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

theregister.com

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

#51

Post by mattxxx »

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that:

1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law

My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against. When I look at the litany of derivative fantasy novels, it's obvious they're not all fully independent works.

Since AI is and will continue to be so useful and transformative, I think we just need to acknowledge that our laws did not accomodate this use-case, then we should change them.

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

#53

Post by madeofpalk »

mattxxx wrote: post #51

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigat…

> Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against

Humans get litigated against this all the time. There is such thing as, charitably, being too inspired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagi...

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

#54

Post by achierius »

Zambyte wrote: post #30
brador wrote: post #17

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

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

Well what we're getting is lifetime for corporate, and zero (0) for human. Hope you're happy.

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

#56

Post by dghlsakjg »

GuB-42 wrote: post #47
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 mome…

Then make it the greater of 20 years or the lifetime for humans.

Comparing intellectual property to real or physical property makes no sense. Intellectual property is different because it is non exclusive. If you are living in your father’s house, no one else can be living there. If I am reading your fathers book, that has nothing to do with whether anyone else can read the book.

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

#57

Post by redwall_hp »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #48
School-Cotton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Whole genres of music are based entirely on sampling, and they got screwed by copyright law as it evolved over the 90s and 2000s. Now only people with a sufficiently sized business backing them can truly participate, or they're stuck licensing things on Splice.

And that's not even touching the spurious lawsuits about musical similarity. That's what musicians call a genre...

It makes some sense for a very short term literal right to reproduction of a singular work, but any time the concept of derivative works comes into play, it's just a bizarrely dystopian suppression of art, under the supposition that art is commercial activity rather than an innate part of humanity.

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

#58

Post by [deleted] »

ahmeni wrote: post #20
tempeler wrote: post #18

I think, A new chapter is about to begin. It seems that in the future, many IPs will become democratized — in other words, they will become public assets.

If only there was some sort of term for fake democracy where you're actually just there to plunder resources.

[deleted]

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

#59

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

evanjrowley wrote: post #52

If AI companies in the US are penalized for this, then the effect on copyright holders will only be slowed until foriegn AI companies overtake them. In such cases the legal recourse will be much slower and significantly limited.

Access to copyrighted materials might make for slightly better-trained models the way that access to more powerful GPUs does. But I don't think it will accelerate foundational advances in the underlying technology. If anything, maybe having to compete under tight constraints means AI companies will have to innovate more, rather than merely push scale.

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

#60

Post by JKCalhoun »

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.

My understanding — LLMs are nothing at all like a "savant with perfect recall".

More like a speed-reader who retains a schema-level grasp of what they’ve read.

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