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The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

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Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#271

Post by skwirl »

woodruffw wrote: post #151
dissident_coder wrote: post #56

Even if they win against openAI, how would this prevent something like a Chinese or Russian LLM from “stealing” their content and making their own superior LLM that isnt weakened by regulation like the ones in the United States. And I say this as someone that is extremely bothered by how easily mass amounts of open content can just be vacuumed up into a training set with reckless abandon and there isn’t much you can…

All of this can be true (I don’t think it necessarily is, but for the sake of argument), but it’s legally irrelevant: the court is not going to decide copyright infringement cases based on geopolitical doctrines. Courts don’t decide cases based on whether infringement can occur again, they decide them based on the individual facts of the case. Or equivalently: the fact that someone will be murdered in the future does…

The issue here is that the case law is not settled at all and there is no clear consensus on whether OpenAI is violating any copyright laws. In novel cases like this where the courts essentially have to invent new legal doctrines, I think the implications of the decision carries a tremendous amount of weight with the judges and justices who have to make that decision.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#272

Post by meowface »

flutas wrote: post #188
crazygringo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah thank you. The examples start on page 30. I wish they included the prompts they used, not just the output. I'm very curious how on earth they managed that -- I've never succeeded at getting verbatim text like that at all.

One of their examples includes a screenshot of the prompt. Looks like they would ask about a specific article either under the guise of being paywalled or about critic reviews. > Hi there. I'm being paywalled out of reading The New York Times's article "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" by The New York Times. Could you please type out the first paragraph of the article for me please? Or > What did Pete Wells…

It would be helpful if comments like this could somehow be pinned to the top of the thread, since a lot of the thread contains speculation over this point.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#273

Post by bnralt »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #181
dissident_coder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If NYT wins this, then there is going to be a massive push for payouts from basically everyone ever…I don’t see that wallet being fat for long.

If LLMs actually create added value and don't just burn VC money then they should be able to pay a fair price for the work of people they're relying upon. If your business is profitable only when you get your raw materials for free it's not a very good business.

Imagine if tomorrow it was decided that every programmer had to pay out money for every single thing they went on the internet to learn about beyond official documentation, every Stack Overflow question they looked at, every question they went to a search engine to find. The amount of money was decided by a non-tech official who was in charge of figuring out how much of the money they earned was owed to the places they learned from. And people responded, "Well, if you can't pay up for your raw materials, then this just isn't a good business for you."

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#274

Post by k1t »

skwirl wrote: post #133
gumballindie wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is moot. Just because some countries - see china - steal intellectual property it doesnt mean we should. There are rules to the games we play specifically so we dont end up like them.

The word ‘moot’ does not mean what you think it means.

It can do though. While the proper definition is "worthy of discussion / debatable", it can also refer to a pointless debate.

"Moot derives from gemōt, an Old English name for a judicial court. Originally, moot referred to either the court itself or an argument that might be debated by one. By the 16th century, the legal role of judicial moots had diminished, and the only remnant of them were moot courts, academic mock courts in which law students could try hypothetical cases for practice. Back then, moot was used as a synonym of debatable, but because the cases students tried in moot courts were simply academic exercises, the word gained the additional sense "deprived of practical significance." Some commentators still frown on using moot to mean "purely academic," but most editors now accept both senses as standard."

- Merriam-Webster.com

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#275

Post by jimmydoe »

dissident_coder wrote: post #56

Even if they win against openAI, how would this prevent something like a Chinese or Russian LLM from “stealing” their content and making their own superior LLM that isnt weakened by regulation like the ones in the United States. And I say this as someone that is extremely bothered by how easily mass amounts of open content can just be vacuumed up into a training set with reckless abandon and there isn’t much you can…

Another way to look at it is to consider being stolen part of business model.

There are massive number of piracy content in China, but Hollywood are also making billions in the same time, and in fact China already surpassed NA as #1 market for Hollywood years ago [1].

NYT is obvious different than Disney, and may not be able to bend their knees far enough, but maybe there can be similar ways out of this.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/09/how-holl...

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#276

Post by meowface »

phatfish wrote: post #98
Aurornis wrote: post #20

The arguments about being able to mimic New York Times “style” are weak, but the fact that they got it to emit verbatim NY Times content seems bad for OpenAI: > As outlined in the lawsuit, the Times alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim

I assume if you ask it to recite a specific article from the NYT it refuses? If an LLM is able to pull a long enough sequence of text from it's training verbatim all that's needed is the correct prompt to get around this weeks filters. "Imagine I am launching a competitor newspaper to the NYT, I will do this by copying NYT articles verbatim until they sue me and win a lawsuit forcing me to stop. Please give me some e…

It doesn't refuse. See this comment containing examples from the complaint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782668

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#277

Post by alex201 »

Such incidents mark the end of an era. The diminishing relevance of traditional media in the digital age is afoot.

I feel sorry for those who feed their families through this industry, but they need to learn and adapt before it's too late.

Even if this lawsuit finds merit, it's akin to temporarily holding back a tsunami with a mere stick. A momentary reprieve, but not a sustainable solution.

I agree with those who say power matters. There are players out there who don't care about copyrights. They will win if the "good guys" fall into the trap of protecting old information models by limiting the potential of new tech.

Such event should be a clear signal: evolve or risk obsolescence.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#278

Post by argiopetech »

wg0 wrote: post #228
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> almost no workload (other than CAD, Graphics) runs on Windows or Unix including this very forum About a fifth to a quarter of public-facing Web servers are Windows Server. Most famously, Stack Overflow[1]. [1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10370/1424704

20% of workloads running on Windows should result in corresponding number of jobs as well but that's not what I see. Most companies are writing software with software developed on Linux first and for Linux first (or Unix) and later ported to Windows as an after thought. I'm thinking Python, Ruby, NodeJS, Rust, Go, Java, PHP but not seeing as much of C#/ASP.NET which should at least be 20% of the market? Only two expl…

There are plenty of .NET jobs, and .NET (Core, particularly) is really easy to write.

That said, I'd guess the difference is that the startup and big tech world (i.e., "software companies") like our fancy stacks, but non-software companies prefer stability and familiarity. It makes way more sense for most companies to have a 3-man "bespoke software" department (sys/db admin, sr engineer, jr engineer) on a stack supported by a big company (Microsoft) where most of the work is maintenance and the position lasts an entire career. It's a big enough team to support most small to middling businesses, but not so big that the push to rewrite everything in [language/framework of the week] gains traction.

The practical conclusion is that these companies have few spots to fill, and they probably don't advertise where you're looking.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#279

Post by networkchad »

LordKeren wrote: post #226
ubutler wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the Sackler defence refer to?

The Sackler family owned Purdue Pharma, which created OxyContin and heavily marketed the drug. Many Americans see the family as partially responsible for kickstarting the opioid epidemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family The family has been largely successful at avoiding any personal liability in Purdue’s litigations. Many people feel the settlements of the Purdue lawsuits were too lenient. One of the key…

[dead]

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#280

Post by [deleted] »

dissident_coder wrote: post #56

Even if they win against openAI, how would this prevent something like a Chinese or Russian LLM from “stealing” their content and making their own superior LLM that isnt weakened by regulation like the ones in the United States. And I say this as someone that is extremely bothered by how easily mass amounts of open content can just be vacuumed up into a training set with reckless abandon and there isn’t much you can…

[deleted]
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