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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

#591

Post by wvenable »

greysphere wrote: post #164
wvenable wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe for music is already outrageous -- why do you think that needs to be extended to everything? https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...

It takes work to create/identify/classify information, both in the economic and physics sense. That work should be allowed the same protections we do other forms of work. Your example is one where nearly no work was done, thus it doesn't deserve much value. "Let a = the set of all songs" doesn't help me find new songs I like. A songwriter does that work. Another artist that takes and uses and resells that work (witho…

> Another artist that takes and uses and resells that work (without consent), is stealing that work.

Another artist accidentally uses a melody from another song (because it's a finite set) and are sued for all their income is a horrible system. The winners aren't the people producing value, it's the people who got there first and are now profiting off other people's work.

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

#592

Post by pvaldes »

joxel wrote: post #383
b112 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not dealing with AGI here. Current trained models are basically just using copy and paste, to create "new" works. There is zero creativity, zero art, zero original thought, zero newness. When actual AGI happens, then your arguments mean something. Such as in, at least 50 or 100 years down the road.

Your statement here is simply ignorance. Generative models do not only provide “copy paste”, they can interpolate and extrapolate from training data. When a human sees a bunch of ideas and mixes them up to produce something slightly different it doesn’t bother anyone. But when a human creates an AI and uses it to do something similar suddenly it’s a problem. I think the burden of proof is on the laypeople here that k…

> When a human sees a bunch of ideas and mixes them up to produce something slightly different it doesn’t bother anyone.

Try to make a car using the best ideas developed by each car maker. You will be surprised.

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

#593

Post by randombits0 »

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…

Oversight? Hardly. You don’t seem to understand the purpose of copyright to begin with.

The purpose of copyright is to progress science and useful arts. Period. Any action taken in the name of copyright that does not progress science and useful arts is unsupported by law.

What else do we know about copyright? A copyright can apply only to creative expressions. While the bar for sufficient creativity is intentionally low, it is non-zero.

Another thing we know is that purely functional expressions are not copyrightable. When does an expression go beyond being a function expression to a creative expression? That’s up to a judge. Since code is math and math, by itself, cannot be copyrighted, when an expression reaches the level of creative expression must be beyond the math. Updating a database field, factoring primes, or using data correction algorithms are not creative expressions.

Now for AI. Only humans may own copyrights. The output of an AI is not copyrightable. But what if the input was copyrighted?

When it comes to software code, AI will value expressions that are commonly used more so than uncommon ones. But software code is, by it’s very nature, an intertwined collection of copyrightable (creative) and non-copyrightable (functional) expressions. If AI values commonly used expressions, those expressions are highly unlikely to be creative enough for copyright protection in the first place.

So we have a circumstance where AI is trained on copyrighted but Open Source code. Yet the code itself is comprised of both creative (presumably) and functional code, with no clear delineation of what is and what is not protectable.

Lastly, many authors do not understand what constitutes a creative expression that is protectable by copyright. The amount of work required to create the expression is meaningless. Manipulating data to thresh out something interesting is not creative. Let’s just face it that most software is comprised of mostly functional expressions that are not protectable. Back to that “math” problem again!

The big take-away? The purpose of copyright is to progress science and useful arts, not to build walls around ideas and concepts (which, by themselves, are not protectable).

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

#594

Post by dahart »

jonkho wrote: post #588
dahart wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By using a simple test (currently legal standard) that if I showed you the node weights Nope, this is strawman and continuing to demonstrate a misunderstanding of Copyright Law. There is no such legal standard, where did you get that? If the network can reproduce a work, then it does in fact contain a latent copy. Arguing that you can’t see it by inspecting node weights is straw man. You cannot argue that you’re no…

My claim has always been that 1) the creating of the model is does not violate copyright. Claiming otherwise means running same algorithm in meatspace would violate copyright laws, which implies thoughts violates laws which is absurd. 2) distribution of the model does not violate copyright laws because the models themselves do not contain latent copies of the work. The model itself is not the work nor a recognizable…

Creating of the model does violate copyright if the model you create can reproduce someone else’s work. Your logic is faulty. Running the algorithm isn’t what causes the problem, so there is no implication that thought is the problem: this point is still a straw man argument. If it seems absurd, then shouldn’t you re-check your assumptions?

> nor can it be reconstituted back to the work

This is false. It has already happened multiple times that networks reproduced copyrighted material.

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

#595

Post by Groxx »

chii wrote: post #467
threeseed wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been leaks where OpenAI is charging $42/month to use their service. How much of that is going back to the copyright holders whose work their service derives value from ?

> How much of that is going back to the copyright holders whose work their service derives value from ? how much of the earnings of the student of art goes to the textbook authors, paintings and learning materials he used to get to where he is today?

Derivative works are their own things (when sufficiently derivative). And AIs are not humans - using an algorithm does not automatically remove the copyright. See also "I uploaded a movie to youtube but it's upside down, why did it get taken down".

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

#596

Post by bombolo »

zone411 wrote: post #582
bombolo wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you can't read words? Extraterritorial jurisdiction? You sell stuff to country A, you comply with laws of country A. Which is why USA companies have to take GRPR into account. You make an illegal model for country A? Can't sell it there.

You wouldn't sell the model, you would sell its outputs. I can legally buy products made by factories in Bangladesh that would violate all sorts of laws if they were operating in the U.S. It will be for international trade agreements to determine.

You mean operate in a legal grey area and shut down when the loophole is closed

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

#597

Post by jonkho »

dahart wrote: post #594
jonkho wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My claim has always been that 1) the creating of the model is does not violate copyright. Claiming otherwise means running same algorithm in meatspace would violate copyright laws, which implies thoughts violates laws which is absurd. 2) distribution of the model does not violate copyright laws because the models themselves do not contain latent copies of the work. The model itself is not the work nor a recognizable…

Creating of the model does violate copyright if the model you create can reproduce someone else’s work. Your logic is faulty. Running the algorithm isn’t what causes the problem, so there is no implication that thought is the problem: this point is still a straw man argument. If it seems absurd, then shouldn’t you re-check your assumptions? > nor can it be reconstituted back to the work This is false. It has already…

How is creating the model in my brain not illegal (as in my thoughts are not illegal) yet if it’s in silicon it would be illegal? Please give a well reasoned answer. This is not a strawman no matter how many times you insist on using that label.

Secondly you seem to be conflating the “tool itself” to “what the tool can do” to be strongly equivalent. I.e if the tool has the capability to violate laws, then the existence and distribution of the tool itself also violates said law. (Not so)

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

#598

Post by sdfhbdf »

spoiler wrote: post #590
clejack wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the parent poster has the right idea. This is not just anthropomorphization; it's an analogy. They take away is contained in the first and last sentences. Derivation is key. Copyright protects original expressions, and copying means to reproduce (read and write) something. The analogy OP made is focused on the reading and writing done by humans and the reading and writing done by an algorithm. Algos like stab…

I guess. Imagine you're an artist, and you've created your career based around your unique art style. It gets you jobs as a concept artist, or whatnot (idk). Now, imagine there's a tool someone "trained" in a few hours to do what you you do, but withi seconds instead of hour or days. Is there any reason to pay you, ever again? Your hourly rate is surely going to be higher than their electricity bill for running the a…

No. You cannot copyright an abstract style. Process is not copyrightable.

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

#600

Post by freejazz »

usrbinbash wrote: post #361
cycomanic wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, AI learning is not the same as a person learning. The same way memorizing a book is not the same way as putting it into computer memory. Nobody would sue you for copyright infringement if you memorized a book, song or movie in your head. No the issue is a completely different matter if you made a copy on a harddrive.

> The issue is a completely different matter if you made a copy on a harddrive. But there are no copies. For example, the LAION-2b training data is a total of 240 TB. The pruned SD model based on this dataset, is less than 5GB. The data isn't copied into the models, it is used to teach the models, letting them learn patterns in the dataset.

You are just anthropomorphizing the model by calling it teaching and then implicitly equating that it's the same thing happening in the human mind. That's your burden to establish when you say it's the same.
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