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Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

variety.com

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Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#81

Post by qarl »

triceratops wrote: post #72
qarl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if you read the article, the point is in the training, not the reproduction. That's what all these lawsuits are about - it's the training not the reproduction. I already agreed in my first comment that the reproduction is off limits. In this case, it appears that Meta torrented illegal copies of the work to do the training. Obviously that's bad. But conflating that with training itself doesn't follow.

Training requires making copies. Even if Meta had purchased each work they'd have had to make copies of it to distribute around the training cluster.

Does it though? If they bought a copy for each machine?

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#82

Post by SahAssar »

qarl wrote: post #14
SahAssar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the consumption is illegal. It's the reproduction that is illegal. Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.

No, if you read the article, the point is in the training, not the reproduction. That's what all these lawsuits are about - it's the training not the reproduction. I already agreed in my first comment that the reproduction is off limits. In this case, it appears that Meta torrented illegal copies of the work to do the training. Obviously that's bad. But conflating that with training itself doesn't follow.

The point of these lawsuits is the piracy. My parent comment was about the general situation, not this specific article.

Pirating content is illegal, regardless of if it is to train an LLM.

Usage of LLMs trained on unlicensed content (basically all of them) might or might not be illegal.

Using any method to reproduce a copyrighted work by using that original as input in a way that supplants the market value of the original is probably illegal.

At least that is my rudimentary understanding.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#83

Post by RIMR »

nadermx wrote: post #71

"They then copied those stolen fruits" How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen? Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose…

I think you are confusing the idiom "stolen fruits" with an actual accusation of criminal theft. Aside from its use in this phrasing, neither "theft" nor "steal" appears anywhere else in the article.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#84

Post by Barrin92 »

qarl wrote: post #8
nancyminusone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is asking human savants about what they read 1 million times per day. Suppose they did, and some guy was filling stadiums regularly to hear him recite an entire audio book. That would probably get the attention of someone's lawyers.

I don't see your point. The problem is producing the copyrighted work, not processing it beforehand. If it's illegal for AIs it should be illegal for humans, too. Is that really what you're arguing? It should be illegal for savants to read books?

>The problem is producing the copyrighted work, not processing it beforehand.

the distinction isn't particularly clear cut with an open source model. If it is able to reproduce copyright protected work with high fidelity such that the works produced would be derivative, that's like trying to get around laws against distribution of protected works by handing them to you in a zip file.

It's a kind of copyright washing to hand you the data as a binary blob and an algorithm to extract them out of it. That wouldn't really fly with any other technology.

And that's really where a lot of the value is mind you, these models are best thought of as lossily compressed versions of their input data. Otherwise Facebook ought to be perfectly fine to train them on public domain data.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#85

Post by nadermx »

RIMR wrote: post #83
nadermx wrote: post #71

"They then copied those stolen fruits" How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen? Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose…

I think you are confusing the idiom "stolen fruits" with an actual accusation of criminal theft. Aside from its use in this phrasing, neither "theft" nor "steal" appears anywhere else in the article.

The article, references the complaint. And even then, why use it at all?

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#87

Post by dylan604 »

ben_w wrote: post #74
azinman2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And meta's worth is much more than that. He's not personally paying.

A company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if…

At the same time, isn't Zuck's worth based on his shares of evilCorp while evilCorp's shares are what you just said. Ergo, the Zuck isn't worth all that either???

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#88

Post by qarl »

Barrin92 wrote: post #84
qarl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see your point. The problem is producing the copyrighted work, not processing it beforehand. If it's illegal for AIs it should be illegal for humans, too. Is that really what you're arguing? It should be illegal for savants to read books?

>The problem is producing the copyrighted work, not processing it beforehand. the distinction isn't particularly clear cut with an open source model. If it is able to reproduce copyright protected work with high fidelity such that the works produced would be derivative, that's like trying to get around laws against distribution of protected works by handing them to you in a zip file. It's a kind of copyright washing…

I tend to agree - but you assume that it would not be possible to create a model that can train on copyrighted work and only output text which would be considered fair use.

That seems very possible to me, and undermines the "training is copyright violation" argument. It's not the training, it's the output.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#89

Post by qarl »

SahAssar wrote: post #82
qarl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if you read the article, the point is in the training, not the reproduction. That's what all these lawsuits are about - it's the training not the reproduction. I already agreed in my first comment that the reproduction is off limits. In this case, it appears that Meta torrented illegal copies of the work to do the training. Obviously that's bad. But conflating that with training itself doesn't follow.

The point of these lawsuits is the piracy. My parent comment was about the general situation, not this specific article. Pirating content is illegal, regardless of if it is to train an LLM. Usage of LLMs trained on unlicensed content (basically all of them) might or might not be illegal. Using any method to reproduce a copyrighted work by using that original as input in a way that supplants the market value of the or…

Well - maybe so. But the common belief is that training itself is a violation of copyright, no matter how it's done. That's the argument I'm countering here.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

#90

Post by pkaeding »

qarl wrote: post #43
NoOn3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should an AI have the same rights as a human? How about then to grant AI all other rights, for example, to allow voting?(sarcasm)

We're not talking about rights, we're talking about illegal acts. If it's illegal for a machine to do it, how can it be ok for a human? Just from a rational argumentation point of view. Clearly if a law is written saying as much, then sure. But there is no such copyright law like that yet.

But machines don't do things. People do things, and they use tools/machines to do those things more easily or efficiently.
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