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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

#541

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

tbrownaw wrote: post #525
joquarky wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often get buried in the weeds about the purpose of copyright. Let us not forget that the only reason copyright laws exist is > To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries If copyright is starting to impede rather than promote progress, then it needs to change to remain constitutional.

Do other countries all use the same reasoning?

I don't think this was your point, but no they don't. Specifically China. What will happen if China has unbridled training for a decade while the United States quibbles about copyright?

I think publications should be protected enough to keep them in business, so I don't really know what to make of this situation.

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

#542

Post by CaptainFever »

cozzyd wrote: post #307
inglor_cz wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In contrast to child labor laws, which are intended and written to protect vulnerable people from exploitation, current copyright laws are tailored to the interests of Disney et al. If they were watered down, I wouldn't see any moral or ethical loss in that.

Copyright law is far from perfect, but the concept is not morally bankrupt. It is certainly abused by large entities but it also, in principle, protects small content creators from exploitation as well. In addition to journalists, writers, musicians, and proprietary software vendors, this also includes things like copyleft software being used in unintended ways. When I write copyleft software, it is my intention that…

With the exception of source code availability, copyleft is mostly about using copyright to destroy itself. Without copyright (which I feel is unethical), and with additional laws to enforce open sourcing all binaries, copyleft need not exist.

So it is not good when people use copyleft as a justification for copyright, given that its whole purpose was to destroy it.

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

#543

Post by lossolo »

vivekd wrote: post #491
ngetchell wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what industries with what application? I've seen lots of task like summarizing articles or producing text. The image and video work seems too rudimentary to be taken seriously. Is there something out there that seems like a killer application? I was amazed at the idea of the block chain but we never found a use for it outside of cryptocurrency. I see a similariy with AI hype.

Well front page of HN right now is an article about how AI aided in the development of a new antibiotic

It wasn't LLM. It was a graph network.

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

#544

Post by notahacker »

soulofmischief wrote: post #376
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter what's good for open source ML. It matters what is legal and what makes sense.

It doesn't matter what is legal. It matters what is right. Society is about balancing the needs of the individual vs the collective. I have a hard time equating individual rights with the NYT and I know my general views on scraping public data and who I was rooting for in the LinkedIn case.

I have an even harder time equating individual rights with the spending of $xx billion in Azure compute time and payment of a collective $0 to millions of individuals who involuntarily contribute training material to create a closed source, commercial service allowing a single company to compete with all the individuals currently employed to create similar work.

NYT just happens to be an entity that can afford to fight Microsoft in court.

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

#545

Post by SideQuark »

cogman10 wrote: post #479
SideQuark wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Circumventing computer security to copy items en masse to distribute wholesale without transformation is a far cry from reading data on public facing web pages.

He didn't circumvent computer security. He had had a right to use the MIT network and pull the JSTR information. He certainly did it in a shady way (computer in a closet) but it's every bit as arguable that he did it that way because he didn't want someone stealing or unplugging his laptop while it was downloading the data. He also did not distribute the information wholesale. What he planned on doing with the inform…

> right to use the MIT

That right ended when he used it to break the law. It was also for use on MIT computers, not for remote access (which is why he decided to install the laptop, also knowing this was against his "right to use").

The "right to use" also included a warning that misuse could result in state and federal prosecutions. It was not some free for all.

> and pull the JSTR information

No, he did not have the right to pull en masse. The JSTOR access explicitly disallowed that. So he most certainly did not have the "right" to do that, even if he were sitting at MIT in an office not breaking into systems.

> did it in a shady way

The word you're looking for is "illegal." Breaking and entering is not simply shady - it's illegal and against the law. B&E with intent to commit a felony (which is what he was doing) is an even more serious crime, and one of the charges.

> he did it that way because he didn't want someone stealing or unplugging his laptop

Ah, the old "ends justifies break the law" argument.

Now, to be precise, MIT and JSTOR went to great lengths to stop the outflow of copying, which both saw. Schwartz returned multiple times to devise workarounds, continuing to break laws and circumvent yet more security measures. This was not some simply plug and forget laptop. He continually and persistently engaged in hacking to get around the protections both MIT and JSTOR were putting in place to stop him. He added a second computer, he used MAC spoofing, among other things. His actions started to affect all users of JSTOR at MIT. The rate of outflow caused JSTOR to suffer performance, so JSTOR disabled all of MIT access.

Go read the indictment and evidence.

> OpenAI IS distributing information they got wholesale

No, that ludicrous. How many complete JSTOR papers can I pull from ChatGPT? Zero? How many complete novels? None? Short stories? Also none? Can I ask for any of a category of items and get any of them? Nope. I cannot.

It's extremely hard to even get a complete decent sized paragraph from any work, and almost certainly not one you pre-select at will (most of those anyone produces are found by running massive search runs, then post selecting any matches).

Go ahead and demonstrate some wholesale distribution - pick an author and reproduce a few works, for example. I'll wait.

How many could I get from what Schwartz downloaded? Millions? Not just even as text - I could have gotten the complete author formatted layout, diagrams, everything, in perfect photo ready copy.

You're being dishonest in claiming these are the same. One can feel sad for Schwartz outcome, realize he was breaking the law, and realizing the current OpenAI copyright situation is likely unlike any previous copyright situation all at the same time. No need to equate such different things.

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

#546

Post by munchler »

crowcroft wrote: post #144

Will be interesting to see where this ends up. If I scrape the NYT content, and then commercialize a service that lets users query that content through an API (occasionally returning verbatim extracts) without any agreement from or payment to the NYT, that would be illegal. It's not obvious to me why putting an LLM in the middle of the process changes that.

As long as you pay for your copy of the content and the extracts are fair use, how would that be illegal?

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

#547

Post by CaptainFever »

gumballindie wrote: post #84
blagie wrote: post #36

I think the train has left the station and the ship has sailed. I'm not sure it's possible to put this genie back in the bottle. I had stuff stolen by OpenAI too, and I felt bad about it (and even send them a nasty legal letter when it could output my creative work almost verbatim), but I think at this point, the legal landscape needs to somehow adjust. The Copyright Clause in the US Constitution is clear: To promote…

I see, the narrative switched form “cat’s out of the bag” to “genie’s out of the bottle”. Regardless, no one wants to ban llms. We just want the theft to stop.

    Copying is not theft.
    Stealing a thing leaves one less left
    Copying it makes one thing more;
    that’s what copying’s for.

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

#548

Post by throwup238 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #509
theGnuMe wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s likely fair use.

It's likely not. Search for "the four factors of fair use". While I think OpenAI will have decent arguments for 3 of the factors, they'll get killed on the fourth factor, "the effect of the use on the potential market", which is what this lawsuit is really about. If your "fair use" substantially negatively affects the market for the original source material, which I think is fairly clear in this case, the courts wont…

Fair use is based on a flexible proportionality test so they don't need perfect arguments on all factors.

> If your "fair use" substantially negatively affects the market for the original source material, which I think is fairly clear in this case, the courts wont look favorably on that.

I think it's fairly clear that it doesn't. No one is going to use ChatGPT to circumvent NYTimes paywalls when archive.ph and the NoPaywall browser extension exist and any copyright violations would be on the publisher of ChatGPT's content.

But let's not pretend like any of us have any clue what's going to happen in this case. Even if Judge Alsup gets it, we're so far in uncharted territory any speculation is useless.

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

#549

Post by charonn0 »

rand1239 wrote: post #527
charonn0 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the NYT goes under, why would its replacement fare any better?

News media like NYT, Fox etc are tools for high scale brainwashing public by the elite. This is why you see all the News papers have some political ideology. If they were reporting on truth and not opinions they won't have the need for leaning. Also you never see the journalists reporting against their own publication. Humanity is better off without these mass brainwashing systems. Millions of independent journalists…

Honestly, this sounds like a conspiracy theory and/or an attempt to deflect criticism from the AI companies.

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

#550

Post by whichfawkes »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #520
solardev wrote: post #313

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…

> I hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. Couldn't disagree more strongly, and I hope the outcome is the exact opposite. I think we've already started to see the severe negative consequences when the lion's share of the profits get sucked up by very, very few entities (e.g. we used to have tons of local papers and other entities that made money through advertising, now Google and Facebook…

Trying to prohibit this usage of information would not help prevent centralization of power and profit.

All it would do is momentarily slow AI progress (which is fine), and allow OpenAI et al to pull the ladder up behind them (which fuels centralization of power and profit).

By what mechanism do you think your desired outcome would prevent centralization of profit to the players who are already the largest?

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