisement between songs. It Is expected that If I buy a book I will be allowed to read it without asking for a permission. What I don't do is copypasting paragraphs of other…

If you pirate a book, learn from it and then create something using the information you learned, would that creation constitute copyright infringement? If so how far does the tainting go? Once you put your eyes on something which you haven't purchased, all future works could potentially be inspired by that experience and should therefore be considered infringement, following your logic.

If you pirate a book, lossy compress it into a 14-byte content description vector, decompress it into a book that fundamentally contain at most 14-byte worth of information, then subsequently sold it, that will still be piracy partially depending on how good that 14-byte representation is.

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

#579

> 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. The open source movement is won…

It kinda is, but from what I’ve seen the developers against this are highly egotistical and having a meltdown that the skills that make them special and on some level famous are becoming obsolete

What a gross and hateful (and false) way to frame this…
Post reply on HN