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Copyright reform is necessary for national security

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41–50 of 114 posts

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

EU Copyright law actually seems to have you covered already.

EU Digital Single Market Directive (2019/790) Art 3 and 4 allow text and data mining. Art 3 for scientific purposes, Art 4 more in general.

Now, some people argue that AI models are somehow compressed databases of the data that was crawled; but that seems patently ridiculous to me - so this should be sufficient.(at least mathematically) (IANAL) (famous last words)

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#42

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 companie…

I think our IP laws are optimized to maximize benefits for the legal system.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#43

I’m afraid LLMs are making copyrights obsolete and unenforceable. If an author uses DeepSeek to write a book, piece of music, application, or patent did they break copyright? Is the new work protected if this is disclosed?

If I looked at a painting before making my own similar one, did I break copyright?

While this pattern shows the inconsistency between how humans and AI are treated, there have been many examples over history where the ability to do at an increased scale something that was already familiar, results in the law being changed.

Shining a torch at a plane is usually fine, shining a laser at them usually is a crime.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#44

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…

The option for a single renewal for 14 more years doesn't strike me as onerous. It makes a concession for the "audience hasn't made you rich in the first 14 years" and is still light years ahead of the current de facto infinite duration.

It won't ever change, though. No chance ever. Other than to be actually made infinite. The nature of "intellectual property" and money being speech in US politics locks that in.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#45
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

if you do suddenly become popular, you can write a second book, and get involved in TV or movie adaptations of it. GRRM isnt included on ASOIAF content because hes the copyright holder, but because his influence makes people want to see the shows

You could argue that 14 years is a little short, especially for books which can get adaptations that pay more than the book. OTOH preventing adaptations stifles things. Imagine if Tolkein had managed to lock down his orcs and elves like Disney locked down the mouse.

I think 20 or 30 years is fairer. But IIRC it's not about fair, the Constitution says that it should only be to encourage innovation, and long copyright inhibits innovation.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1) For starters, ML companies clearly go through enormous amounts of money, the rich people in control of them very obviously get compensated quite generously, if you're into euphemisms, which the people who built the "training data" (= their copyrighted works) get nothing.

2) It's not just ML companies but anyone using their products.

A while ago everyone was upset that chatGPT regurgitated fast inverse square root from Quake's GPL code verbatim including a comment, clearly violating the license unless the program it generated it into was also under GPL.

I am sure since then they've made sure the copyrighted material used as training data gets misex up a bit more thoroughly so it doesn't produce it in the output verbatim and is therefore harder to detect.

So what if i spend a couple days writing an algorithm, give it a nice doc comment and tests, publish it under AGPL, it gets used as training data and a random programmer in a random company working on a random for-profit product runs into the same problem but instead of writing the algo himself, he asks a generative model and it produces my code just a little mixed up so it's not immediately recognizable but clearly based on my code? I deserve to be paid, that's what happens.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The option for a single renewal for 14 more years doesn't strike me as onerous. It makes a concession for the "audience hasn't made you rich in the first 14 years" and is still light years ahead of the current de facto infinite duration. It won't ever change, though. No chance ever. Other than to be actually made infinite. The nature of "intellectual property" and money being speech in US politics locks that in.

Well, at some point our government will collapse entirely, and then all the laws can change. I'm starting to think that might not be far off.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#50
post #36

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/…

None of those services could exist today if copyright didn't exist, because streaming services wouldn't be able to compete with free downloads. I think Patreon and Kickstarter are how creative work is funded in that world.

Piracy isn’t a legal problem—it’s a service problem [1].

Netflix, Spotify, and Valve (Steam) didn’t succeed because of copyright enforcement. They won because they made paying for content easier, faster, and better than piracy.

Piracy isn’t hard, but these services solved the friction: instant access, high quality, fair pricing, and features that free alternatives couldn’t match. That’s why they still thrive today.

[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...

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