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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

#151

Post by raverbashing »

EnPissant wrote: post #138
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?

This is a tough one for the HN crowd. It's like that man not sure which button to push meme. 1) RIAA is evil for enforcing copyrights on lyrics? 2) OpenAI is evil for training on lyrics?

Actually in Germany it's GEMA

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

#152

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

rpdillon wrote: post #148
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?

The content industries should have been the ones to invent LLMs, but their head is so stuck in the past and in regressive thinking about how they protect their revenue streams that they're incapable of innovating. Publishing houses should have been the ones to have researchers looking into how to computationally leverage their enormous corpus of data. But instead, they put zero dollars into actual research and develo…

“The content industries.”

Why would people invest in destroying what they love?

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

#153

Post by smelendez »

saghm wrote: post #143
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?

One amusing part of lyrics on Spotify to me is how they don't seem to track which songs are instrumentals or not and use that to skip the message about them not knowing the lyrics. An instrumental will pop up and it will say something like "Sorry, we don't have the lyrics to this one yet". The only thing funnier than that is when they do have the lyrics to a song that probably doesn't need them, like Hocus Pocus by F…

I’ve also seen cases where they list lyrics for a song that doesn’t have any (usually an instrumental jazz version of an old standard).

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

#154

Post by rpdillon »

admaiora wrote: post #135
miltonlost wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All AI companies know they're breaking the law. They all have prompts effectively saying "Don't show that we broke the law!". That we continue to have tech companies consistently breaking the law and nothing happens is an indictment of our current economy.

And it's a question of do we accept breaking law for the possibility to have the greatest technological advancement of the 21st century. In my opinion, legal system has become a blocker for a lot of innovation, not only in AI but elsewhere as well.

This is a point that I don't see discussed enough. I think anthropic decided to purchase books in bulk, tear them apart to scan them, and then destroy those copies. And that's the only source of copyrighted material I've ever heard of that is actually legal to use for training LLMs.

Most LLMs were trained on vast troves of pirated copyrighted material. Folks point this out, but they don't ever talk about what the alternative was. The content industries, like music, movies, and books, have done nothing to research or make their works available for analysis and innovation, and have in fact fought industries that seek to do so tooth and nail.

Further, they use the narrative that people that pirate works are stealing from the artists, where the vast majority of money that a customer pays for a piece of copyrighted content goes to the publishing industry. This is essentially the definition of rent seeking.

Those industries essentially tried to stop innovation entirely, and they tried to use the law to do that (and still do). So, other companies innovated over the copyright holder's objections, and now we have to sort it out in the courts.

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

#155

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

admaiora wrote: post #135
miltonlost wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All AI companies know they're breaking the law. They all have prompts effectively saying "Don't show that we broke the law!". That we continue to have tech companies consistently breaking the law and nothing happens is an indictment of our current economy.

And it's a question of do we accept breaking law for the possibility to have the greatest technological advancement of the 21st century. In my opinion, legal system has become a blocker for a lot of innovation, not only in AI but elsewhere as well.

You’re willing to eliminate the entire concept of intellectual property for a possibility something might be a technological advancement? If creators are the reason you believe this advancement can be achieved, are you willing to provide them the majority of the profits?

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

#156

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

rpdillon wrote: post #154
admaiora wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's a question of do we accept breaking law for the possibility to have the greatest technological advancement of the 21st century. In my opinion, legal system has become a blocker for a lot of innovation, not only in AI but elsewhere as well.

This is a point that I don't see discussed enough. I think anthropic decided to purchase books in bulk, tear them apart to scan them, and then destroy those copies. And that's the only source of copyrighted material I've ever heard of that is actually legal to use for training LLMs. Most LLMs were trained on vast troves of pirated copyrighted material. Folks point this out, but they don't ever talk about what the alt…

I don’t follow. You’re punishing the publishing industry by punishing authors?

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

#157

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

mock-possum wrote: post #126
miltonlost wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All AI companies know they're breaking the law. They all have prompts effectively saying "Don't show that we broke the law!". That we continue to have tech companies consistently breaking the law and nothing happens is an indictment of our current economy.

I don’t read this as “don’t show we broke the law,” I read it as “don’t give the user the false impression that there’s any legal issue with this generated content.” There’s nothing law breaking about quoting publicly available information. Google isn’t breaking the law when it displays previews of indexed content returned by the search algorithm, and that’s clearly the approach being taken here.

Masked token prediction is reconstruction. It goes far beyond “quoting.”

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

#158

Post by llbbdd »

mathieu4v wrote: post #16

I found this bit very revealing: > Since the output would only be generated as a result of user inputs known as prompts, it was not the defendants, but the respective user who would be liable for it, OpenAI had argued. Another glimpse into the "mind" of a tech corporation allowing itself full freedom to profit from the vast body of human work available online, while explicitly declining any societal responsibility at…

This is largely how it works for nearly all coprightable work. I can draw Mickey Mouse but legally I'm not doing anything wrong until I try to sell it. It certainly doesn't put Crayola or Adobe at legal risk for me to do so.

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

#159

Post by EdgeExplorer »

griffzhowl wrote: post #125
griffzhowl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them. But these days with generative AI, they can take lyrics and just make a new song with them, and you can probably see why artists and record companies would want to stop that. Plus, from TFA, "GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with O…

Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion? Granted I know nothing about the case except for what's in TFA

I'm not one of the downvoters, but it may be this: "Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them."

Record companies have in fact, for decades, been going after sites for showing lyrics. If you play guitar, for example, it's almost impossible to find chords/tabs that include the lyrics because sites get shut down for doing that.

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

#160

Post by thedevilslawyer »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #155
admaiora wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's a question of do we accept breaking law for the possibility to have the greatest technological advancement of the 21st century. In my opinion, legal system has become a blocker for a lot of innovation, not only in AI but elsewhere as well.

You’re willing to eliminate the entire concept of intellectual property for a possibility something might be a technological advancement? If creators are the reason you believe this advancement can be achieved, are you willing to provide them the majority of the profits?

That's an absolutely good tradeoff. There's no longer any need for copyright. Patents should go next. Only trademarks can stay.
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