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

theregister.com

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

#161

Post by datavirtue »

vessenes wrote: post #74
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 Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal.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…

Thank you - a voice of sanity on this important topic. I understand people who create IP of any sort being upset that software might be able to recreate their IP or stuff adjacent to it without permission. It could be upsetting. But I don't understand how people jump to "Copyright Violation" for the fact of reading. Or even downloading in bulk. The Copyright controls, and has always controlled, creation and distribut…

Exactly, it is an immense privilege to have your works preserved and promulgated through the ages for instant recall and automated publishing. It's literally what everyone wants. The creators and the consumers. The AI companies are not robbing your money or IP. Period.

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

#162

Post by ashoeafoot »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #128
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 Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal.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…

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…

Obviously a revenue tracking weight should be trained in allowing the tracking and collection of all values generated from derivative works.

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

#163

Post by datavirtue »

jasonlotito wrote: post #124
vessenes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you - a voice of sanity on this important topic. I understand people who create IP of any sort being upset that software might be able to recreate their IP or stuff adjacent to it without permission. It could be upsetting. But I don't understand how people jump to "Copyright Violation" for the fact of reading. Or even downloading in bulk. The Copyright controls, and has always controlled, creation and distribut…

> But I don't understand how people jump to "Copyright Violation" for the fact of reading. The article specificaly talks about the creation and distribution of a work. Creation and distribution of a work alone is not a copyright violation. However, if you take in input from something you don't own, and genAI outputs something, it could be considered a copyright violation. Let's make this clear; genAI is not a copyrig…

"However, gen AI becomes an issue when you are using as your source stuff you don't have the copyright or license to."

Absolute horse shit. I can start a 1-900 answer line and use any reference I want to answer your question.

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

#164

Post by tensor »

jfengel wrote: post #111
Workaccount2 wrote: post #105

I have yet to see someone explain in detail how transformer model training works (showing they understand the technical nitty gritty and the overall architecture of transformers) and also layout a case for why it is clearly a violation of copyright. You can find lots of people talking about training, and you can find lots (way more) of people talking about AI training being a violation of copyright, but you can't fin…

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…

If I write a math book, and you read it, then tell someone about the math within it. You are not violating copyright. In fact, you could write your OWN math book, or history book, or whatever, and as long as you're not copying my actual text, you are not violating copyright.

However, when an LLM does the same, people now what it to be illegal. It seems pretty straightforward to apply existing copyright law to LLMs in the same way we apply them to humans. If the actual text they generate is substantially similar to a source material that it would constitute a copyright violation if a human were to have done it, then it should be illegal. Otherwise it should not.

edit: and in fact it's not even whether an LLM reproduces text, it's wether someone subsequently publishes that text. The person publishing that text should be the one taking on the legal hit.

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

#165

Post by datavirtue »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #65
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…

Doing a cover song requires permission, and doing it without that permission can be illegal. Being inspired by a song to write your own is very legal. AI is fine as long as the work it generates is substantially new and transformative. If it breaks and starts spitting out other peoples work verbatim (or nearly verbatim) there is a problem. Yes, I'm aware that machines aren't people and can't be "inspired", but if the…

"If it breaks and starts spitting out other peoples work verbatim (or nearly verbatim) there is a problem."

Why is that? Seems all logic gets thrown out the window when invoking AI around here. References are given. If the user publishes the output without attribution, NOW you have a problem. People are being so rabid and unreasonable here. Totally bat shit.

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

#166

Post by SilasX »

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…

>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 litigated against. When I look at the litany of derivative fantasy novels, it's obvious they're not all fully independent works.

Huh? If you agree that "learning from copyrighted works to make new ones" has traditionally not been considered infringement, then can you elaborate on why you think it fundamentally changes when you do it with bots? That would, if anything, seem to be a reversal of classic copyright jurisprudence. Up until 2022, pretty much everyone agreed that "learning from copyrighted works to make new ones" is exactly how it's supposed to work, and would be horrified at the idea of having to separately license that.

Sure, some fundamental dynamic might change when you do it with bots, but you need to make that case in an enforceable, operationalized way.

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

#167

Post by staticman2 »

ulbu wrote: post #77
palmotea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

> these comparisons of llms with human artists copying are just ridiculous.

I've come to think of this as the "Performatively failing to recognize the difference between an organism and a machine" rhetorical device that people employ here and elsewhere.

The person making the argument is capable of distinguishing the two things, they just performatively choose not to do so.

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

#168

Post by datavirtue »

jeroenhd wrote: post #67
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…

Pirating movies is also useful, because I can watch movies without paying on devices that apps and accounts don't work on. That doesn't make piracy legal, even though I get a lot of use out of it. Also, a person isn't a computer so the "but I can read a book and get inspired" argument is complete nonsense.

And everyone here is downloading every show and movie in existence without even a hint of guilt.

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

#169

Post by sdenton4 »

Intralexical wrote: post #153
temporalparts wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

LLMs are certainly not a jpeg or a database...

The google news snippets case is, in my non-lawyer opinion, the most obvious touch point. And in that case, it was decided that providing large numbers of snippets in search results was non-infringing, despite being a case of copying text from other people at-scale... And the reasons this was decided are worth reading and internalizing.

There is not an obvious right answer here. Copyright rules are, in fact, Calvinball, and we're deep in uncharted territory.

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

#170

Post by bgwalter »

jhaile wrote: post #159

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 t…

The same president that is putting 145% tariffs on China could put 1000% tariffs on Internet chat bots located in China. Or order the Internet cables to be cut as a last resort (citing a national emergency as is the new practice).

I'm not sure at all what China will do. I find it likely that they'll forbid AI at least for minors so that they do not become less intelligent.

Military applications are another matter that are not really related to these copyright issues.

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