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Copyright reform is necessary for national security

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Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#81

Post by thatcat »

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. […

Alternative take: those services have a smaller selection, use annoying algorithms to promote IP they own, and are generally worse that piracy, but people don't like being hassled by their ISP and initially they cost a similar amount to a VPN.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#82

Post by martin-t »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #79
martin-t wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that. My point is that any situation where person A puts in a certain amount of work (normalized by skill, competence, etc.), person B uses person A's work, puts in some work of his own but less than A, then gets more reward than A, is fundamentally unfair. LLMs are this, just at a massive scale. But to be honest, this is where the discussion went only after thinking about it for a while. My real start…

> LLMs are used to launder my code, > deprive me of credit > and deprive users of their rights. > Can we agree this is harm? I might consider it if any of those claims were true. I think the opposite is true -- especially with Open-Weight models which expand user freedoms rather than restricting them. I wonder if we can get the FSF to come up with GPL compatible Open-Weight licenses. At this point in time I'm not ent…

> I might consider it if any of those claims were true.

Please step back and consider what you are replying to.

> LLMs are used to launder my code

If an LLM was trained only on AGPL code, would it have to be licensed under AGPL? Would its output?

> deprive me of credit

They _obviously_ deprive me of credit. Even if an LLM was trained entirely on my code, nobody using its output would know. Compare to using a library where my name is right there in the license.

> and deprive users of their rights.

I appeal to you again, re-read my comment. I am not talking about users of the model but users of the software that is in part based on my AGPL code. If my code got there traditionally by being included in a library, the whole software would have to be AGPL and users would have the right to modify. If my code is laundered through an LLM, users of my code lose that right.

> Can we agree this is harm?

So all of those things are true. And this is clearly harm.

Stealing a little from everyone is morally no different than stealing a lot from one person. Whenever you think about ML, consider extreme cases such as training on data under one license and all the arguments to pretend it's not copyright infringement fall apart. (And if you don't think extreme cases set precedent to real cases, then please point out where exactly you draw the line. Give me a number.)

Spreading the harm around means everyone is harmed similarly but that is not the kind of fairness I had in mind.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#83

Post by jimmydoe »

> This should be more than enough time for authors of books, papers, music, art, and other creative works, to get fully compensated for their efforts (including longer-term projects such as movie adaptations).

not sure I agree. a lot of work only get recognized broadly long after published.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#84

Post by wrtka »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #15

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…

[flagged]

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#86

Post by liamwire »

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…

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

I disagree, respectfully. You’re unable to accurately credit the myriad of people, sources, and works that’ve all educated and influenced you along the way. Suppose even if you could, you’d not be able to resolve their dependencies ad infinitum. Nor would it even make sense—arguably, as a species we’re defined by the compounding and shared nature of the knowledge we learn, implicitly and explicitly. Shoulders of giants, and all that.

If your contributions were a significant portion of the entire training corpus, then perhaps we’d have a separate discussion to have, but there’s no single person for which you can reasonably argue that’s true. Maybe for authors of hyper-niche topics or cutting edge research?

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#87

Post by _factor »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #15

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…

Copyright is a form of censorship in an absolute sense. It leads to a less skilled / educated populace and consolidates wealth. For a capitalist nation, it’s very anti free-market.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#88

Post by Trung0246 »

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…

One of my idea was establish a copyright renew system in which first year is free, then for second year the right holder will pay $1 to retain the rights, third year pay $2, fourth year pay $4, fifth year pay $8... which follows the power of 2. If they cannot pay for next year then the copyright will fall into public domain (or allows more restrictive form of non-commercial). Most of the worthless stuff will expire at around 10-15 years. Then around 35-40 years for big works that generate tons of revenue if they can pay that amount.

Re: Copyright reform is necessary for national security

#90

Post by chromanoid »

martin-t wrote: post #78
chromanoid wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorithms should not be subject to copyright IMO. If you publish code, AFAIK under EU law only blatant copies are an infringement. In case of art, copyright is enforceable anyway, at least not in any different form than before AI. Yes, current AIs just remix their training data in a rather direct way. But in the end how different is that to how humans create? I would suggest we should embrace this new way of creatin…

> AFAIK under EU law only blatant copies are an infringement Laws generally don't encode what is right but a compromise between the state's interests, lobbyists and the general population making enough ruckus if too unsatisfied. > But in the end how different is that to how humans create? 1) Scale. Some strategies that are socially acceptable when done by individuals but not when done at a massive scale. For example…

> > AFAIK under EU law only blatant copies are an infringement

> Laws generally don't encode what is right but a compromise between the state's interests, lobbyists and the general population making enough ruckus if too unsatisfied.

of course, but I actually think that this is the correct moral stand. Patenting algorithms is like patenting thoughts.

> I don't know about you but when I wanna know how to use a particular function, I don't go looking through random GH repos to see how other people use it, I go to the docs.

I always look into sources. Usually I look into the code I want to call first. But this is probably also because I mainly use Java.

So if I read your AGPL code and implement something similar in another programming language after also reading other implementations of the algorithm, is that something I have to attribute you for? Isn't code just an executable documentation of an algorithm? Especially if the algorithm is well known, I don't see any injustice here - "Die Gedanken sind frei". If I copy your code via copy and paste, then this is an infringement, but just retelling a similar story should not be affected by copyright.

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