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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

#221

Post by rpdillon »

cycomanic wrote: post #213
rpdillon wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that LLMs are worthwhile useful tools, and that I'm glad that we built them, and that the publishing industry, which holds the copyright on the material that we would use to train the LLMs, have had no hand in developing them, have done no research, and have actively tried to fight the process at every turn. I have no sympathy for them. The authors have been abused by the publishing industry for many decad…

So the argument is because LLMs are useful and the publishing industry was not involved in their creation we should disregard the property rights of the publishing industry and allow using their work without a license? By that same argument (if something useful is being build, we ignore existing rights) shouldn't not also just take the code/models from OpenAI etc. and just publish them somewhere? Why not also their d…

It's not really an argument. It's an observation that they sat on their hands while other industries out-innovated them. They were complacent and now they're paying the price.

We have laws and rules, but those are intended to work for society. When they fail to do so, society routes around them. Copyright in particular has been getting steadily weaker in practice since the advent of the Internet, because the mechanisms it uses to extract value are increasingly impractical since they are rooted in the idea of printed media.

Copyright is fundamentally broken for the modern world, and this is just a symptom of that.

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

#222

Post by rpdillon »

ghssds wrote: post #202
rpdillon wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 only people seeing themselves as "content creators" are people giving social media stuff so their users get something they can doom scroll. Other people see themselves as artists, entertainers, musicians, authors, etc.

I'm referring to the rent seekers sitting in between the artists and the public.

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

#223

Post by dragonwriter »

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 should have been the ones to invent LLMs

While exclusively-controlled LLMs would be mildly useful to them, the technology existing is dangerous to them, and they already have a surplus supply of content at low cost that they monetize by controlling discovery, gatekeeping, and promotion, so I don't think it makes sense for them to put energy into LLMs even if they had the technical acumen to recognize the possibilities (much the same way that Google, despite leading in developing the underlying technology, had vvery little incentive to productize it since it was disruptive to their established business, until someone else already did and the choice was to compete on that or lose entirely.)

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

#224

Post by EdgeExplorer »

briandear wrote: post #164
EnPissant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Very true. Just the other day, another “copyright is bad” post on the front page. Today its copyright is good because otherwise people might get some use of material in LLMs. Considering this is hacker news, it seems to be such an odd dichotomy. Sometimes it feels like anti-hacker news. The halcyon days of 2010 after long gone. Now we need to apparently be angry at all tech. LLMs are amazing and I wish they could tra…

My point wasn't supposed to be that copyright is bad (or that it's good), just that the business logic of fighting the sharing of lyrics is incomprehensible to me.

That aside, I think there's a lot more complexity than you're presenting. The issue is who gets to benefit from what work.

As hackers, we build cool things. And our ability to build cool things comes in large part from standing on the shoulders of giants. Free and open sharing of ideas is a powerful force for human progress.

But people also have to eat. Which means even as hackers focused on building cool things, we need to get paid. We need to capture for ourselves some of the economic value of what we produce. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for what you create.

Right now, there is a great deal of hacker output the economic value of which is being captured almost exclusively by LLM vendors. And sure, the LLM is more amazing than whatever code or post or book or lyric it was trained on. And sure, the LLM value comes from the sum of the parts of its source material instead of the value of any individual source. But fundamentally the LLM couldn't exist without the source material, and yet the LLM vendor is the one who gets to eat.

The balance between free and open exchange of ideas and paying value creators a portion of the value they create is not an easy question, and it's not anti-hacker to raise it. There are places where patents and other forms of exclusive rights seem to be criminally mismanaged, stifling progress. But there's also "some random person in Nebraska" who has produced billions of dollars in value and will never see a penny of it. Choosing progress alone as the goal will systematically deprive and ultimately drive away the very people whose contributions are enabling the progress. (And of course choosing "fair" repayment alone as the goal will shut down progress and allow less "fair" players to take over... that's why this isn't easy.)

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

#225

Post by 1718627440 »

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…

> Folks point this out, but they don't ever talk about what the alternative was.

That LLMs would be as expensively priced as they really are on society and energy costs? A lot of things are possible, whether they are economically feasible is determined by giving them a price. When that price doesn't reflect the real costs, society starts to wast work on weird things, like building large AI centers, because of a financial bubble. And yes putting people out of business does come with a cost.

"Innovation" is not an end goal.

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

#226

Post by shagie »

freejazz wrote: post #120
embedding-shape wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence. That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries. Courts/the legal system in Germany can not set legal precedents for other countries, and countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws. It could be cited as an authori…

>That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries. Courts/the legal system in Germany can not set legal precedents for other countries, and countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws. It could be cited as an authority, but no one is obligated to follow that. Do you have some sort of different understanding of copyright law where it's legal…

> Do you have some sort of different understanding of copyright law where it's legal to commercially use lyrics (verbatim, mind you) without a license?

Some places have a concept of de minimus as applied to copyright. It is often not prosecuted to have an acoustic guitar and an open case and play music on a park bench. You may need a license for busking in some places - but that's not tied to the music that you play (it could be your own or it could be covers).

I am not saying that it is legal, but rather that it is beneath the notice of the courts.

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

#227

Post by soulofmischief »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #195
soulofmischief wrote: post #183

Copyright law continues to stifle innovation. The DMCA needs to be abolished, and we need to entirely rethink our modern economic system with respect to creative industries (including software development). The cat is not going back in the bag. We are sitting on the precipice of the greatest technological advancement in history, and rent-seeking industry titans have convinced us that we must stop this unstoppable tec…

Ah yes, give away the protection that also protects me, the small person, should I write a song, write a book, come up with a compelling software concept, come up with a way to improve food growth, should go away because it's 'rent seeking' in order to be replaced with.... rent seeking trillion dollar valuation tech companies? Prior to the current tech bros economy one of the number one ways average people moved up t…

I said nothing about patents (though I definitely have feelings about software patents you probably wouldn't like), I simply stated that it is farcical and dishonest to build an economic system predicated upon the restriction of first-amendment rights of consumers, such as the DMCA which prevents me from making copies of my files and sharing them with other people, which, outside of national security threats, is an ethically bankrupt proposition.

The reality is that these small people of which you speak are still beholden to a rent-seeking industry that exploits artists en masse. Most creatives historically got next to nothing. Most artists don't get anything close to rich off of their work.

Yet today, we are able to directly support creatives, and many creatives do quite well by managing the long tail and curating a small, but dedicated patronage. Many of these creatives make more money with such a model, while still allowing their work to be shared with proper attribution.

We have just been brainwashed by a century of corporate interests sticking their hand into every facet of the creative industry, convincing us that the systems they've built over decades are the only way for things to be, even if it infringes upon the rights of others.

Also, while I develop software as a trade, I have also been an artist my entire life, working across many mediums, and so my opinions about the intersection of creativity and technology are not just those of some "tech bro", and I don't think that kind of framing is productive or fair. Especially considering I grew up poor and homeless as a teenager, and have had to reckon with the economic prospects of which you speak much more closely than most.

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

#228

Post by nomel »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #144
EnPissant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why not both? As the GP mentioned, lyrics are also invaluable for people besides training for AI.

I think the perceived lack-of-value for them is related to how easy it is to write lyrics down, compared to any other aspect of the music. Anyone can do it within the time of the song, usually first try. Any other aspect of the song cant't just be written down from ear (yes, including the sheet music, which isn't nearly expressive enough to reproduce a performance*).

*There are some funny "play from sheet music without knowing the song" type videos out there, with funny results. YouTube/google search is no longe usable, so I can't find any.

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

#229

Post by rmoriz »

wongarsu wrote: post #115
inexcf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact they don't already do that, sounds to me like the things produced by AI are not worth the investment. Especially since the output is not copyrightable, right? If there was a lot of gold to find they wouldn't sell the shovels.

There is a lot of value in specialization. It allows capitalism to do its magic to elevate the best uses of your technology without yourself taking on any of the risk. Trying to inhouse everything often smothers innovation and leads to bad resource allocation. It can be done, but in fields with a lot of ongoing innovation it's extremely hard to get right There is a reason that Cisco doesn't offer websites, and you ar…

But think of the Apple approach. And while all cloud providers started with mainstream hardware, they evolved to proprietary systems. The current AI phase may just be the „good old days“ with access just limited by financial power paving to be cut down once the dust settles and some model vendors lose.

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

#230

Post by rmoriz »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #100
rmoriz wrote: post #35

While I partially understand (but not support) the hate against AI due to possible plagiarism and "low effort generation" of works, think about the whole process: If model providers will be liable for generating output, that resembles lyrics or very short texts that fall under copyright laws, they will just change their business model. E.g. why offering lame chat agents as a service, when you can keep the value gener…

> turn everything worse? A media generation company that is forced to publish uncopyrightable works, because it cannot make the usage to these media generators public, since that would violate copyright - that does sound like a big win for everyone but that company. How is that worse?

„Record companies“ without artists, but exclusive access to automated creation, selection and a working distribution.
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