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Copyright reform is necessary for national security

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Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#11

Post by kevingadd »

pavpanchekha wrote: post #9
martin-t wrote: 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 availab…

Scientific papers are available on web pages so they're publicly available for free too right? I can download an ISO or installer of almost anything if I go to the right website, so all software is already free?

If you're going to ignore the existence of copyright and licenses we should extend it to everything that's ever been posted on the internet, not just "web pages". Why shouldn't all books and films count as free too?

I'm actually open to the idea of just abolishing copyright but it's kind of silly to act like it's only about Elsevier. Lots of creatives depend on copyright in order to earn a living, similarly to how patents fund a lot of important research despite how noxious the patent system has become.

If we fixate on examples like Elsevier or Martin Shkreli in order to argue for completely abolishing the copyright or patent systems we risk destroying the framework that enables valuable creative works or new technologies to be developed in the first place. This is part of why people are so upset by AI companies arguing that they should just be able to ignore the whole framework in order to enrich themselves; once you allow the for-profit AI companies to do it, other groups are going to line up to also demand a free ride.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#12

Post by chromanoid »

martin-t wrote: post #10
chromanoid wrote: post #4

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.

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 bot…

I am not sure if profits are easy to gather if all professional users can rent hardware instead of renting the service. In the end the users would actually profit from the model, not the provider (who competes with other providers of the same open source model). And here I am not sure if we can see AI as some kind of cybernetic enhancement that allows to execute ideas on the shoulders of humanity instead of just a scammy way to resell already present content.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#13

Post by marssaxman »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #5
chromanoid wrote: post #4

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.

Well, that sounds good - what are we waiting for?

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#14

Post by martin-t »

pavpanchekha wrote: post #9
martin-t wrote: 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 availab…

I have trouble believing this argument is in good faith.

1) (minor nitpick) I don't see how HN is in the same category as GitHub or Stack Overflow.

2) "sometimes by license" or "free by license" imply you don't understand how copyright works. Code that is not accompanied by a license is proprietary. Period. [0] And if it has a license, then you have to follow it. If the license says that derivative works have to give credit and use the same license, then LLMs using that code for training and anything generated by those models is derivative and has to respect the license.

3) Arguably i didn't say this in the OP but the idea that the publisher owns copyright is absolutely nuts and only possible through extensive lobbying and basically extortion. It should be illegal. Copyright should always belong to the person doing the actual work. Fuck rent-seekers.

4) If western ML companies thought they can produce models of the same quality without for example stealing and laundering the entirety of Github, they would have. They don't so clearly GH is a very important input and its builders should either be compensated or the models and ML companies should only use the subset that they can without breaking the license.

Please don't get offended but I've seen this argument multiple times by proponents of A"I" and their entire argument hinged on the idea that the current ML models are so large that nobody can understand them and therefore a form of "intelligence" which they are clearly not (unless proven otherwise, at which point, they should get their own personhood but the fact no big ML company is arguing for that makes it obvious nobody really considers them intelligent).

[0]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can...

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#15

Post by Kim_Bruning »

This wouldn't be the first time IP laws hurt Western innovation and security. When WW1 started - despite the airplane being invented in Dayton, Ohio - the US had fallen so far behind they had to use French aircraft. Why? The Wright brothers' patent wars had effectively frozen US aviation development.

Today it's not just one industry - Western IP laws are slowing progress across multiple tech frontiers. While companies navigate complex IP restrictions (In EU and US), China's development is following a sharp exponential curve. You can already see it clearly in robotics, electric vehicles, and now these last weeks with AI.

While in the west you deal with predatory licensing (try talking with Siemens, Oracle, or Autodesk), and everyone keeps working on barriers and moats; other nations that allow a more collaborative approach (voluntary or not) are on an accelerating trajectory.

IP law is clearly no longer suitable for purpose - we need a system that encourages collaboration more directly. A complete free for all isn't ideal either - and I certainly don't advocate that- but even that appears to be better than what we have now.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#16

Post by martin-t »

chromanoid wrote: post #12
martin-t wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bot…

I am not sure if profits are easy to gather if all professional users can rent hardware instead of renting the service. In the end the users would actually profit from the model, not the provider (who competes with other providers of the same open source model). And here I am not sure if we can see AI as some kind of cybernetic enhancement that allows to execute ideas on the shoulders of humanity instead of just a sc…

Exactly. It's impractical to distribute compensation (and credit) fairly so it's very easy for those who profit to say "we can't", their their hands up and keep profiting. Doesn't make it right.

It's just the rich getting richer by taking from everyone so little that no individual bothers to fight back.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#17

Post by can16358p »

I honestly don't understand why this is not the case already. Actually copyright should be even less-enforceable.

Information/access to data/works should be totally free and there should be other ways to support the creators.

For example I could easily download MP3s of music and MP4s of series/movies but I don't: simply because of two reasons:

- I want to support the artist (to an extent as possible) - Using Spotify/Apple Music/Netflix is much more convenient with a totally acceptable monthly fee.

I know the article is not about entertainment but a library, same rules should apply.

And if one wants to train an LLM, let them: at its essence it's just a person who has read all the books (and access to information should be free), just the person is a machine instead of a biological human being.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#19

Post by jasinjames »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #6
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #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…

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…

Not sure if this influences your thinking at all, but whatever duration copyright applies for starts once it was made, whether it was published or not.

> Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978, subsists from its creation ... [1]

And "creation" basically means "written down" [2]. IANAL.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_o...

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#20

Post by chromanoid »

martin-t wrote: post #16
chromanoid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if profits are easy to gather if all professional users can rent hardware instead of renting the service. In the end the users would actually profit from the model, not the provider (who competes with other providers of the same open source model). And here I am not sure if we can see AI as some kind of cybernetic enhancement that allows to execute ideas on the shoulders of humanity instead of just a sc…

Exactly. It's impractical to distribute compensation (and credit) fairly so it's very easy for those who profit to say "we can't", their their hands up and keep profiting. Doesn't make it right. It's just the rich getting richer by taking from everyone so little that no individual bothers to fight back.

Why do you think the rich get richer when operating an AI is a price competition and training new models gives only a short competitive advantage? I would hope that for each individual there opens an ocean of opportunities that is sustained by all humans that came before and poured their bucket of knowledge into it.
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