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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

#471

Post by didntcheck »

DennisP wrote: post #308
698969 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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most people stop writing books because they can't get paid for their time/effort and ~every child will be stuck with outdated knowledge within a decade.

Or maybe we could figure out a new economic model, instead of blindly sticking with one based on the limitations of the pre-digital age.

How does the digital age change things? Copyright was invented when copying became easy, and hence arrived due to the printing press. A book is no different to a digital download in that the cost to produce it is tiny, and you're paying for the intellectual property, not the physical production of it

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

#472

Post by toss1 »

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…

>>copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written

Copyright is ALSO the reason that many books can be written in the first place.

Obviously, Copyright is abused and the continual extensions of copyright into near-perpetuity by corporations is basically absurd. And they are abused by music publishers etc. to rip-off artists.

But to claim that it should not exist, when it is utterly trivially simple for anyone to copy stuff to the web is to argue that no one should create or release any creative works, or to argue for drastic DRM measures.

Perhaps you DGAF about your written or artistic works because you do not or can not make a living off them, but I guarantee that for those creatives and artists who can and/or do make a living off of it, they do care, and rightly so.

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

#473

Post by greenie_beans »

ignoramous wrote: post #458
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 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

books hardly make money, so book sales is not the top incentive for most writers. i would be willing to bet that most books pay less than minimum wage, when considering the labor hours it takes to write the book and how much a writer is ultimately paid out. if not less than minimum wage, then certainly less than the expert's typical hourly rate.

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

#474

Post by refulgentis »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #293
refulgentis wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they?

Do you think scraping huge swathes of the internet contains pirated works or not?

Does that mean "no"? I guess so.

Where does it say they scraped huge swathes of the internet and didn't look at the results?

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

#475

Post by [deleted] »

pama wrote: post #131
bugglebeetle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when OpenAI publicly declared they trained on pirated works. I can’t imagine “we can’t tell if this is the result of the illegal thing we did or not” is going to stand up very well, nor does it bode well for any refutation of the plaintiff’s depiction of their intent. Part of fair use consideration is commercial impact and when you steal a bunch of books to train your AI model, it’s hard to refute that the impact…

Please read more carefully. OpenAI never “declared they trained on pirated works.”

[deleted]

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

#476

Post by didntcheck »

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…

Exactly. Take music, for example. Increased capitalist exploitation [1] is what allowed people to spread their creativity far and wide, rather ironically for genres like punk. There's still nothing stopping people from giving away stuff for free, and indeed I do that myself with both FOSS code and CC-BY media (not music), but I'm under no illusions that I'll ever make more than beer money from it, and I do not fault anyone else for going the all rights reserved route

[1] I use that term in the neutral, economic sense

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

#477

Post by adamc »

greenie_beans wrote: post #473
ignoramous wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

books hardly make money, so book sales is not the top incentive for most writers. i would be willing to bet that most books pay less than minimum wage, when considering the labor hours it takes to write the book and how much a writer is ultimately paid out. if not less than minimum wage, then certainly less than the expert's typical hourly rate.

I think that would wholly destroy the ability of writers to actually make a living writing novels. The fact that the living isn't great now does not justify this.

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

#478

Post by mrguyorama »

strunz wrote: post #445
deegles wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I memorize copyrighted material and recite it on Youtube? What if I do so but imperfectly? Where do you draw the line? If it's infringement for a human to do that why is it not for a LLM?

Look at how many people get blocked or demonetized for covers of existing songs which may not even be that close to the original. You can't even play a few seconds of the original in many cases, even for fair use and criticism/discussion. This is already in place.

Talking about what is allowed on youtube as if that's what defines what is copyrightable is a bait and switch. Youtube has an extra-judicial copyright system that explicitly favors large media owners so they won't sue youtube again.

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

#479

Post by temp51723 »

ignoramous wrote: post #458
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 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

> If everyone is allowed to steal books

Nothing was stolen- just copied.

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

#480

Post by mrguyorama »

magoghm wrote: post #232
NegativeK wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possession of copyrighted material without permission of the creator is illegal, but yes -- rights holders don't really go after infringers except maybe via ISP three strikes crap. They're very much incentivized to change their behavior for AI scraping, though.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that copyright law typically regulates the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, public display, or creation of derivative works of copyrighted materials. Possession of copyrighted material in itself is not illegal. It's how you use that material that could potentially violate copyright laws.

You are incorrect. One of the biggest rights in copyright is the ability to basically refuse distribution entirely. You cannot have a copy of a copyrighted work without the authors permission. To do otherwise is a violation of the copyright owners right to be in control of who can access their work.
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