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Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

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Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#151

Post by gavinhoward »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #77
gavinhoward wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaken if you think companies will allow common people to ignore copyright on their IP. The only IP that will be allowed to be stolen is that of other common people.

I agree with you when you talk about places where companies can bully people just by threatening to sue them, and where the defender must have lots of money even if they are clearly in the right. But AI does not change anything there. The problem of being sued into oblivion despite being right exists there even without it. In places where defending does not cost money, this works out in favor of the individuals.

"AI" changes things by making it even harder for individuals to defend against.

Right now, we have FOSS organizations that will help you in lawsuits against companies that don't follow licenses. With "AI" in the picture, companies can launder your code with "plausible" deniability. [1]

[1]: https://matthewbutterick.com/chron/will-ai-obliterate-the-ru...

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#152

Post by fredrik_skne_se »

If anyone want to use my blog posts, they can contact me. I want to know my customer.

If you want to know about copyright that applies to my work: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-f...

Beeing in the US does not shield you from my country's laws. You are not allowed to copy my work without my permission, you are not allowed to transform it.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#154

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

FinnKuhn wrote: post #43
samwillis wrote: post #6

Using robots.txt as a model for anything doesn't work. All a robots.txt is is a polite request to please follow the rules in it, there is no "legal" agreement to follow those rules, only a moral imperative. Robots.txt has failed as a system, if it hadn't we wouldn't have captchas or Cloudflare. In the age of AI we need to better understand where copyright applies to it, and potentially need reform of copyright to ali…

if you do data mining in the EU you are legally required to respect robots.txt afaik

This is how it is a failed system. It doesn't really do what most people who have one think it does and yet it gets rolled into law and everyone now has to deal with it constantly while still not fixing the original issue.

It's like the EU doesn't understand that bad law has a negative value.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#155

Post by Taywee »

lancesells wrote: post #94
safety1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special…

> Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly. You don't think it's them being allowed to buy Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm? Is creativity ruined because I can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon or t-shirt? Does the world need Luke Skywalker coming from any individual studio? People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre D…

The copyright system is what has enabled so few companies (and one giant corporation in particular) to become the owners, controllers, and beneficiaries of the vast majority of American fiction and culture. From visual media companies, record companies, and publishers, you can probably distill ownership of more than 90% of the culture that the average American lives in to fewer than 20 companies.

Copyright has been the most powerful tool in any media company's toolbox when it comes to consolidating power and IP and rolling into a larger and larger ball of what we call culture.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#156

Post by safety1st »

samwillis wrote: post #87
safety1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special…

My phrasing was absolutely not meant to be read as myself speaking for all, apologies, I certainly don't want to offend. It has felt on HN and elsewhere that the prevailing attitude to copyright has been these two, somewhat contradictory, things. That's what I was trying to highlight with my phrasing of "we", which was also not meant to include myself but be a nod to the way a vocal group try to steer and dominate th…

Thank you! I think the average HN'er is frankly pretty ignorant about how copyright law works, the history around it, and the arguments for and against various reforms. In fairness it's an esoteric topic and most software developers depend in some way on copyrighted work for their income so that's not a huge surprise I guess. But it probably explains the contradiction you observed!

The #1 issue with copyright today in my opinion is that if we keep on extending it forever, it will forever entrench the wealth and power of a small number of companies that hold the largest portfolios of IP. I think this is also a huge issue for AI, maybe the biggest issue, because at the end of the day an AI is really just another copyrighted work. It is not the anthropomorphized thing that countless people are acting like it is, it's a work. Change copyright and you change the nature of future AI works.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#157

Post by Taywee »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #107
safety1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special…

> Reducing copyright term extension has everything to do with restoring competition and creativity to our economy Can you explain your line of thinking here? How does the ability to use another company’s intellectual property restore creativity? It just seems like a path to allow bootlegging.

Is it more creative to use your own company's IP? Most of these copyrighted and trademarked stories and characters are being made by people who didn't come up with them anyway, so what's the difference in creativity whether you happen to work at the company that owns the IP or not?

With long copyright terms, it encourages copyright holders to milk a single work for the length of the copyright (90+ years) and therefore discourages the creation of something new. It also encourages people to obtain copyrights to leverage them for profit, rather than making anything at all. A child of an artist can spend their entire life supported by their parent's copyright, and never has to make anything unique for as long as they live.

How is any of this good for creativity?

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#158

Post by butterfi »

lancesells wrote: post #94
safety1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special…

> Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly. You don't think it's them being allowed to buy Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm? Is creativity ruined because I can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon or t-shirt? Does the world need Luke Skywalker coming from any individual studio? People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre D…

"No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm." L. Lessig

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#159

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

zerotolerance wrote: post #88
TechBro8615 wrote: post #71

If AI is using training data from your site, presumably it got that data by crawling it. So either it's already respecting robots.txt, in which case ai.txt would be redundant, or it's ignoring it, in which case there's no reason to expect it would respect ai.txt any more than it did robots.txt.

robots.txt is about crawling, ai.txt would assumably be either augmentative metadata or specific copyright terms of use with respect to AI uses.

> specific copyright terms of use

There's no such thing. Without a license you can't enforce any restrictions.

AI training is basically just building a very complex Markov chain, that's obviously not copyright violation because the output product doesn't contain the input - only data about it. If your text has been copied then please point to it in these weights here.

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