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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

#651

Post by logicchains »

belter wrote: post #648
logicchains wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true; if you hire a contractor and tell them "write from memory the copyrighted code X which you saw before", and they have such a good memory that they manage to write it verbatim, then you take that code and use it in a way that breaches copyright, you're liable, not the person you paid to copy the code for you. They're only liable if they were under NDA for that code.

And what professional developer would not be under NDA for the code he produces for a corporation?

The topic of this thread is LLMs reproducing _publicly available_ copyright content. Almost no developer would be under NDA for random copyrighted code online.

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

#652

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

OpenAI IS distributing information they got wholesale from the internet

Facts are not subject to copyright. It's very obvious ChatGPT is more than a search engine regurgitating copies of pages it indexed.

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

#653

Post by denton-scratch »

tsimionescu wrote: post #514
denton-scratch wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period Which evidence?

The fact that it has never been done successfully outside performance arts.

I used to work as a computer programmer until I retired. Nearly always, my work was part of a collaborative effort, and latterly didn't include any copyright claim. My income was never impacted by unauthorized copying. Until the 80s, there was no copyright on software, and yet even then people made a living programming.

Craftsmen don't claim copyright on their artifacts. Furniture designs were widely copied; but Chippendale did alright for himself. Gardeners at stately homes didn't rely on copyright. Vergil, Plato and Aristotle managed OK without copyright. People made a living composing music, songs and poetry before the idea of copyright was invented. Truck-drivers make a living; driving a truck is hardly a performance art. Labourers and factory workers get by successfully. Accountants and legal advocates get rich without copyright.

None of these trades amounts to "performance arts".

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

#654

Post by realusername »

belter wrote: post #638
tracyhenry wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the first being at the birth of modern search engines. Why do you say that? Search engines would at least direct the viewer to the source. NYT gets 35%+ of its traffic from Google: https://www.similarweb.com/website/nytimes.com/#traffic-sour...

Just because they asked for forgiveness instead of asking first for permission, it's original sins will not be erased :-) "Google Agrees to Pay Canadian Media for Using Their Content" - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/world/americas/google-can...

That's why I think the newspapers will manage to win against the LLM companies. They won against Google despite having no real argument why they should get paid to get more traffic. The search engine tax is even a shakier concept than the LLM tax would be.

Newspapers are very powerful and they own the platform to push their opinion. I'm not about to forget the EU debates where they all (or close to all) lied about how meta tags really work to push it their way, they've done it and they will do it again.

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

#655

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> We’re in a “mutually assured destruction” situation now, but instead of bombs the weapon is information.

We've always been in that situation. Computers made the copying, transmission and processing of information trivial since the day they were invented. They changed the world forever.

It's the intellectual property industry that keeps denying reality since it's such an existential threat to them. They think they actually own those bits. They think they can own numbers. It's time to let go of such insane notions but they refuse to let it go.

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

#657

Post by photonthug »

solveit wrote: post #451
layer8 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, if a passage of any significant length is cited verbatim (or almost verbatim), there would have been a way to track that source through the weights. The issue of replicating a style is probably more difficult.

> Presumably, if a passage of any significant length is cited verbatim (or almost verbatim), there would have been a way to track that source through the weights. Figure this out and you get to choose which AI lab you want to make seven figures at. It's a really difficult problem.

> Figure this out and you get to choose which AI lab you want to make seven figures at. It's a really difficult problem.

It doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful, and even something that is very imperfect would at least send the signal that model-owners give a shit about attribution in general.

Given a specific output, it might be hard to say which sections of the very large weighted network were tickled during the output, and what inputs were used to build that section of the network. But this level of "citation resolution" is not always what people are necessarily interested in. If an LLM is giving medical advice, I might want to at least know whether it's reading medical journals or facebook posts. If it's political advice/summary/synthesis, it might be relevant to know how much it's been reading Marx vs Lenin or whatever. Pin-pointing original paragraphs as sources would be great, but for most models it's not like there's anything that's very clear about the input datasets.

EDIT: Building on this a bit, a lot of people are really worried about AI "poisoning the well" such that they are retraining on content generated by other AIs so that algorithmic feeds can trash the next-gen internet even worse than the current one. This shows that attribution-sourcing even at the basic level of "only human generated content is used in this model" can be useful and confidence-inspiring.

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

#658

Post by logicchains »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #598
JCM9 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And while one can easily just take down such a movie if an infringement claim is filed it’s unclear how one “removes” content from a trained model given how these models work. Thats messy.

If it’s found that the use of the material is infringing on the rights of the copyright holder than the AI company has to retrain their model without any material they don’t have a right to. Pretty clear to me

By that logic Microsoft Word should have to refuse to save or print any text that contained copyrighted content. GPT is just a tool; the user who's asking it to produce copyrighted content (and then publishing that content) is the one violating the copyright, and they're the ones who should be liable.

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

#659

Post by logicchains »

tsimionescu wrote: post #593
aragonite wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their legalese is careful to include the 'if any' qualifier ("We hereby assign to you all our right, title, and interest, if any , in and to Output.") In any case, the point is that they made no claim to Output (as opposed to their code, etc) being their IP.

That's irrelevant. The main point is that they are re-distributing the content without permission from the copyright owners, so they are sort of implicitly claiming they have copy/distribution rights over it. Since they don't, then it's obvious they can't give you this content at all.

>The main point is that they are re-distributing the content without permission from the copyright owners,

By your logic, Firefox is re-distributing content without permission from the copyright owners whenever you use it to read a pirated book. ChatGPT isn't just randomly generating copyrighted content, it just does so when explicitly prompted by a user.

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

#660

Post by logicchains »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #498
rndmwlk wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s disingenuous to frame using data to train a model as a “view,” of that data. The simple cases are the easy ones, if ChatGPT completely rips a NYT article then that’s obviously infringement; however, there’s an argument to be made that every part of the LLM training dataset is, in part, used in every output of that LLM. I don’t know the solution, but I don’t like the idea that anything I post online that is openl…

All I can ever think about with how ML models work is that they sound an awful lot like Data Laundering schemes. You can get basically-but-not-quite-exactly the copyrighted material that it was trained on. Saw this a lot with some earlier image models where you could type in an artists name and get their work back. The fact that AI models are having to put up guardrails to prevent that sort of use is a good sign that…

>You can get basically-but-not-quite-exactly the copyrighted material that it was trained on.

You can do exactly the same with a human author or artist if you prompt them to. And if you decide to publish this material, you're the one liable for breach of copyright, not the person you instructed to create the material.

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