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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

#451

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.…

> 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 con…

The point is that a system exists where books are freely available while the writers get compensation, quite serious compensation.

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

#452
post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to see the deleterious social effects of not having free access to Disney IP. Not Gish-galloping you, I just don't think of Disney IP as having high social utility in the grand scheme of things. I assume you'd have a better case with IP on medicines for example, but I can also see the benefits of, say, Pharma companies being able to turn some profit in order to develop other socially useful therapies...

> not having free access to Disney IP You've got this wrong. Rephrase it like this: > allowing Disney to enforce artificial scarcity with threats of state-enforced violence You might not like Disney stuff, but it's absurd that Winnie the Pooh for example just partially entered the public domain. Tigger is still locked up in a greed vault. You being dismissive of the cultural value is a cold comfort to the daycare tha…

I don't think a daycare should be sued for a Winnie the Pooh mural. But I also don't think a Winnie the Pooh mural has much inherent value anyway, especially to the kids it ostensibly was for. I can think of a million better things for mural-painters and Disney lawyers to do – but I don't think it requires the elimination of IP protections.

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

#453
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a good argument, but I'm not seeing how protecting a comedian's IP translates to limiting access to ideas and tools... that benefit broader society.

The same thing that protects that comedian's IP, is the same thing that makes the source designs for lithographic masks for semiconductor fabrication some of the most sensitive IP in the world! Who it is making the claim doesn't matter half as much as what the knock on consequences to jurisprudence at large.

It does matter who is making the claim because - I think you'd agree – there needs to be some reformation of IP law.

But I'll never support anything that says a comedian can't protect her book.

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

#454

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.…

Your "random" example is currently the #2 ongoing fiction on there, and was #1 until a couple days ago when the guy who wrote Mother of Learning released his new fiction.

It was random in the sense I clicked on trending and then clicked on the first thing I saw. Sure, the amount is an outlier, but there are more that are making over 500 or 1000/month, that's not unusual. Most authors are not making any money, of course, just like in the current system.

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

#455

> 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…

This assumes that the law is applied equally to both rich and poor.

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

#456

> 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…

We can totally take a second to remember that without it being in the context of allowing large corporations to hoover up private works with impunity.

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

#457
post #307

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.

so why haven't they already stopped if it is already trivial to download nearly any new piece of media?

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

#458

> 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…

Second-order effects matter, though: If everyone is allowed to steal books, what's the incentive for experts to write new ones, and for the publishers to reward them for it?

Btw, not a fan of "but what about the kids" rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit of the existing scheme is that new works get created, and some of them are even copy-edited and published. How many texts are created which are explicitly placed in the public domain and from which the authors have made a conscious decision not to profit thereby?

Books and libraries have existed for thousands of years. It’s copyright that is the young intruder. Most people who write non-fiction books do it because they want to contribute to human knowledge and be recognized as an expert in a particular field, not because they think that writing a differential geometry textbook is their path to riches. With the internet, more and more text books are made freely available by th…

Yet not as young as some people are inclined to think. For example, Charles Dickens was known for pushing for international copyright [1] (domestic copyright was already well established). I acknowledge that he wrote fiction, while you're primarily talking about non-fiction, but the point that it's not recent recent still stands

Also you've said yourself that many people can and are offering their work for free. Awesome. So I would prefer not to force others to (though I would certainly be up to consider repealing many of the posthumous copyright extensions that are fairly recent)

[1] https://www.charlesdickensinfo.com/life/copyright-laws/

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