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AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

jasonwillems.com

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Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#101

Post by palmotea »

Borg3 wrote: post #96
N_Lens wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law (and the system/society) generally serves capital, instead of humans. That's why big corporations can both use copyright against smaller companies and individual creators, while also ignoring the same copyright laws when it suits them. I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy…

And why you think all the big boys push for ML, LLM, AI? To cut off the middle class. Once stuff will work automagicaly, they can squish even more profits while not caring about middle class at all. They will just ask automatas to do things for them... Great bright future...

> And why you think all the big boys push for ML, LLM, AI? To cut off the middle class. Once stuff will work automagicaly, they can squish even more profits while not caring about middle class at all. They will just ask automatas to do things for them... Great bright future...

To be fair, I don't think "the big boys" are so actively malicious to be seeking "to cut off the middle class." I think they push for "ML, LLM, AI" because they've made investments and see dollar signs, and they just don't care about about who is harmed or what kind of damage they do. There might also be an element of seeing the bad outcome as inevitable, and selfishly focusing on ending up on top after all the disruption vs trying to prevent or mitigate it.

Don't get me wrong, that's a terrible attitude and those are awful people. They get no points for merely not being a cartoon villain. But I think it's important to understand the situation correctly if anything's to be done about it.

Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#102

Post by larsonian »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #92
jazzyjackson wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they certainly aren’t selling paper

Jstor is an information database provider that that specializes in the republication of academic journal articles. The web is the company's delivery mechanism, not the defining trait of the its existence. A public-facing website doesn't make it anymore of a tech company as such than it would the New York Times.

NYT is more of a tech company than you might think [1] and they've been one for longer than you might think: the de-facto standard profiler for Perl [2], of all things, comes from them.

[1] https://open.nytimes.com/

[2] https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::NYTProf

Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#103

Post by program_whiz »

lp4v4n wrote: post #56

In the past, many developers were against copyright law because they saw it as a way for big corps to stifle competition and curb creativity in order to increase their profits. A lot of people right now invoke the violation of the same copyright law because the tide has changed and now companies, by ignoring copyright law, are hurting artists/smaller companies and/or not contributing back or unlawfully closing the co…

Correct, and for some reason America has gotten to an "over legalization" state where every concept has to filter through a legal system in order to be good / bad. I think that's where the matter comes from. Pedantic legalists insist that everyone couch their ideas in a rigid set of legal statutes.

"But you just said that an individual should be able to use copyrighted works. Therefore you should have no qualms with a legal individual (corp) utilizing every copyrighted work in the world to destroy society, as nothing they are doing is illegal under your rubric."

The reality is most humans operate from a more natural and intuitive sense. A single artist who made a song shouldn't be destroyed by the big corp that is stealing it for their own profit (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon). But its hard to interpret this in the strict legalist sense, because in the US, law is setup to make corps/people, money/speech, art/product, all hard to distinguish, and generally doesn't give much affordance to "what the law reasonably meant" when challenged by corporations (but it does seem to be applied quite conservatively for individuals).

For example, data protection laws tend to be applied quite loosely to corps with slaps on the wrist and stern words. For individuals, accessing data you shouldn't can mean the rest of your life in prison. People feel this is unfair, but the legalists will use a bunch of reasoning to excuse the clear immorality.

Its definitely "using the intellect and words to override correct human moral intuitions."

Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#104

Post by account42 »

Spivak wrote: post #26
klustregrif wrote: post #7

Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry, that is until they started doing it themselves at scale and now they are claiming it’s the law that’s broken, it’s crazy.

Hollywood sure, publishers sure, but tech? Where? The pro piracy pro game cracking open source p2p distribution people?

The people adding DRM to operating systems, display connector standards and even the web.

Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#105

Post by account42 »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #2

Most people in my social circles are various flavours of anti-AI, and it drives me crazy how many of them, who were once stridently anti-copyright, are now using copyright as one of the great pillars of AI opposition

I think besides the points already brought up by other responses, it's important to distinguish attribution from copyright. AI training ignores both while people who are against copyright might not want to get rid of attribution requirements.

Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#106

Post by salawat »

patrick451 wrote: post #99
observationist wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, not really - there's no "they" in general. Copyright law is constructed by design for large institutions, lobbying, case law, and attendant legislation allow it to be abused by data hoarders. It was never built to protect individual creators or authors or artists, despite the PR campaigns and marketing for it. There are just companies big enough to ignore those institutions for which copyright law was creat…

If I create something, I should get to dictate how it is used not just until I die but for eternity.

Don't have kids. For their sake.

Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#107

Post by acheron »

HPsquared wrote: post #3
sharkjacobs wrote: post #2

Most people in my social circles are various flavours of anti-AI, and it drives me crazy how many of them, who were once stridently anti-copyright, are now using copyright as one of the great pillars of AI opposition

It serves to demonstrate that in most cases, "principles" are only a rhetorical device.

Yep. It’s just who/whom all the way down.

Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#108

Post by mock-possum »

socalgal2 wrote: post #85
klustregrif wrote: post #7

Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry, that is until they started doing it themselves at scale and now they are claiming it’s the law that’s broken, it’s crazy.

Nina Paley was against copyright, and she's still against copyright. Her position is all artists copy https://ninapaley.com/category/creativity/

Copying is not theft!

I do tend to vibe wjth Paley’s views on originality and creativity, though I haven’t kept up with her recently, good reminder!

Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#109

Post by fuzzfactor »

at1as wrote: post #87
scrubs wrote: post #80

This is a particularly well written article. Plaudits to poster and original writer. It took me from no clue to a context or sieve I could organize the noise through. And darn it, it made it look easy. Like the John Daily line it's so good I'm mad. Sheesh, thanks a lot!

Thanks, I'm glad it helped! I still think it's too long, but kudos to those that made it through

I can only imagine you already cut out a lot of material :)

The way I see it, the original problem, which stands the test of time, is when copies are made and/or sold by somebody who is taking credit for the original work without giving credit to the actual creator.

Anything less needs to be much more realistically reflected as very minor by comparison.

Re: AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

#110

Post by tsoukase »

Not copywrite but the whole democracy is broken. A big company with an army of lawyers and an OS project will claim exactly the same case. Who has more probability to win? It happens in every occasion, it's just that copywrite ones are more common. Only when two giants collide justice is rendered, eg Oracle vs Google over Java on Android.
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