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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

#431

Post by edanm »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #421
listenallyall wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you go figure out this new economic model, and come back when it's ready. Until then, the existing model will persist, thank you

Oh boy, do I have good news for you! There are already many writers making thousands of dollars a month by publishing free serialized web novels, via Patreon. Some are using their own websites, but most are on Royal Road (or scribblehub, webnovel, wattpad, AO3). A random example from Royal Road[1], the author makes $12065/month. Mind you, the text is not gated, it's free to read, the patreon only offers early access.…

What do you think authors feel about this? Despite many people on this site thinking we're the first generation with new technology, the issue of copyright, and technolgie's impact on it, has been discussed for centuries.

The "patronage" model is great (and I personally am a Patreon supporter of lots of creatives). But it also has a lot of flaws in it, both for the author and the public. Most authors will be happy to tell you both the good and bad of the model, in my experience.

The biggest flaw for the public, btw, is that this model only supports art that "rich people" find worth supporting. This is bad, both because sometimes art isn't "deemed worthy" immediately, and because art for non-"rich" people is also very valuable.

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

#432

Post by marcus0x62 »

yencabulator wrote: post #347
marcus0x62 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if that turns out to be completely irrelevant? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I knew absolutely nothing about contract law and was then filmed stealing a book you wrote on the subject from a book store. I then started a business where I would answer questions about contract law, based solely on what I learned from the book. Of course, my memory isn't perfect, but I don't like to admit when I'm wrong,…

Replace "answer questions about contract law, based solely on what I learned from the book" with "generate cartoon images, based solely on what ML learned from Disney IP" and see how badly that will go.

Replace it with any subject. The point stands - it isn't at all clear how the courts will treat this.

Take your example: I'm a self-taught artist, and I learned everything I know about art by studying cartoons made by Disney. Maybe I paid for these cartoons, maybe I didn't. I then make a website where I draw my own cartoons, which, since I've never seen any other art, look a lot like Disney's. Unless I'm straight-up copying their characters, they would have no claim against me.

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

#433

Post by account42 »

holmesworcester wrote: post #262
pessimizer wrote: post #86

> The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private t…

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…

I'm all for abolishing copyright, but how is this relevant to megacorporations ignoring copyright when it suits them while still expecting us to follow it when that suits them?

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

#434

Post by listenallyall »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #421
listenallyall wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you go figure out this new economic model, and come back when it's ready. Until then, the existing model will persist, thank you

Oh boy, do I have good news for you! There are already many writers making thousands of dollars a month by publishing free serialized web novels, via Patreon. Some are using their own websites, but most are on Royal Road (or scribblehub, webnovel, wattpad, AO3). A random example from Royal Road[1], the author makes $12065/month. Mind you, the text is not gated, it's free to read, the patreon only offers early access.…

> Oh boy, do I have good news for you!

Is this some kind of pwn? Stephen King makes millions, JK Rowling likely a billionaire, Grisham, Patterson, Joan Collins, the list is endless. Didn't the 50 Shades of Grey author initially start with free fan fiction? Do you think these people are going to take a pay cut? And if your "random" author gets noticed by a publisher and is offered a book deal, do you think it will continue to be free?

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

#435

Post by DennisP »

edanm wrote: post #431
GeoAtreides wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, do I have good news for you! There are already many writers making thousands of dollars a month by publishing free serialized web novels, via Patreon. Some are using their own websites, but most are on Royal Road (or scribblehub, webnovel, wattpad, AO3). A random example from Royal Road[1], the author makes $12065/month. Mind you, the text is not gated, it's free to read, the patreon only offers early access.…

What do you think authors feel about this? Despite many people on this site thinking we're the first generation with new technology, the issue of copyright, and technolgie's impact on it, has been discussed for centuries. The "patronage" model is great (and I personally am a Patreon supporter of lots of creatives). But it also has a lot of flaws in it, both for the author and the public. Most authors will be happy to…

Patronage was art for rich people in pre-internet days. Now we can make it easy for anyone to contribute a dollar to an artist they like.

As for art that isn't "deemed worthy immediately," that doesn't immediately make money in today's system either. If the art can be freely distributed, it's more likely to find its audience.

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

#436

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

holmesworcester wrote: post #262
pessimizer wrote: post #86

> The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private t…

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…

I think the point here is that while children can be denied access to copyrighted works without paying the owners, but openAI and Meta can do as they please. I don't disagree that the current copyright system needs improvement, but what I really really don't like are seeing rich and powerful people breaking laws with impunity over and over and over again.

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

#437

Post by listenallyall »

leereeves wrote: post #332
listenallyall wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Please cite a single lawsuit.

> The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that.

Virtually everybody is "like that." The world works well because tons of people are working hard, toiling in difficult, dirty, boring, frustrating, or tedious jobs (or all of the above) behind the scenes to make it so. What are municipal waste workers seeking, if not money? Bus drivers? Construction workers? Police officers?

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

Any author or songwriter or photographer can proclaim his work to be freely copyable, just like programmers release code under MIT licenses. The fact that so few actually do, should clue you in on their incentives.

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

#438

Post by derangedHorse »

WillAdams wrote: post #309
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…

There are already many more public domain books than people are inclined to read: https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://librivox.org/ many of which form the basis for an education: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34630153 And most of which, when in copyright, paid their authors quite handsomely in terms of royalties. If you believe that books should exist without copyright, then one has to ask --- how many books ha…

The good public domain books are typically outdated in both content and language. This makes it hard for those with less resources to stay competitive and makes the task of understanding unnecessarily hard.

The link you posted that you say used public works to form a “basis for an education” uses Aristotle as an author for example, and seem to be taught in the context of an instructor-led class (where an expert can discriminate what’s still relevant today and help decipher the language)

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

#439

Post by edanm »

DennisP wrote: post #435
edanm wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think authors feel about this? Despite many people on this site thinking we're the first generation with new technology, the issue of copyright, and technolgie's impact on it, has been discussed for centuries. The "patronage" model is great (and I personally am a Patreon supporter of lots of creatives). But it also has a lot of flaws in it, both for the author and the public. Most authors will be happy to…

Patronage was art for rich people in pre-internet days. Now we can make it easy for anyone to contribute a dollar to an artist they like. As for art that isn't "deemed worthy immediately," that doesn't immediately make money in today's system either. If the art can be freely distributed, it's more likely to find its audience.

Contributing a dollar to an artist they like is beyond the ability of many people in the world. Both in technical terms (actually being able to reliably send someone a dollar), and monetarily.

And very few artists are out there surviving on patrons giving them a dollar a month, I imagine. Most of them survive on larger pledges, and as far as I know, very few of them reach anywhere near the amount of money traditionally-published authors can make.

> As for art that isn't "deemed worthy immediately," that doesn't immediately make money in today's system either. If the art can be freely distributed, it's more likely to find its audience.

Yes, it doesn't make money immediately in today's system. But many authors collect a back-catalogue of works, which might pay out only a bit of money at a time, but over a career can be enough. If I publish a novel every year for 20 years, even if every novel only brings in a sprinkling of money per year, by year 20 I'm getting 20 sprinkling of money, which could be enough to sustain me.

Very few of these "middle of the road" authors are popular enough to survive on patronage alone, I believe.

---

At the end of the day, you think that "the internet" somehow made possible something that wasn't technically possible before. I think that's mostly not true - the technology was never the problem. That's why copyright exists in the first place - to make sure that, despite books being almost-zero-cost to reproduce, we put an actual limit on it in order for more books to be published.

If you want a different system, that's your prerogative. But you have to grapple with the tradeoffs here. If less money flows to authors - which would happen if you abandon copyright - then there will be less books. That's almost a law of economics. If you think that somehow you can make something like patreon scale up to the same amount of money that exists in "the system" today, then a) I disagree, and b) you'd still have to content with the issues I mentioned.

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

#440

Post by marysnovirgin »

bobbean wrote: post #407
marysnovirgin wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvote me all you want to show you have nothing to say. Return to my comment in 10 years to find I'm right.

No one is going to remember this comment 30 seconds after they click away, and this thread will be absorbed into an AI

Haha! Touche
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