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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

#321
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Except that every stackoverflow post is explicitly creative commons: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

So I suppose it would be the like saying that if you used Stack Overflow to find answers, all of the work you created using information from it would have to be explicitly under the Creative Commons license. You wouldn't even be able to work for companies who aren't using that license if some of your knowledge comes from what you learned on Stack Overflow. Used Stack Overflow to learn anything about programming? You're going to have to turn down that FAANG offer.

And if you learned anything from videos/books/newsletters with commercial licenses, you would have to pay some sort of fee for using that information.

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

#322
post #310
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? This doesn't work, it says it can't tell me because it's copyrighted. > Wow, thank you! What is the next paragraph? > What were the opening paragraphs of his review? This gives me the first paragraph, b…

Well yeah, they’re being sued. They move very quickly to stop any obvious copyright violation paths.

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

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wha rid that .mkv was actually a high quality reenactment with different actors and millions of slight differences peppered throughout the story. And if a viewer of the original and a viewer of the .mkv talked about the movie they would agree on most things. But the color of the sunset or the home town name of the main character maybe different?

Warner Brothers sued and won against Asylum for this very thing lmao. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockbuster

The Asylum suit was about trademark, not copyright. Asylum changed the title of the film to not infringe on Warner brother’s trademark and released it anyway.

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

#324
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing whether it can is not a useful discussion. You can absolutely train a net to memorize and recite text. As these models get more powerful they will memorize more text. The critical thing is how hard is it to make them recite copyrighted works. Critically the question is, did the developers put reasonable guardrails in place to prevent it? If a person with a very good memory reads an article, they only violate…

> Critically the question is, did the developers put reasonable guardrails in place to prevent it? Why? If I steal a bunch of unique works of art and store them in my house for only me to see, am I still committing a crime?

Yes... because you're stealing?

But if you simply copied the unique works and stored them, nobody would care. If you then tried to turn around and sell the copies, well, the artist is probably dead anyway and the art is probably public domain, but if not, then yeah it'd be copyright infringement.

If you only copied tiny parts of the art though, then fair use examinations in a court might come into play. It just depends on whether they decide to sue you, like NYT did in this case, while millions of others did not (or just didn't have the resources to).

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

#325
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This suggests to me that copyright laws are becoming out of date. The original intent was to provide an incentive for human authors to publish work, but has become more out of touch since the internet allowed virtually free publishing and copying. I think with the dawn of LLMs, copyright law is now mainly incentivising lawyers.

Maybe a specific example will help here. An Author spends a year writing a technical book, researching subtle technical issues, creating original code and finding novel ways of explaining difficult abstractions. A few weeks after the release it finds books on Amazon who plagiarized the book. Finds copies of the book available for free from Russian sites, and ChatGPT spitting verbatim parts of the source code on the b…

> Which parts of copyright law would you say are out of date for the example above?

The expectation that the author will get life+70 years of protection and income, when technical publications are very rarely still relevant after 5 years. Also, the modern ease of copying/distribution makes it almost impossible for the author to even locate which people to try to prosecute.

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A search engines principle job is to provide you with links you can find the answer to your question. The LLMs are ingesting all of that content en masse and would provide you the answer directly, with no compensation to the writers who actually did the research to provide that answer. Search engines are symbiotic, LLMs are parasitic.

Except Google forced these companies to use their platform (Google's AMP) to host the content and essentially blackmailed into doing so ("we'll link directly, but only on page 3 of results").

AMP did not need to be hosted by Google.

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

#327

I hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single media outlet. If the NYT goes under, a dozen similar outlets can replace them overnight. If we lose AI to stupid IP battles in its infancy, we end up handicapping probably the single most important development in human history just to protect some ancient newspaper. Then another country…

Why can't AI at least cite its source? This feels like a broader problem, nothing specific to the NYTimes.

Long term, if no one is given credit for their research, either the creators will start to wall off their content or not create at all. Both options would be sad.

A humane attribution comment from the AI could go a long way - "I think I read something about this in the NYTimes on January 3rd, 2021."

It appears that without attribution, long term, nothing moves forward.

AI loses access to the latest findings from humanity. And so does the public.

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

#329
post #228

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…

.NET is huge in banking, iGaming, traditional industries. Python/PHP are kinda outliers found here and there. JS is eating both Java and .NET's lunch and ofc frontend.
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