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Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

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Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#121

Post by teddyh »

mindcandy wrote: post #105
somewhereoutth wrote: post #31

Depending on the outcome of the NYT case, I.P. may in fact be the death of (profitable) AI. One problem with AI (vs e.g. Google search) is that there is no mechanism for attribution. So it is impossible for rights holders to understand whether their works are being monetised (unlike, say, Spotify). Should NYT win, then either AI services will have to pay into a (very large) common pot for rights holders, which likely…

> there is no mechanism for attribution. What if there was? What if I hand-painted an image (without AI) and God himself came down from heaven and explained to the world that my painting was derived 10% from my observations of the collected works of Lisa Frank, 3% from looking at Davinci paintings, and 87% a long tail of various sources. And then I sell my painting for $100. OK. Now what?

> OK. Now what? Do I owe Lisa Frank $10?

No, because copyright law says that if you hand-paint an image (without AI), then as long as the images isn’t deemed (by a court, if necessary) to be a derivative work, then you, and nobody else, own the copyright. The word of God is not necessarily considered by the law. And even if the court takes the word of God as gospel, a 10% derivative work might not exceed the necessary threshold of infringement.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#122

Post by jtriangle »

tilwidnk wrote: post #59
mlsu wrote: post #43

Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (copyright) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines. Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to…

> Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Now, I don't have a college degree, but with my 60+ years life experience I can say, yes, copyright is a real thing, it protects people who create, from assholes and AI.

Now, I don't have a college degree, but with my 60+ years life experience I can say, yes, copyright is a real thing, it protects people who create, from assholes and AI.

There, I've stolen your post. Did copyright protect you? No, it did not. Copyright is an idea we came up with that sounded good at the time, and it's come to pass at this point that the original idea was deeply flawed in ways we could never have predicted, but now can see clearly in hindsight.

The truth is, intellectual property should be protected by those creating it. Coke does a great job of this, as do many, many other companies. We call these "trade secrets", but ultimately the concept is the same. You're protecting the work you deem worth protecting.

I don't buy the notion that copyright ever protected the creator. What it really protected was the interests of the entities who effectively enslave the creators via contract, and is not of any tangible benefit to the creators themselves. If one truly cares about the artisans among us, one cannot justify the existence of our ideas surrounding copyright.

Yes, removing those laws from our doctrine would cause upheaval, as the market must then rebalance itself in the absence of the artificial pressure we've put on it, but in time all things find equilibrium again, and placing the value and responsibility back on the individual is, in my mind, simple human decency.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#123

Post by visarga »

axus wrote: post #111
visarga wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a clever trick, making out corporations to be the beneficiary - who is the real beneficiary? The one who prompts, because they can use the output of the model to solve their problems. In the meantime AI developers make cents on 100K tokens and are mostly in the red. Why not put the issue where it is - it's a debate about public empowerment with AI vs incumbents protecting their copyrights. Especially for open…

The outrage as packaged by the media really does mirror the anger against Napster from 25 years ago. I seem to recall the small-time musicians were more excited about Napster, though.

I remember when BitTorrent users were getting sued left and right, I was thinking about how can a P2P network allow downloading without revealing what was downloaded. Now we got the answer - the LLM - you can download the same LLM like anyone else and nobody knows what you're getting from it.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#124

Post by rangerelf »

mlsu wrote: post #43

Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (copyright) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines. Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to…

I think you're sowing the seeds to undermine your own arguments, because, literally, everything of social utility is a fiction: money, law, "private property", contracts, and so forth.

All of them are needed for society to function, but at the same time all of them are convenient fictions for us to build upon.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#125

Post by belter »

mlsu wrote: post #43

Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (copyright) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines. Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to…

This post does not exist...

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#126

Post by visarga »

ronsor wrote: post #80
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U.S. copyright also has a constitutionally defined purpose: `[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] 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.` Does the current scheme really promote the progress of science and useful arts? Is the current length of copyright really "limited Times"?

> Is the current length of copyright really "limited Times"? This was argued before, and the Supreme Court decided "Yes, it is, somehow."

Choose any number of years < infinite. It's limited time.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#127

Post by teddyh »

chefandy wrote: post #17
gustavus wrote: post #10

Intellectual property isn't.

The problem is that our society has no other viable widespread mechanism to support the many millions of people who do intellectual work, and lots of intellectual work is really important for our society-- far more important than would make sense to relegate to hobbyists and volunteers. And this is coming from someone who's contributed well over 10k coding hours to FOSS software.

> The problem is that our society has no other viable widespread mechanism to support

Except, of course, UBI.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#128

Post by visarga »

ricardo81 wrote: post #66
mlsu wrote: post #43

Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (copyright) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines. Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to…

>What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one That just seems like a sociopathic argument to circumvent perfectly clear laws intended to protect people who expend energy into offering new ideas and also trying to diminish what is already delineated as right and wrong. In the blatant sense. I'm not sure how your gun analogy funnels along to fair use. As wit…

And if you look at open source it does exactly that. Most AI models are open source/weights. People are giving away some of their best work because they want to cooperate with others to build things.

Scientific publications also share knowledge openly. Only private journals are locking up papers, but they are losing ground. At least AI papers are free to read and implement. They share even code, datasets and trained models.

I think the ethos of progress is with open culture not closed copyrights.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#129

Post by noitpmeder »

adventured wrote: post #28

It inherently has to damage our present conception of IP, unless we plan to cripple the AI revolution in the crib. If you have smart robots in the home, much less AGI, what's the plan on restricting them? Sorry robot, you may only learn this limited set of skills, you're not allowed to create, because you've seen too much and might be too good at learning and producing. They'll be incredibly metered if they're not al…

I, for one, do not want to live in your new world.

Further, I doubt that preventing AIs from literally stealing protected information will halt the rise of smarter AI. There is plenty of free use information out there that is LEGAL TO USE. Just curate your dataset to prevent the ILLEGAL use of other material.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#130

Post by hadlock »

mschuster91 wrote: post #34
ricardo81 wrote: post #18

It's been dead a while because of big tech. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter - they have no way of effectively managing IP and so you basically see people's stolen content and they monetise it, so TBF Napster and torrents are another and earlier angle. Purely IMO, big tech normalised the taking of other people's content, and it's getting to the point where content creators (as in, ones that are capable of producing…

> TBF Napster and torrents are another and earlier angle. Napster didn't kill the music industry, torrents didn't kill the movie industry because people still want to see movies on a big screen experience. And so, actors, directors, VFX artists, cutters, riggers, lighting staff, costume/mask people, they all continue to have jobs. But now, with AI being already able to do very realistic photos, and in a few years lik…

> and in a few years likely to create short movie sequences all based upon a prompt

It depends on the director and style of the era, but average "shot length" runs between 5 and 14 seconds. Six months ago companies were already demonstrating AI generated, 20 second shots (albeit with low motion, like slow pans) with the background staying mostly the same. I would probably upgrade this statement from "likely to create" to "almost near certainty".

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