Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

futurism.com

11–20 of 23 posts

Re: OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

#11

So? Making money is not a legal right. Copyright is. If you can't make money without misappropriating copyrighted material, then you can't make money that way.

This is such an insane take. At this point, I think as a society we need to just say copyright as a concept and law has completely failed and scrap the whole thing. The 0.01% of powerful copyright cartel publishers get rich while harming 99.99% of people, because we've seen further erosion of fair use rights, absurdly lengthy expansions of copyright to prop up Disney's profits and expansive interpretation of how much…

I have whiplash from your first and last sentences.

> Students should be able to learn from books, music, film. So should AI training models.

An AI model is a thing. It is owned and fully controlled by some agent. A student is a sentient, thinking being. Both can be trained, only one can be educated. Treating the two as comparable is misleading and in my view, wrong.

Re: OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

#12
If the Internet Archive makes a whoopsie with loaning out books they didn't have the license or permission to and gets sued into the ground by publishers, then OpenAI shouldn't have been/be allowed to use and process copyrighted material either.

OpenAI is actively receiving money from funders and (potentially, maybe, eventually will) make money by using others' copyrighted content at a much larger potential than what the Internet Archive was doing.

OpenAI should not have permission to soullessly suck up copyrighted material and use it to make money.

On the other hand, other countries who don't place ethical/moral/fiscal priority on creating and protecting copyrighted works will eat the wests' lunch when it comes to AI as there's no limitation that's preventing them from consuming the content.

Not sure what the answer is - maybe copyright is an archaic idea/belief built and maintained by a once well-intended, now corrupted economic system that needs a bit of a shakeup anyways...

Re: OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

#13

So? Making money is not a legal right. Copyright is. If you can't make money without misappropriating copyrighted material, then you can't make money that way.

This is such an insane take. At this point, I think as a society we need to just say copyright as a concept and law has completely failed and scrap the whole thing. The 0.01% of powerful copyright cartel publishers get rich while harming 99.99% of people, because we've seen further erosion of fair use rights, absurdly lengthy expansions of copyright to prop up Disney's profits and expansive interpretation of how much…

I actually agree with you. I think what the LLM craze has show is that the copyright/IP laws need to adapt and not the other way around.

I think it should be legal to train a model on anything that is legal to scrape (which is almost everything).

Then, if someone uses a generative AI output that violates someones existing IP in an infringing way, go after the person that's trying to monetize that output, whether it's software, an image, or writing.

The thing is, if you limit what these things can be trained on, it creates a huge power imbalance. The wealthy and nation states are still going to scrape everything under the sun and train AIs with that data along with whatever else their surveillance has gathered. If businesses are neutered from being able to do the same, we all lose.

Re: OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

#14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an insane take. At this point, I think as a society we need to just say copyright as a concept and law has completely failed and scrap the whole thing. The 0.01% of powerful copyright cartel publishers get rich while harming 99.99% of people, because we've seen further erosion of fair use rights, absurdly lengthy expansions of copyright to prop up Disney's profits and expansive interpretation of how much…

I have whiplash from your first and last sentences. > Students should be able to learn from books, music, film. So should AI training models. An AI model is a thing. It is owned and fully controlled by some agent. A student is a sentient, thinking being. Both can be trained, only one can be educated. Treating the two as comparable is misleading and in my view, wrong.

We're in strange new times, but the equivalence of human cognition and synthetic will likely become mainstream and mundane in the coming years.

Sci-fi has long had various "cyborg" type things as a plot element, but if you walk down the street in NYC today you'll pass thousands of people with pacemakers, artificial hips, insulin pumps, colostomy bags, and prosthetics. People who've had laser surgery on their eyes to see better or transplanted organs. Plus people's usage of smart watches that measure heart rate, steps, sleep quality or continuous blood glucose monitors.

We don't marvel at the cyborgs among us, we just accept it as modern medicine. Similarly, while we've gotten used to internet search and GPS turn-by-turn navigation. Gen Z and younger will probably just accept the integration of genAI into their everyday life as seamlessly and casually as we accepted our cyborgification.

You can say that an AI model can only "be trained, not educated" in the same way you can argue that a submarine doesn't swim. But does that really matter to any of the people using it?

Re: OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

#15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an insane take. At this point, I think as a society we need to just say copyright as a concept and law has completely failed and scrap the whole thing. The 0.01% of powerful copyright cartel publishers get rich while harming 99.99% of people, because we've seen further erosion of fair use rights, absurdly lengthy expansions of copyright to prop up Disney's profits and expansive interpretation of how much…

Fine then, let's get rid of software copyrights too. We can copy the AI software, models, datasets all we want. They don't get copyright protection for their software while declaring that everybody else doesn't get copyright protection for their work.

Pointless distinction, you'll never see their code or weights if you just get a response from the API, so the license doesn't matter.

Re: OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

#17
post #3

So? Making money is not a legal right. Copyright is. If you can't make money without misappropriating copyrighted material, then you can't make money that way.

It's a clickbait title, this is not what they are arguing > "Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression — including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents — it would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials," the company wrote in the evidence filing. "Limiting training data to public domain books…

What exactly is misleading or "clickbait" in the title?

I know that copyright covers blog posts and generally every immaterial creation published by humans that is reproducible and above a fuzzily defined threshold of "original creativity".

The other day, I was downvoted here for criticizing the often-cited "freeware" claim put out by MS.

The argument was: copyright already covers all this, I must lack knowledge about copyright law.

Now, the argument seems to have shifted to: copyright law doesn't apply the way it used to?

Re: OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

#18
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a clickbait title, this is not what they are arguing > "Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression — including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents — it would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials," the company wrote in the evidence filing. "Limiting training data to public domain books…

What exactly is misleading or "clickbait" in the title? I know that copyright covers blog posts and generally every immaterial creation published by humans that is reproducible and above a fuzzily defined threshold of "original creativity". The other day, I was downvoted here for criticizing the often-cited "freeware" claim put out by MS. The argument was: copyright already covers all this, I must lack knowledge abou…

Copyright applies to the reproduction, not the consumption. We are free to read or otherwise ingest copyrighted material without legal concerns. We are free to learn from and create content based on those learnings.

Is there any precedence from banning the use of copyright material because someone (thing) might reproduce it later? Do the current copyright laws not already protect the authors and give them tools for takedowns and remuneration?

Re: OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is misleading or "clickbait" in the title? I know that copyright covers blog posts and generally every immaterial creation published by humans that is reproducible and above a fuzzily defined threshold of "original creativity". The other day, I was downvoted here for criticizing the often-cited "freeware" claim put out by MS. The argument was: copyright already covers all this, I must lack knowledge abou…

Copyright applies to the reproduction, not the consumption. We are free to read or otherwise ingest copyrighted material without legal concerns. We are free to learn from and create content based on those learnings. Is there any precedence from banning the use of copyright material because someone (thing) might reproduce it later? Do the current copyright laws not already protect the authors and give them tools for t…

Isn't this about generating output after all?

I'm not sure if I get your distinction about "consumption".

> Do the current copyright laws not already protect the authors and give them tools for takedowns and remuneration?

That was also my point in the prior HN comment thread on the MS news submission that I mentioned.

Good luck starting "fair use" copyright lawsuits against a myriad of auto-generated derivatives. This was already hard for naïve creators with humans and (mostly) human-run corporations on the other end.

Re: OpenAI pleads it can't make money with o using copyrighted material for free

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright applies to the reproduction, not the consumption. We are free to read or otherwise ingest copyrighted material without legal concerns. We are free to learn from and create content based on those learnings. Is there any precedence from banning the use of copyright material because someone (thing) might reproduce it later? Do the current copyright laws not already protect the authors and give them tools for t…

Isn't this about generating output after all? I'm not sure if I get your distinction about "consumption". > Do the current copyright laws not already protect the authors and give them tools for takedowns and remuneration? That was also my point in the prior HN comment thread on the MS news submission that I mentioned. Good luck starting "fair use" copyright lawsuits against a myriad of auto-generated derivatives. Thi…

If the goal is to prevent companies from training on copyright material, then yes, it is about consuming the material, not generating it. The generation part comes from anecdotal incidents where some copyright material has been generated.

- This is not the normal

- This can be changed over time, there are also moderation techniques that can be used.

- We already have remedies for those publishing or selling copyrighted material already

So I personally see a difference between training time and inference time. Using the potential for copyrighted material to be generated, to prevent its usage a training time is... luddite territory... imho

Post reply on HN