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New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

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Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#251

Post by Filligree »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #226
morelisp wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright law includes many exceptions explicitly for libraries.

Copywrite law doesn't ban people from reading the source altogether. That is what is being proposed, ban AI from being allowed to 'read' the content. The real argument is how does a human brain aggregate knowledge and then profit from it, and is it really that different from an AI model aggregating knowledge. They both read in data, perform calculations on the data, and spit out something.

Why should it be okay for humans to make a profit off of reading copyrighted content, though?

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#252

Post by dilap »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #245
pimterry wrote: post #113

Honestly, I think generative AI losing a massive copyright showdown is inevitable at this stage. It's extremely easy to get the latest generation of AIs to produce outputs that in many fields sans-AI would be trivially considered as IP infringement. While there are many interesting reasonable legal & technical arguments that it's not, the result completely undermines copyright protections regardless. If that's accept…

> AI consuming copyrighted data and producing an output has to be considered a derivative work (or indeed, the model itself will be considered a derivative work) or IP protections are effectively broken. It’s not derivative work though. First, a human didn’t create it, so copyright protections don’t exist on its output. Machines don’t enjoy copyright protections, people do. It’s mechanically copying and reproducing p…

Seems unfair as we converge on AGI. If I memorize the lyrics to a song, is that a copyright violation? The lyrics are encoded in the arrangement of my neurons, after all.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#253

Post by b33j0r »

pimterry wrote: post #113

Honestly, I think generative AI losing a massive copyright showdown is inevitable at this stage. It's extremely easy to get the latest generation of AIs to produce outputs that in many fields sans-AI would be trivially considered as IP infringement. While there are many interesting reasonable legal & technical arguments that it's not, the result completely undermines copyright protections regardless. If that's accept…

Short of a police state, how would you enforce this?

This has napster -> subscription spotify energy. But the only people happy about that are Spotify and people who found it distasteful to download music illegally. There just wasn’t a consumer-friendly option for a while, so the black market was the only market.

So. The enforcement mechanism is what… a scary DMCA letter?

(There will definitely be a stupid DCAIA in the next congress)

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#254

Post by Filligree »

lewhoo wrote: post #227
pixl97 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a business can (at least in the US)?

But by business we mean an organization of people.

For the moment. How many years until we see the first person-less business?

I’m sure there’ll be a human on the books, on paper.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#255

Post by zb3 »

CodeSgt wrote: post #240
Pannoniae wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that no one would create new software/music/books/movies/art/etc. without copyright. Humans have done so for millenia before, they still did so in absence of copyright protections. I don't see how this is not a serious alternative - the only major losers would be the middlemen, not the artists themselves.

Eh, I could definitely see the artists losing. The most obvious scenario that comes to mind for me is, imagine an independent artists launching their (book/film/album/etc) and the same day someone with more resources and experience takes the work and markets it better than the OG author ever could on their own.

It would be great if such "creative" works were simply impossible to monetize. I already don't pay for these and try to find unknown artists / writers who have a job and do stuff simply because they enjoy doing it.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#256

Post by zb3 »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #247
Pannoniae wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or on the converse: if those industries are unviable without copyright protection, they could go away entirely. This is a plausible path to "drop copyright entirely", just like encryption was dropped as an export-controlled technology in the late 90s. (remember the 40-bit "international" SSL?) OpenAI etc. have huge amounts of money behind them, they very well have a fighting chance in court to defend their usage of s…

You’ve ironically stumbled upon thenphilosocial argument in favor of copyright! We do want these industries to exist. Without copyright protection in a world of zero effort reproduction, it becomes impossible to make a living this way. This the industries cease to exist. And people stop crafting anything other than the most dogshit of media and programs and writing. If you have to work a different job all day, you’re…

But I don't want them to exist, I want to find content that is created because people (who earn money different way) enjoy producing it.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#257

Post by polski-g »

ojosilva wrote: post #159

IANAL, but copyright protections are pretty much tied to content and format and not to the idea itself, with the intent of preventing (or putting a price on) the copying of original works. The Times will have a very hard time proving that their content is being re-marketed by OpenAI. Having a competing product based on your ideas. Compare: "Steve Jobs [was] a tyrant": https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/ste…

If I read a story about a flood in Dubai on the NYTimes and then I write an email to my friend summarizing what I just read, it is not copyright infringement.

I am not sure why it would suddenly become infringement because an LLM is composing that email for me.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#258

Post by amadeuspagel »

zirgs wrote: post #131
voytec wrote: post #90

> if a federal judge finds that OpenAI illegally copied The Times' articles to train its AI model, the court could order the company to destroy ChatGPT's dataset, forcing the company to recreate it using only work that it is authorized to use. I'd like to see it happening but it sounds unrealistic.

They would simply move AI training operations to other jurisdictions where it's legal.

They can train whereever they want, but if they want to make the service available in the US, then US law applies.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#260

Post by allturtles »

idle_zealot wrote: post #173
genocidicbunny wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't humans operate similarly? I'm going to bypass this question a bit and say, who cares? Why do we need to treat these things the same way we treat humans? Why can we not say that it's okay if a human does it, and not okay if it's a computer? There's nothing that requires us to establish 'fair' as treating them the same as people.

> Why do we need to treat these things the same way we treat humans? Because it would be absurd for it to be legal to do X, but illegal to do so with an efficient tool. Especially when the activity X in question is "learning".

I don't find it at all absurd. Order-of-magnitude differences in quantity often become differences in quality.

It's legal in most places in the U.S. to own a semi-automatic weapon that fires x bullets/minute, but not a fully-automatic one that fires 10*x bullets/minute. It's legal for me to send water into my sewer by flushing the toilet, but not for me to pump the larger volume of water in my sump pump into that same sewer.

It's legal for a child to throw a handful of sand from the beach into the ocean. Do you think it should be legal for anyone to build and operate a sand throwing machine that methodically throws all of the sand on the beach into the ocean?

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