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Copyright reform is necessary for national security

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Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#51

Post by martin-t »

chromanoid wrote: post #40
martin-t wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think all work produced with the help of LLMs should by required to be open sourced under a copyleft-like license? That is actually an intriguing idea and at least aligned with the reasons I use AGPL for my code.

Honestly, I only thought about the models, assuming that work that uses them, will also inevitably be incorporated into them. But maybe it is a good idea to actually include the produced works. It could create a nice incentive for rich corps to pay artists to create something AI free / copyleft free. If we could extract correct attribution and even licensing out of work that was produced with AI, I don't think it wou…

> pay artists to create something AI free / copyleft free

I still don't think that's enough to be fair. If their work is used to produce value ad infinitum, them any one-time payment is obviously less than what they deserve.

The payment should be fractional compared to the produced value. And that is very hard to do since you don't know how much money somebody made by using the model.

> It would effectively exclude the poor from using AI for compliance reasons.

Again, this only an issue if you're thinking in terms of one-time fixed payments.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#52

Post by martin-t »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #41
chromanoid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not ridiculous at all. If LLMs (can we please stop calling it AI?) can produce correct factual statements (for example about historical events), then the data is clearly present in the model in some (compressed) form.

The only question then is if the models have some kind of additional value ("intelligence") beyond being compressed databases.

My take is that either no, or the burden of proof is on those making the claim. Until they prove it, they are just databases and therefore derivative work of their input and their output is also derivative work.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#54

Post by martin-t »

qrwafn wrote: post #53

It is interesting that since January 20th all pro-copyright posts are downvoted. Is this the user alignment that the AI broligarchs speak of?

I haven't noticed a particular date but yes, my posts describing a fair system of compensation get downvoted incredibly fast.

At least I sometimes also get replies but many of them use fallacious arguments to the point of feeling like trolling. No idea if the same people commenting are also downvoting but I am starting to think that votes should not be anonymous.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#55

Post by martin-t »

can16358p wrote: post #17

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/…

> And if one wants to train an LLM, let them: at its essence it's just a person

If I gzip a couple hundred thousand books and distribute them freely, can I also claim it's just a person who has read those books and avoid a massive lawsuit?

Please, stop anthropomorphising machine learning models.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#56

Post by artninja1988 »

qrwafn wrote: post #53

It is interesting that since January 20th all pro-copyright posts are downvoted. Is this the user alignment that the AI broligarchs speak of?

On the contrary. It's only been since the proliferation of genai that I've seen so many copyright maximalist takes on Hackernews, reminiscent of the you wouldn't steal a car propaganda run by big corpos.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#57

Post by martin-t »

ben_w wrote: post #43
ranger_danger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None of the people who claim LLMs are intelligent and "persons" argue for giving them legal personhood and human rights. Telling.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#58

Post by Kim_Bruning »

martin-t wrote: post #52
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not ridiculous at all. If LLMs (can we please stop calling it AI?) can produce correct factual statements (for example about historical events), then the data is clearly present in the model in some (compressed) form. The only question then is if the models have some kind of additional value ("intelligence") beyond being compressed databases. My take is that either no, or the burden of proof is on those making the cl…

I think you're positing a false binary.

* LLM's aren't databases, you can’t query them for exact stored records, and they can’t reconstruct (most of) their training data.

* But they also don’t reason or understand exactly like humans do either.

They're something else: to wit, Transformer models.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#59

Post by chromanoid »

martin-t wrote: post #51
chromanoid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I only thought about the models, assuming that work that uses them, will also inevitably be incorporated into them. But maybe it is a good idea to actually include the produced works. It could create a nice incentive for rich corps to pay artists to create something AI free / copyleft free. If we could extract correct attribution and even licensing out of work that was produced with AI, I don't think it wou…

> pay artists to create something AI free / copyleft free I still don't think that's enough to be fair. If their work is used to produce value ad infinitum, them any one-time payment is obviously less than what they deserve. The payment should be fractional compared to the produced value. And that is very hard to do since you don't know how much money somebody made by using the model. > It would effectively exclude t…

I believe you think in too short time frames. In 70 years this becomes a futile discussion. AI is a way to directly benefit from the explosion of free content that the next decades will bring. The only way to counter this in an ethical way, is to establish some kind of enforced liberation for AI models, otherwise as you say, only the rich will profit from this.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#60

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #50
jprete wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. […

> They won because they made paying for content easier, faster, and better than piracy

PopcornTime would eat their lunch if it were allowed to work [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time

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