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

Post by 8note » Thu, Aug 17, 2023, 7:08 PM UTC

wilsynet wrote: post #241

zlg_codes wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As previously said, search engines index and provide links. I’ll add that it constitutes fair use because a search engine isn’t itself a replacement for the articles that it indexes. But ChatGPT is actually providing an alternative that obviates the original articles themselves.

Post by golem14 » Thu, Aug 17, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #225

zlg_codes wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think there is a major qualitative difference between generative AI and search engines. Search engines index the web and point you at other people's work, along the way showing perhaps too much of that content (thus "stealing" users from the target webpage). But they don't reshuffle existing content into something apparently new and original. The "malicious" case for generative AI is that it sucks in copyrighted wo…

Post by capableweb » Thu, Aug 17, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

8note wrote: post #301

wilsynet wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As previously said, search engines index and provide links. I’ll add that it constitutes fair use because a search engine isn’t itself a replacement for the articles that it indexes. But ChatGPT is actually providing an alternative that obviates the original articles themselves.

Search engines provide links, but also titles and snippets of the page -- enough for you to decide if you want to visit, and Google will show you their cached page if you ask for it. Even the link is a copyrightable item -- artistic effort went into creating it

Post by max51 » Thu, Aug 17, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

nextaccountic wrote: post #233

contravariant wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part openai will have to argue is that it's not mererly compression but an irreversible transformation. Which is hard, best hope they have is trying to put the burden of proof on the nytimes to show you can make the model regurgitate their articles (with some nudging). If they manage that then nytimes is going to have a lot of trouble showing the model actually breaches their copyright, because just the informati…

Any form of lossy compression is an irreversible transformation. We do it all the time for video, audio and images (you can't recover the original data) and they are still copyrighted

Post by telotortium » Thu, Aug 17, 2023, 7:17 PM UTC

kolbe wrote: post #222

CaptArmchair wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is going to be a test of the fair use doctrine. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ Now, there's this idea that "news" is just factual and therefore falls under "fair use". However, that's only part of what section 107 says. Fair use very much is still conditional, as there are 4 factors to be considered: (a) Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for…

Unfortunately we'll have 9 justices who know little about copyright law and nothing about tech to tell us what the law really is.