Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 410 posts

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#41

Post by 9283409232 »

bgwalter wrote: post #16
andy99 wrote: post #2

Two different issues that while apparently related need separate consideration. Re the copyright finding, does the US copyright office have standing to make such a determination? Presumably not since various claims about AI and copyright are before the courts. Why did they write this finding?

The US Supreme court has complained on multiple occasions that it is forced to do the work of the legislative. Why could a copyright office not advise the congress/senate to enact a law that forbids copyrighted material to be used in AI training? This is literally the politicians' job.

Part of Congresses power is to defer that agencies it has created. Such as the US Copyright Office.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#42

Post by Maxatar »

bgwalter wrote: post #13
prvc wrote: post #6

The released draft report seems merely to be a litany of copyright holder complaints repeated verbatim, with little depth of reasoning to support the conclusions it makes.

The required reasoning is not very deep though: If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism. If a savant has perfect recall, remembers text perfectly and rearranges that text to create a marginally new text, he'd be sued for breach of copyright. Only large corporations get away with it.

Plagiarism isn't illegal, has nothing to do with the law.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#43

Post by shkkmo »

dfxm12 wrote: post #39
scraptor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it. If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.

Please argue in good faith. A new research paper is obviously materially different from "rearranging that text to create a marginally new text".

The comment is responding to this line:

> If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism.

That is a specific claim that is being directly addressed and pretty clearly qualifies as "good faith".

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#44

Post by int_19h »

dfxm12 wrote: post #39
scraptor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it. If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.

Please argue in good faith. A new research paper is obviously materially different from "rearranging that text to create a marginally new text".

"Rearranging text" is not what modern LLMs do though, unless you specifically ask them to.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#45

Post by shkkmo »

Maxatar wrote: post #42
bgwalter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The required reasoning is not very deep though: If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism. If a savant has perfect recall, remembers text perfectly and rearranges that text to create a marginally new text, he'd be sued for breach of copyright. Only large corporations get away with it.

Plagiarism isn't illegal, has nothing to do with the law.

Plagarism is often illegal. If you use plagarism to obtain a financial or other benefit, that can be fraud.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#47

Post by GuB-42 »

brador wrote: post #17

Lifetime for human copyright, 20 years for corporate copyright. That’s the golden zone.

The issue with lifetime (vs something like lifetime + X years) is that of inheritance.

Assuming you agree with the idea of inheritance, which is another topic, then it is unfair to deny inheritance of intellectual property. For example if your father has built a house, it will be yours when he dies, it won't become a public house. So why would a book your father wrote just before he died become public domain the moment he dies. It is unfair to those doing who are doing intellectual work, especially older people.

If you want short copyright, is would make more sense to make it 20 years, human or corporate, like patents.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#48

Post by whamlastxmas »

School-Cotton wrote: post #34
Zambyte wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero (0) years for corporate copyright, zero (0) years for human copyright is the golden zone in my book.

Why?

Because the concept of owning an idea is really gross. Copyright means I can’t write about whatever I want in my own home even if I never distribute it or no one ever sees it. I’m breaking the law by privately writing Harry Potter fanfic in my journal or whatever. Copyright is supposed to be about encouraging intangibles, and the reality is that it only massively stifles it

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#49

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

Zambyte wrote: post #40
School-Cotton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

It took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...

The first article is saying that "Copyright is bad because of corporations", and I can kind of get behind that, especially the very long term copyrights that have lost the intent, but the second article says that artists will be happier without copyright if we just solve capitalism first. I don't know about you, but that reads to me like "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe".

If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#50

Post by AlotOfReading »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #28
achrono wrote: post #11

If anyone was skeptical of the US government being deeply entrenched with these companies in letting this blatant violation of the spirit of the law [1] continue, this should hopefully secure the conclusion. And for the future, here's one heuristic: if there is a profound violation of the law anywhere that (relatively speaking) is ignored or severely downplayed, it is likely that interested parties have arrived at an…

> If anyone was skeptical of the US government being deeply entrenched with these companies in letting this blatant violation of the spirit of the law [1] continue, this should hopefully secure the conclusion. European here, but why do you think this is so clear cut? There are other jurisdictions where training on copyrighted data has already been allowed by law/caselaw (Germany and Japan). Why do you need a conspira…

Google asserted fair use in that case, which is an admission of (allowed) copyright infringement. They didn't turn books into a "new form", they provided limited excerpts that couldn't replace the original usage and directly incentivized purchases through normal sales channels while also providing new functionality.

Contrast that with AI companies:

They don't necessarily want to assert fair use, the results aren't necessarily publicly accessible, the work used isn't cited, users aren't directed to typical sales channels, and many common usages do meaningfully reduce the market for the original content (e.g. AI summaries for paywalled pages).

It's not obvious to me as a non-lawyer that these situations are analogous, even if there's some superficial similarity.

Post reply on HN