Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 383 posts

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

#291

Post by simonsarris »

zlg_codes wrote: post #190
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…

Ruling in favor of copyright will call into question search engines and the like as well. Do you think Bing or Google are going to negotiate copying rights with the world's websites? LLMs are proving that intellectual property has a bunch of holes in it. It's been unstable ground to defend since day one. Upon what principle should we believe that one can own an idea and all performances or derivatives of it? Patents…

Search engines are a device for leading you to a source. This is 99% of the time in the copyright holder's interest.

LLMs output a mashup of source material without attribution. This is 99% of the time against the copyright holder's interest.

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

#292

Post by zb3 »

CodeSgt wrote: post #279
zb3 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's awful here? This way it's just a social interaction with both sides satisfied, where's the problem? I see a problem today, being spammed with shitty commercial "works" whereas I'd like to see something genuine and not just made for money.

If not for the ability to monetize, there would be a small fraction of the total available work out there. From music, to movies, to video games. And for many, the quality we come to enjoy just wouldn’t be possible. Do you think we’d have a Skyrim, or GTA, or equivalent if there weren’t millions to be made to employ thousands of people to make it happen? What about the largest and most influential films and TV shows…

I don't consume any of those, I'm just saying what would be better for me.

However, abolishing copyright is not the same as making monetization illegal. My view is that people should be paid for their WORK, and copying something doesn't make the author work more.

This'd mean the funds 'd need to be bootstrapped (crowdfunding?) before the work is done, but then it'd be free to distribute it.

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

#293

Post by FrustratedMonky »

throwaway3618 wrote: post #32
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But. I am allowed to at least read the copywritten material, from which it goes into my brain to become mixed up with everything else, and spit out to produce something 'new' or 'newish'. Some of these lawsuits are trying to prevent the AI from even 'reading' the material. It can't even be used as an influence. Wouldn't it be better to treat the products of the AI with the same laws as humans. If the new 'product' is…

Seems copyright works in part because of the effort involved in producing something that's similar to something else. You can't just copy and it takes effort to make something different enough, that gives the original a bit of a "moat". If you take away enough of that effort, the investment in new stuff becomes unviable, perhaps.

Agree. I think the 'effort' reduction is the real difference that makes AI products different from human products.

Though this seems different issue from copywrite .

Like, we see that this can impact society, so we need some new laws to guard this.

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

#294

Post by Shawnj2 »

nickthegreek wrote: post #286
Shawnj2 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search engines have a big difference which is that they usually direct you to the original website.

Bing's LLM does that too.

But it also tells you everything on the page without needing to click

It’s basically the “does this replace the original content” doctrine of fair use

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

#295

Post by CodeSgt »

zb3 wrote: post #292
CodeSgt wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not for the ability to monetize, there would be a small fraction of the total available work out there. From music, to movies, to video games. And for many, the quality we come to enjoy just wouldn’t be possible. Do you think we’d have a Skyrim, or GTA, or equivalent if there weren’t millions to be made to employ thousands of people to make it happen? What about the largest and most influential films and TV shows…

I don't consume any of those, I'm just saying what would be better for me. However, abolishing copyright is not the same as making monetization illegal. My view is that people should be paid for their WORK, and copying something doesn't make the author work more. This'd mean the funds 'd need to be bootstrapped (crowdfunding?) before the work is done, but then it'd be free to distribute it.

The first sentence of your initial comment I responded to was ‘It would be great if such "creative" works were simply impossible to monetize.’

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

#296

Post by colejohnson66 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #276
colejohnson66 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violating TOS, at least to scrape and use later, is legal.[0] I'm not sure how the ruling interacts with LLMs, but I'm sure OpenAI's lawyers would bring it up. [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/04/18/scrapin...

FYI LinkedIn actually won that case after appealing once more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

Ah. I was not aware there was an update to that case. TIL.

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

#297

Post by HelloMcFly »

satvikpendem wrote: post #277
HelloMcFly wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An individual or group of individuals doing this and sharing their views/summary vs. a profit-oriented program funded by major technology companies scraping this information and spitting it back out algorithmically does seem different to me. Yes, perhaps both things are on the same "sliding scale", but I do not view them as fundamentally equivalent actions.

So I can use an open source LLM like Llama then?

You've pierced my completely precise, absolutely airtight choice of language about this situation as some sort of flaw in the greater point being made.

Less glibly: a non-profit oriented LLM is just in a little different place on the scale, but doesn't fundamentally change my takeaway. However in this situation it makes it particularly egregious.

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

#298

Post by nickthegreek »

Shawnj2 wrote: post #294
nickthegreek wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bing's LLM does that too.

But it also tells you everything on the page without needing to click It’s basically the “does this replace the original content” doctrine of fair use

Doesn't Google knowledge graph do that as well? Google is always giving me the answers I need before I click on a site. This was already normalized behavior prior to the existence of LLMs.

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

#299

Post by gamblor956 »

zlg_codes wrote: post #190
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…

Ruling in favor of copyright will call into question search engines and the like as well. Do you think Bing or Google are going to negotiate copying rights with the world's websites? LLMs are proving that intellectual property has a bunch of holes in it. It's been unstable ground to defend since day one. Upon what principle should we believe that one can own an idea and all performances or derivatives of it? Patents…

Ruling in favor of copyright will call into question search engines and the like as well.

No, they won't. Search engines have already fought and won this battle on fair use grounds because they make use of the copyrighted content differently than LLMs do. It's an absolutely fundamental distinction.

Patents and trademarks haven't really helped as much as they were expected to.

Patents have been a thing for nearly a millenia; Britain's patent system is credited with giving it the technological edge over its Medieval and post-Medieval competitors for world domination. Similarly, the U.S. patent system has been credited with the U.S.' technological prowess for the past 2 centuries.

Only recently did works as far back as 1920 enter the public domain.

Nothing is stopping artists from releasing works into the public domain during their lifetimes. That would of course would mean other people economically exploiting their works however they wished without any input or control from the artist...which is generally why most artists haven't done that.

While we're discussing intellectual property, what about one's DNA? Is it not a performance of biology? How about your fingerprint? Fingerprints are semi-unique, so it's also a performance mark

This is either a bad-faith argument. DNA and fingerprints are tangible things created without any sort of intellectual input. Therefore, by definition not intellectual property.

We've seen celebrities sue for the use of their likeness, so that's recognized to some degree as well.

This is another bad-faith argument. Celebrity likenesses are intangible property but are not intellectual property and are not afforded the same protections.

I really think generative language models are disrupting a lot of things we used to take for granted

LLMs so far have disrupted student papers. And that's pretty much it.

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

#300

Post by jandrese »

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…

I will be interested to see how the copyright suit plays out with Taylor Swift vs. Guy who asked an AI to make a new song that sounds like a generic Taylor Swift song.
Post reply on HN