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Copyright reform is necessary for national security

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Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#2
I hope to see copyright duration go down to a reasonable length within my lifetime. There's tons of creative derivative work which builds upon existing content which cannot be sold due to copyright.

The way I think about IP is that if you grew up with something, by the time you're an adult it should be possible to remix it in any way you like, because it's part of your culture. Nobody should get to lock down an idea for their lifetime.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#3
I was hoping the article would propose the opposite: if you train LLMs on copyrighted data, you owe the author a part of your income from it. How big should be determined by courts but probably proportional to the amount of data.

There's absolutely no reason rich people owning ML companies should be getting richer by stealing ordinary people's work.

But practicality trumps morality. The west needs to beat China and China doesn't give a fuck about copyright or individual people's (intellectual) property.

The ML algos demand to be fed so we gotta sink to their level.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#4
post #3

I was hoping the article would propose the opposite: if you train LLMs on copyrighted data, you owe the author a part of your income from it. How big should be determined by courts but probably proportional to the amount of data. There's absolutely no reason rich people owning ML companies should be getting richer by stealing ordinary people's work. But practicality trumps morality. The west needs to beat China and C…

Maybe enforcing open sourcing the models is the best route to go. At some point everything worthwhile ever created will be processed. Models can be seen as the processed, collective cultural output of humanity. It seems fair to me to force publishing the models in the vein of some kind of copyleft clause.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#5
post #3

I was hoping the article would propose the opposite: if you train LLMs on copyrighted data, you owe the author a part of your income from it. How big should be determined by courts but probably proportional to the amount of data. There's absolutely no reason rich people owning ML companies should be getting richer by stealing ordinary people's work. But practicality trumps morality. The west needs to beat China and C…

Maybe enforcing open sourcing the models is the best route to go. At some point everything worthwhile ever created will be processed. Models can be seen as the processed, collective cultural output of humanity. It seems fair to me to force publishing the models in the vein of some kind of copyleft clause.

Publishing weights? Meh.

Publishing code and data would lead to abolishing copyright.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#6

I hope to see copyright duration go down to a reasonable length within my lifetime. There's tons of creative derivative work which builds upon existing content which cannot be sold due to copyright. The way I think about IP is that if you grew up with something, by the time you're an adult it should be possible to remix it in any way you like, because it's part of your culture. Nobody should get to lock down an idea…

14 years as originally intended would be fine. All the classic movies up to 2010, and I still have to pay a subscription to watch, and lots of them are unavailable because the studios want to haggle over licenses for 50 year old properties? It's the kind of thing that might drive a man to pirate.

If your book hasn't made you rich in the first 14 years after publishing, I'm sorry, audience just isn't that into you.

(I am aware movie deals can languish for many years before finally landing a deal, and with 14 years studios could just wait you out and there's no incentive to write a script anymore, but copyright should be 14 years after publishing right? And movie scripts are not generally published before they get made into a movie, if ever.)

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe enforcing open sourcing the models is the best route to go. At some point everything worthwhile ever created will be processed. Models can be seen as the processed, collective cultural output of humanity. It seems fair to me to force publishing the models in the vein of some kind of copyleft clause.

Publishing weights? Meh. Publishing code and data would lead to abolishing copyright.

Copyright is just not prepared for AI. Training with copyrighted material could become "officialy legal" under copyleft terms, at least when the amount of training material exceeds a certain threshold.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#9
post #3

I was hoping the article would propose the opposite: if you train LLMs on copyrighted data, you owe the author a part of your income from it. How big should be determined by courts but probably proportional to the amount of data. There's absolutely no reason rich people owning ML companies should be getting richer by stealing ordinary people's work. But practicality trumps morality. The west needs to beat China and C…

Realistically, the copyrighted works that are most valuable to training machine learning models, at least if we go by The Pile as typical of training data [1] is:

- Web pages; hard to argue that royalties are due since these are publicly available for free

- Scientific papers; these do cost money but the copyright is typically owned by scientific publishers

- Github, Stack Exchange, HN (yes); these are freely available, sometimes by license, so hard to argue for royalties

- Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg; these are also free by license

So the actual consequence of what you're proposing (or at least the realistically-enactable version of it) is the big AI firms paying scientific publishers a lot of money. Is this actually good? Is Elsevier, a basically pure rent-seeker, really more worthy than AI labs, which maybe you don't like but at least do something valuable?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pile_(dataset)

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#10
post #3

I was hoping the article would propose the opposite: if you train LLMs on copyrighted data, you owe the author a part of your income from it. How big should be determined by courts but probably proportional to the amount of data. There's absolutely no reason rich people owning ML companies should be getting richer by stealing ordinary people's work. But practicality trumps morality. The west needs to beat China and C…

Maybe enforcing open sourcing the models is the best route to go. At some point everything worthwhile ever created will be processed. Models can be seen as the processed, collective cultural output of humanity. It seems fair to me to force publishing the models in the vein of some kind of copyleft clause.

Even if they are small enough to be run be individuals, this still doesn't solve the issue of profiting from someone's work for free.

Many of us publish our open source work under GPL or AGPL with the intention that you can profit from it but you have to give back what you built on it under the same license. LLMs allow anyone to launder copyleft code and profit without giving anything back.

If people who downvote bothered to reply, they'd probably say that by being "absorbed" into LLM weights, the code served that purpose and is available for everyone to use. That forgets 2 critical points:

- LLMs give no attribution. I deserve to be credited for my fractional contribution to the collective output of humanity.

- LLMs are not intelligences, they don't suddenly make intellectual work redundant. Using them still requires work to integrate their output and therefore companies build (for-profit) products on top of my work without compensating me, without crediting me and without giving anyone the freedom to modify the code.

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