US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by nadermx » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

mdhb wrote: post #158

nadermx wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact you are even using the word stealing, is telling to your lack of knowledge in this field. Copyright infringement is not stealing[0]. The propaganda of the copyright cartel has gotten to you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985...

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

#192

Post by sklargh » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #178

therouwboat wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI is so important, maybe it should be owned by the government and free to use for all citizens.

Name two non-military things that the government owns and aren't complete dumpster fires that barely do the thing they're supposed to do. Even (especially?) the military is a dumpster fire but it's at least very good at doing what it exists to do.

Hi. Assuming the US here. Depends on scope of analysis and dumpster fire definition.

1. The National Weather Service. Crown jewel and very effective at predicting the weather and forecasting life threatening events.

2. IRS, generally very good at collecting revenue. 3. National Interagency Fire Service / US Forest service tactical fire suppression

4. NTSB/US Chemicals Safety Board - Both highly regarded.

5. Medicare - Basically clung to with talons by seniors, revealed preference is that they love it.

6. DOE National Labs

7. NIH (spicy pick)

8. Highway System

There are valid critiques of all of these but I don’t think any of them could be universally categorized as a complete dumpster fire.

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

#193

Post by Zambyte » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:20 PM UTC

noirscape wrote: post #93

Zambyte wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. That would indeed be nice, but as the article says, that's usually not the case. The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. I know I'm not the rights holder for my erroneously-considered-art work (software). > If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and…

It may surprise you, but artists need to buy things like food, water and pay for their basic necessities like electricity, rent and taxes. Otherwise they die or go bankrupt. In our current society, that means they need some sort of means to make money from their work. Copyright, at least in theory, exists to incentivize the creation of art by protecting an artists ability to monetize it. If you abolish copyright toda…

Amazing. Have you considered reading the articles I linked? They aren't even that long.

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

#194

Post by vessenes » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

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…

> Let's make this clear; genAI is not a copyright issue by itself. However, gen AI becomes an issue when you are using as your source stuff you don't have the copyright or license to. So context here is important. If you see people jumping to copyright violation, it's not out of reading alone.

My proposal is that it's a luddish kneejerk reaction to things people don't understand and don't like. They sense and fear change. For instance here you say it's an issue when AI uses something as a source that you don't have Copyright to. Allow me to update your sentence: "Every paper every scientist or academic wrote that references any copyrighted work becomes an issue". What you said just isn't true. The copyright refers to the right to copy a work.

Distribution: Sure. License your content however you want. That said, in the US a license prohibiting you from READING something just wouldn't be possible. You can limit distribution, copying, etc. This is how journalists can write about sneak previews or leaked information or misfiled court documents released when they should be under seal. The leaking On my last points, I think you're missing my point, Fan fiction is legal if you're not trying to profit from it. It is almost impossible to perfectly copy a painting, although some people are pretty good at it. I think it's perfectly legal to paint a super close copy of say Starry Night, and sell it as "Starry night by Jason Lotito." In any event, the discourse right now claims its wrong for AI to look at and learn from paintings and photographs.

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

#195

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

dmonitor wrote: post #82

Zambyte wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...

You need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.

[deleted]

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

#196

Post by palmotea » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #154

bgwalter wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

> 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".

Except in this case, we already have the equivalent of "laws about oxygen consumption": copyright.

> 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.

The laws are not "entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI," unless your interests lie in breaking them. All the hand-waving about the laws being "questionable" and "entirely ill-equipped" is just noise.

Under current law OpenAI, Google, etc. have no right to cheap training data, because someone made that data and may have the reasonable interest in getting paid for their efforts. Like all businesses, those companies would ideally like the law to be unfairly biased towards them: to protect them when they charge as much as they can, but not protect anyone else so they can pay as little as possible.

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

#197

Post by nilamo » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #178

therouwboat wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI is so important, maybe it should be owned by the government and free to use for all citizens.

Name two non-military things that the government owns and aren't complete dumpster fires that barely do the thing they're supposed to do. Even (especially?) the military is a dumpster fire but it's at least very good at doing what it exists to do.

1) art museums, specifically the Smithsonian, but nearly every major city has a decent one.

2) state parks are pretty rad.

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

#198

Post by Zambyte » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #80

Zambyte wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. That would indeed be nice, but as the article says, that's usually not the case. The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. I know I'm not the rights holder for my erroneously-considered-art work (software). > If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and…

> The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. There's definitely problems with corporatization of ownership of these things, I won't disagree. > Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art? Why do we expect artists to be selfless? Do you think Stephen King is still writing only because he loves the art? You…

> You don't simply make software because you love it, right?

I can't speak for Stephen but I absolutely do. I program for fun all the time.

> Should people not be able to make money off their effort?

Is anyone arguing otherwise?

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

#199

Post by caconym_ » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

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…

If it was as obvious as you claim, the legal issues would already be settled, and your characterization of what LLMs are doing as "reading and summarizing" is hilariously disingenuous and ignores essentially the entire substance of the debate (which is happening not just on internet forums but in real courts, where real legal professionals and scholars are grappling with how to fit AI into our framework of existing copyright law, e.g.^[1]).

Of course, if you start your thought by dismissing anybody who doesn't share your position as not sane, it's easy to see how you could fail to capture any of that.

^[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/judge-on-metas-a...

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

#200

Post by nadermx » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

ls612 wrote: post #152

mr_toad wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Breaking DRM, is in fact, Fair Use: https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/08/08-10521-CV0.wp...