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US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

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Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#151

Post by empath75 »

gruez wrote: post #122
jfengel wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your question. It's reasonably clear that transformers get caught reproducing material that they have no right to. The kind of thing that would potentially result in a lawsuit if you did it by hand. It's less clear whether taking vast amounts of copyrighted material and using it to generate other things rises to the level of copyright violation or not. It's the kind of thing that people woul…

>I'm not sure I understand your question. It's reasonably clear that transformers get caught reproducing material that they have no right to. The kind of thing that would potentially result in a lawsuit if you did it by hand. Is that a problem with the tool, or the person using it? A photocopier can copy an entire book verbatim. Should that be illegal? Or is it the problem that the "training" process can produce a mo…

Let's start with I think a case that everyone agrees with.

If I were to take an image, and compress it or encrypt it, and then show you data file, you would not be able to see the original copyrighted material anywhere in the data.

But if you had the right computer program, you could use it to regenerate the original image flawlessly.

I think most people would easily agree that distributing the encrypted file without permission is still a distribution of a copyrighted work and against the law.

What if you used _lossy_ encryption, and can merely reproduce a poor quality jpeg of the original image? I think still copyright infringement, right?

Would it matter if you distributed it with an executable that only rendered the image non-deterministically? Maybe one out of 10 times? Or if the command to reproduce it was undocumented?

Okay, so now we have AI. We can ignore the algorithm entirely and how it works, because it's not relevant. There is a large amount of data that it operates on, the weights of the model and so on. You _can_ with the correct prompts, sometimes generate a copy of a copyrighted work, to some degree of fidelity or another.

I do not think it is meaningfully different from the simpler example, just with a lot of extra steps.

I think, legally, it's pretty clear that it is illegally distributing copyrighted material without permission. I think calling it an "ai" just needlessly anthropomorphizes everything. It's a computer program that distributes copyrighted work without permission. It doesn't matter if it's the primary purpose or not.

I think probably there needs to be some kind of new law to fix this situation, but under the current law as it exists, it seems to me to be clearly illegal.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#152

Post by ls612 »

mr_toad wrote: post #68
nadermx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only does it read like a litany[0]. It seems like the copyright holders are not happy with how the meta case is working through court and are trying to sidestep fair use entirely. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Copywriter holders have always hated fair use, and often like to pretend it doesn’t exist. The average copywrite holder would like you to think that the law only allows use of their works in ways that they specifically permit, i.e. that which is not explicitly permitted is forbidden. But the law is largely the reverse; it only denies use of copyright works in certain ways. That which is not specifically forbidden is…

That used to be how it worked. Then the DMCA 1201 provisions arrived and so now anything not expressly permitted by the enumerated exceptions is forbidden. Even talking about how it works is punishable as a felony (upheld by SCOTUS in like 2000 or 2001, they basically said the Copyright clause is in the constitution so the government can censor information on how to defeat DRM).

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#153

Post by Intralexical »

temporalparts wrote: post #142
ulbu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these comparisons of llms with human artists copying are just ridiculous. it’s saying “well humans are allowed to break twigs and damage the planet in various ways, so why not allow building a fucking DEATH STAR”. abstracting llms from their operators and owners and possible (and probable) ends and the territories they trample upon is nothing short of eye-popping to me. how utterly negligent and disrespectful of fell…

The problem isn't that people aren't aware that the scale and magnitude differences are large and significant. It's that the space of intellectual property LAW does not handle the robust capabilities of LLMs. Legislators NEED to pass laws to reflect the new realities or else all prior case law relies on human analogies which fail in the obvious ways you alluded to. If there was no law governing the use of death stars…

Why do you think the obvious analogy is LLM=Human, and not LLM=JPEG or LLM=database?

I think you're overstating the legal uniqueness of LLMs. They're covered just fine by the existing legal precedents around copyrighted and derived works, just as building a death star would be covered by existing rules around outer space use and WMDs. Pretending they should be treated differently is IMO the entire lie told by the "AI" companies about copyright.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#154

Post by TeMPOraL »

bgwalter wrote: post #146
jobigoud wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are talking about the rights of the humans training the models and the humans using the models to create new things. Copyright only comes into play on publication. It's only concerned about publication of the models and publication of works. The machine itself doesn't have agency to publish anything at this point.

Does the distinction matter? If humans build a machine that uses so much oxygen that the oxygen levels on earth drop by half, can they say: "Humans are allowed to breathe, so our machine is too, because it is operated by humans!"

Yes, and then the response would be, "what have you done, we now need to pass laws about oxygen consumption where before we didn't".

Point being, laws aren't some God-ordained rules, beautiful in their fractal recursive abstraction, perfectly covering everything that will ever happen in the universe. No, laws are more or less crude hacks that deal with here and now. Intellectual property rights were questionable from the start and only got worse; they've been barely keeping up with digital media in the past couple decades, and they're entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI. This is a new situation, and laws need to be updated to cover it.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#155

Post by [deleted] »

mattxxx wrote: post #51

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigat…

[deleted]

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#156

Post by Intralexical »

palmotea wrote: post #62
mattxxx wrote: post #51

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigat…

[flagged]

> The fatal flaw in your reasoning: machines aren't humans. You can't reason that a machine has rights from the fact a human has them. Otherwise it's murder to recycle a car.

The direction we're going, it seems more likely it'll be recycling to murder a human.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#157

Post by bgwalter »

renewiltord wrote: post #79

I wonder when general internet sentiment moved from pro-piracy to IP maximalism. Fascinating shift.

That is fairly easy to answer: When the infringement shifted from small people taking from Walt Disney to Silicon Valley taking from everyone, including open source authors and small YouTube channels.

I find the shift of some right wing politicians and companies from "TPB and megaupload are criminals and its owners must be extradited from foreign countries!" to "Information wants to be free!" much more illuminating.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#158

Post by mdhb »

nadermx wrote: post #150
zelphirkalt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law covers these cases pretty well, it is just that the law has very powerful extremely rich adversaries, whose greed has gotten the better of them again and again. They could use work released sufficiently long ago to be legally available, or they could take work released as creative commons, or they could run a lookup, to make sure to never output verbatim copies of input or outputs, that are within a certain s…

I'm confused, so you're saying its illegal? Because last I checked it's still in the process of going through the courts. And need we forget that copyright's purpose is to advance the arts and sciences. Fair use is codified into law, which states each case is seen on a use by use basis, hence the litigation to determine if it is in fact, legal.

It’s so fucking obviously illegal when you think about it rationally for more than a few seconds. We aren’t even talking about “fair use” we are talking about how it works in practice which was Meta torrenting pirated books, never paying anyone a cent and straight up stealing the content at scale.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#159

Post by jhaile »

One aspect that I feel is ignored by the comments here is the geo-political forces at work. If the US takes the position that LLMs can't use copyrighted work or has to compensate all copyright holders – other countries (e.g. China) will not follow suit. This will mean that US LLM companies will either fall behind or be too expensive. Which means China and other countries will probably surge ahead in AI, at least in terms of how useful the AI is.

That is not to say that we shouldn't do the right thing regardless, but I do think there is a feeling of "who is going to rule the world in the future?" tha underlies governmental decision-making on how much to regulate AI.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#160

Post by apercu »

mattxxx wrote: post #51

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigat…

>Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against.

Corporations are not humans. (It's ridiculous that they have some legal protections in the US like humans, but that's a different issue). AI is also not human. AI is also not a chipmunk.

Why the comparison?

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