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Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

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Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#331

Post by tzs »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #302
tzs wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US permission is required to make copies, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, publicly perform the work, or publicly display the work [1]. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

Right, the question is, when my computer requests a file from your computer, which one of us is "making a copy" ? It becomes less ambiguous to ask who is doing the publishing. In a physical analogy, if someone is selling bootleg DVDs on the street, I don't think anyone ever got busted for being a customer.

Note that you can't really do much with a downloaded file that is just sitting there on the disk or whatever that you downloaded it onto. Using it is likely to make a copy into RAM.

If the case of computer programs making such a copy does not require permission because of 17 USC 117 [1], which says that the owner of a copy of a computer program can make copies or adaptations if they are created as an essential step in utilizing the program and they are used in no other manner.

For digital downloads other than computer programs 17 USC 117 does not apply, and so copying to RAM to use the download would in theory be infringement. You probably won't get sued over it of course so its nothing to lose sleep over.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#332

Post by leereeves »

listenallyall wrote: post #330
leereeves wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First change the incentives, then everyone will work on finding a new economic model.

This makes even less sense than the previous guy. When you've figured out how the world will work without people incentivized by money and power, get back to the rest of us

Suing people for reading a book is one of the ways the poor are kept poor.

The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that. The question is how to prevent the few who are from oppressing the rest of us.

That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#333

Post by bryans »

holmesworcester wrote: post #208
kibwen wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But acquiring the material illegally is the thrust of the issue, and the point of the thread here: the notion that large companies can get away with piracy if they just execute it on a large enough scale. Copyright infringment for thee but not for me.

There's no "for thee but not for me" issue here: nobody has ever been sued or prosecuted simply for downloading, acquiring, or possessing illegally acquired copyrighted works. People are sued and prosecuted for unlicensed distribution . Making and having your own copies, and doing what you want with them, has always been fine. At worst it's a grey area, but in many cases it's been protected as fair use.

> nobody has ever been sued or prosecuted simply for downloading, acquiring, or possessing illegally acquired copyrighted works

Everyone who was sued by the RIAA was done so for possessing the music in a publicly accessible method. Distribution was never actually proven in any of the cases (including the high profile losses). Defendants who argued that accessibility does not qualify as distribution actually won their cases. Most who argued against the validity of the evidence acquisition also won their cases.

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#335

Post by dragonwriter »

erehweb wrote: post #300
holmesworcester wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written. While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact. And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone…

Second-order effects are real - removing copyright would hurt authors. (See cstross comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761641 e.g.)

> Second-order effects are real - removing copyright would hurt authors.

Aiding authors is an instrumental, not fundamental, purpose of copyright in the US; the fundamental purpose to which any instrumental purposes are subordinate is “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”.

That is, while copyrights are a form of property, they are not something that is seen as natural property, but instead property explicitly granted as a means of achieving a public policy goal, and therefore limitations (or even elimination) harming the owners of that property is not the kind of dispositive argument against a policy that would be with the kinds of property seen as natural property.

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#336

Post by cgriswald »

djaouen wrote: post #320

AI is transformative. Period.

That's a very strong claim that for which you should probably provide some evidence.

I just asked ChatGPT to produce a script of a scene from a movie by asking it first to change a single line (which wouldn't be transformative) and then asking it to restore the line to the original. It obliged. Sure, it's probably not the same exact script, but it's not transformative at all.

In any case, the issue here isn't whether the output is transformative, but whether the work was used to train an LLM, which (perhaps) isn't an authorized or licensed use.

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#337

Post by CaptainFever »

698969 wrote: post #307
holmesworcester wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written. While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact. And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone…

Then most people stop writing books because they can't get paid for their time/effort and ~every child will be stuck with outdated knowledge within a decade.

> The economic argument goes like this: “I want to get rich (usually described inaccurately as ‘making a living’), and if you don't allow me to get rich by programming, then I won't program. Everyone else is like me, so nobody will ever program. And then you'll be stuck with no programs at all!” This threat is usually veiled as friendly advice from the wise.

> I'll explain later why this threat is a bluff. First I want to address an implicit assumption that is more visible in another formulation of the argument.

> This formulation starts by comparing the social utility of a proprietary program with that of no program, and then concludes that proprietary software development is, on the whole, beneficial, and should be encouraged. The fallacy here is in comparing only two outcomes—proprietary software versus no software—and assuming there are no other possibilities.

This, but with creative works instead. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#338

Post by [deleted] »

TheDong wrote: post #294
int_19h wrote: post #285

> The lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that summaries of the plaintiffs’ work generated by ChatGPT indicate the bot was trained on their copyrighted content. “The summaries get some details wrong” but still show that ChatGPT “retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset," the lawsuit says. Setting aside the whole issue of whether LLM constitutes a derived work of whatever it's trained on, this sounds l…

That isn't firm evidence, but courts don't need firm evidence to start a case and discover new facts. They very well can ask LLM experts, and openAI themselves, whether that output is highly likely to have been derived from the copyrighted work in question. Anyway. If the argument is "No, it's not from the book, it's from someone else's copyrighted summary", that just means the person who wrote such a summary needs t…

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