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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

#251

Post by wnevets »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #241
wnevets wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most people would agree that whatever AI companies are doing with training AI models is different than sending verbatim copies to random people on the internet. I think most artist who had their works "trained by AI" without compensation would disagree with you.

The question is: would that disagreement have the same basis as the news above? I don't think so. Artists that are against GenAI take that stance out of a perceived abstract unfairness of the situation, where the AI companies aren't copy-pasting the works per-se with each generation, but rather "taking" the "sweat of the brow" of those artists. You can agree or not about this being an actual problem, but that's where…

> would that disagreement have the same basis as the news above?

Yes. An artist's style can and sometimes is their IP.

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

#252

Post by zelphirkalt »

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.

Just to challenge that idea: Why?

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

#253

Post by moralestapia »

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…

Because it's a machine that reproduces other people's work, who are copyrighted. Copyright protects the essence of original work even after its present in or turned into derivative work.

Some try to make the argument of "but that's what humans do and it's allowed", but that's not a real argument as it has not been proven, nor it is easy to prove, that machine learning equates human reasoning. In the absence of evidence, the law assumes NO.

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

#254

Post by moralestapia »

gruez wrote: post #231
palmotea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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. That might be true but I don't see how it's relevant. There's no provision in copyright law that gives a free pass to humans vs machines, or makes a distinction between them.

In the case of Copyright law, no provision means it will fall in "forbidden" land, not in "allowed" land.

Also in general, grey areas don't mean those things are legal.

Edit: this remains true even if you don't like it, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

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

#255

Post by moralestapia »

jobigoud wrote: post #76
palmotea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

>Copyright only comes into play on publication.

Nope.

You have a right to not publish any work that you own. This is protected by Copyright law.

Copyright covers you from the moment you create some sort of original work (in a tangible medium).

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

#256

Post by stevenAthompson »

mjburgess wrote: post #95
stevenAthompson wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I fear the lack of our ability to measure your mind might render you without many of the legal or moral protections you imagine you have. But go ahead, tare down the law to whatever inanity can be described by the trivial machines of the world's current popular charlatans. Presumably you weren't using society's presumption of your agency anyway.

> I fear the lack of our ability to measure your mind might render you without many of the legal or moral protections you imagine you have.

Society doesn't need to measure my mind, they need to measure the output of it. If I behave like a conscious being, I am a conscious being. Alternatively you might phrase it such that "Anything that claims to be conscious must be assumed to be conscious."

It's the only answer to the p-zombie problem that makes sense. None of this is new, philosophers have been debating it for ages. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

However, for copyright purposes we can make it even simpler. If the work is new, it's not covered by the original copyright. If it is substantially the same, it isn't. Forget the arguments about the ghost in the machine and the philosophical mumbo-jumbo. It's the output that matters.

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

#257

Post by bongodongobob »

renewiltord wrote: post #79

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

Right around the same time struggling artists thought paying $40 for global distribution via Spotify and not getting paid anything for their 100 streams a month was being "ripped off". And I think that is related to influencer culture. Everyone thinks they deserve to be famous and needs someone to blame for their below average art not making them rich.

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

#258

Post by gruez »

empath75 wrote: post #234
gruez wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Suppose we accept all of the above. What does that hold for human learning?

If a human were to reproduce, from memory, a copyrighted work, that would be illegal as well, and multiple people have been sued over it, even doing it unintentionally. I'm not talking about learning. I'm talking about the complete reproduction of a copyrighted work. It doesn't matter how it happens.

>I'm not talking about learning. I'm talking about the complete reproduction of a copyrighted work. It doesn't matter how it happens.

In that case I don't think there's anything controversial here? Nobody thinks that if you ask AI to reproduce something verbatim, that you should get a pass because it's AI. All the controversy in this thread seems to be around the training process and whether that breaks copyright laws.

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

#259

Post by mncharity »

renewiltord wrote: post #79

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

I considered adding a reminder above that email used to be a copyright violation. Implied license not yet established; every copy between disk and memory a violation; let alone forwarding; the occasional email footer "LegalisticCo grants you a licence to use this email under the following terms ...". Oh well. And then almost all sharing of images.

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

#260

Post by EMIRELADERO »

wnevets wrote: post #251
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: would that disagreement have the same basis as the news above? I don't think so. Artists that are against GenAI take that stance out of a perceived abstract unfairness of the situation, where the AI companies aren't copy-pasting the works per-se with each generation, but rather "taking" the "sweat of the brow" of those artists. You can agree or not about this being an actual problem, but that's where…

> would that disagreement have the same basis as the news above? Yes. An artist's style can and sometimes is their IP.

No it's not? Style has been ruled pretty specifically to be uncopyrightable. Perhaps you could show me some examples?
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