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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

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Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#2
> Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful.

This is disingenuous... the issue for FOSS is the scrubbing the license off the code and then users not observing the terms copilot or whatever concealed from you... that is against copyright law.

It's not a real problem? Great dump MS monorepo in there for public use.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#3
The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#4
post #3

The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.

Yeah but our current implementation of law is entirely subjective and exists solely to benefit those Fortune 500 organizations.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#5
post #3

The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.

>Bing, Google

~~robots.txt~~ ai.txt for code repos? :P

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#7
post #3

The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.

I think it comes down to use. Web crawlers like Google are fine because they index the web and then the search engine directs users to the original source. If instead Google recycled all the content they crawled and hosted everything on google.com while scrubbing all attributions from the pages then they’d fall afoul of copyright law (specifically the moral rights [1]).

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

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#8
Only speaking to the coding situation.

It seems to me that if the "LLM Copilots" just observed the existing license there would be less of a problem here.

Copilot, only recommend work based on $LICENSE or $LICENSE compatible license when I am working on $LICENSE code.

What's the problem genius?

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#9

> Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful. This is disingenuous... the issue for FOSS is the scrubbing the license off the code and then users not observing the ter…

'Disingenuous' is a very nice way of phrasing what that line is.

Especially strange coming from a site which has 'copyleft' in its name.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#10
post #3

The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.

If you're a rideshare or cab driver and you also happen to see / recognize billboards nobody is going to hassle you for storing those in your neural net or suggest law should do so.

If you're a designer and you take "billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted" as stored in your head as the basis for something you're working on, you will need to consider ways in which your derivative work may be infringing.

Similarly, no, the space where copyright meets training data doesn't "means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal." Nobody is going to care if a driving or search neural net has that billboard or t-shirt data, because their function isn't to output copies or derivative works.

If the function of what you're building is to output billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that's copyrighted, then you may violating the spirit of copyright law whether you're wetware or using silicon. And whether or not the letter of the law has been refined carefully to apply to the issues at hand.

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