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OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#101

Post by dathinab »

petesergeant wrote: post #34
aniviacat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine providers who want to comply will scan the LLM's output and pay a license fee to the owner if it contains lyrics.

They scan for commercial work already. Isn’t the law about training, not output?

they clearly didn't do that properly, or we wouldn't have the current law suite

the lawsuit was also not about weather it is or isn't copy right infringement. It was about who is responsible (OpenAI or the user who tries to bait it into making another illegal copy of song lyrics).

A model outputting song lyrics means it has it stored somehow somewhere. Just because the storage is in a lossy compressed obscure hyper dimensional transformation of some kind, doesn't mean it didn't store an illegal copy. Or it wouldn't have been able to output it. _Technical details do not protect from legal responsibilities (in general)_

you could (maybe should) add new laws which in some form treat LLM memorized things the same as if a human did memorize it, but currently LLMs have no special legal treatment when it comes to them storing copies of things.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#102

Post by estebarb »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #92
estebarb wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is completely different. Piracy websites do only one thing. Chatbots are different. My concern is that where are we going to put the line: If I type a copyrighted song in Word is Microsoft liable? If I upload a lyric to ChatGPT and ask it to analyze or translate it, is it a copyright violation? I totally understand your line of thinking. However, the one I'm suggesting could be applied as well and it has…

> I think that is completely different. Piracy websites do only one thing. Chatbots are different. Well...YouTube is liable for any copyrighted material on their site, and do 'more than one thing'

Not really. Youtube is not liable as long as they remove the content after a copyright complain and other mechanisms.

The problem is if OpenAI is liable for reproducing copyrighted content, so will be other products such as word processors, video editors and so on. So, as society where we will put the line?

Are we going to tolerate some copyright infringement in these tools or are we going to pursue copyright infringements even in other tools as we already got the tools to detect it?

We cannot have double standards, law should be applied equally to everyone.

I do think that overall making OpenAI liable for output is a bad precedent, because of repercusions beyond AI tools. I'm all fine with making them liable for having trained on copyrighted content and so on...

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#103

Post by EdgeExplorer »

The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#104

Post by JohnFen »

gabrielgio wrote: post #19
JCM9 wrote: post #9

With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content. With all major models not basically trained on nearly all available data, beyond the financial AI bubble about to burst there’s also a big content bubble that’s about exhausted as folks are just pumping out slop vs producing original creative human output. That may be the ultimate lo…

> With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content. I think people would still produce original things as long they have the means for doing it. I guess we could say it is our nature. My fear is AI monopolizing the wealth that once would go to support people producing art.

This. I still produce original things and will continue to do so until I am incapable anymore. What's changed, though, is that I no longer put or discuss those things on the open internet because there's no realistic way to prevent it from getting used to train genAI models.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#105

Post by estebarb »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #99
estebarb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countries where drug consumption/posesion is penalized too. There is a similar example in other area: For instance, in Sweeden, Norway and Belize selling sex (aka prostitution) is legal, but buying it is not legal. So, your example actually exists in world legislation. I'm just asking where are we going to put the line and why.

You had originally said the user should be liable instead of OpenAI being liable. > However, the lyrics are shown because the user requested them, shouldn't be the user be liable instead? I would imagine the sociological rationale for allowing sex work would not map to a multi-billion-dollar company. And to add, the social network example doesn't map because the user is producing the content and sharing it with the n…

No, the edited wording still conveys the same meaning. My edit was to fix another grammar typo.

The social networks are distributing such content AND benefiting from selling ads on them. Adding ads on top is a derivative work.

Personally I'm on the side of penalizing the side that provides the input, not the output:

- OpenAI training on copyrighted works. - Users requesting custom works based on copyrighted IP

That is my opinion on how it should be layered, that's it. I'm happy to discuss why it should be that way or why not. As I put in other comment, my concern is that mandating copyright filtering o each generative tool would end up propagating to every single digital tool, which as society we don't really want.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#106

Post by TiredOfLife »

JCM9 wrote: post #9

With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content. With all major models not basically trained on nearly all available data, beyond the financial AI bubble about to burst there’s also a big content bubble that’s about exhausted as folks are just pumping out slop vs producing original creative human output. That may be the ultimate lo…

> With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content.

BBC truly was ahead of times with their deletion of tv shows.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#107

Post by fosk »

EdgeExplorer wrote: post #103

The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?

They probably fear a domino effect if they let go of this. And so they defend it vehemently to avoid setting a precedent.

Think about compositions, samples, performance rights, and so on. There is a lot more at stake.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#109

Post by friendzis »

alienbaby wrote: post #108

Can't they just ask for copies of the lyrics they are not allowed to use and s/lyrics//g the training set? I imagine the volume of text that will be removed would be relatively miniscule.

They should ask for lyrics they are allowed to use. The volume of the text that's left would be miniscule.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#110

Post by friendzis »

rmoriz wrote: post #35

While I partially understand (but not support) the hate against AI due to possible plagiarism and "low effort generation" of works, think about the whole process: If model providers will be liable for generating output, that resembles lyrics or very short texts that fall under copyright laws, they will just change their business model. E.g. why offering lame chat agents as a service, when you can keep the value gener…

> why offering lame chat agents as a service

Because that's the only business model that the management of these model provider companies suspect to have a chance of generating income, at the current state.

> While I partially understand (but not support) the hate against AI due to possible plagiarism

There's no *possible* plagiarism, every AI slop IS result of plagiarism.

> E.g. have a strategy board that identifies possible use cases for your model, then spin off a company that just does agentic coding, music generation.

Having lame chat agents as a service does not preclude them from doing this. The fact that they are only selling the shovels should be somewhat insightful.

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