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

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

#261

Post by gruez »

moralestapia wrote: post #254
gruez wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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)_/¯.

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

AI companies claim it falls under fair use. Pirates use the same excuse too. Just look at all the clips uploaded to youtube with a "it's fair use guys!" note in the description. The only difference between the two is that the former is novel enough that there's plausible arguments for both sides, and the latter has been so thoroughly litigated that you'd be laughed out of the courtroom for claiming that your torrenting falls under fai ruse.

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

#262

Post by TeMPOraL »

palmotea wrote: post #196
TeMPOraL wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That's the thing though: intuitively, they do - training the model != generating from the model, and it's the output of a generation that violates copyright (and the user-supplied prompt is a crucial ingredient in getting the potentially copyrighted material to appear). And legally, that's AFAIK still an open question.

> 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.

That's 100% true. I know that, I'm not denying that. But in this particular case, I find my own views align with their case. I'm not begrudging them for raking in heaps of money offering generative AI services, because they're legitimately offering value that's at least commensurate (IMHO it's much greater) to what they charge, and that value comes entirely from the work they're uniquely able to do, and any individual work that went into training data contributes approximately zero to it.

(GenAI doesn't rely on any individual work in training data; it relies on the breadth and amount being a notable fraction of humanity's total intellectual output. It so happens that almost all knowledge and culture is subject to copyright, so you couldn't really get to this without stepping on some legal landmines.)

(Also, much like AI companies would like the law to favor them, their opponents in this case would like the law to dictate they should be compensated for their works being used in training data, but compensated way beyond any value their works bring in, which in reality is, again, approximately zero.)

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

#263

Post by ben_w »

palmotea wrote: post #196
TeMPOraL wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Copyright laws were themselves created by the printing press making it easy to duplicate works, whereas previously if you half-remembered something that was just "inspiration".

But that only gave the impression of helping creative people: today, any new creative person has to compete with the entire reproducible cannon of all of humanity before them — can you write fantasy so well that new readers pick you up over Pratchett or Tolkien?

Now we have AI which are "inspired" (perhaps) by what they read, and half-remember it, in a way that seems similar to pre-printing-press humans sharing stories even if the mechanism is different.

How this is seen according to current law likely varies by jurisdiction; but the law as it is today matters less than what the law will be when the new ones are drafted to account for GenAI.

What that will look like, I am unsure. Could be that for training purposes, copyright becomes eternal… but it's also possible that copyright may cease to exist entirely — laws to protect the entire creative industry may seem good, but if AI displaces all humans from economic activity, will it continue to matter?

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

#264

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

Zambyte wrote: post #198
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Removing copyright is removing a lot of the protections that enable users to get paid for their efforts. How would a novelist make money, and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will?

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

#265

Post by wnevets »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #260
wnevets wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Waits v. Frito-Lay. The court held that his voice and style were part of his brand and thus protected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0H_hcRc0MA

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

#266

Post by Ekaros »

pc86 wrote: post #177
bgwalter wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

How exactly does one add a tariff to a foreign-based chat bot?

Build a big firewall. And then fine massively any ISP that allows traffic to reach bad hosts...

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

#267

Post by Ekaros »

asddubs wrote: post #171
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…

you could apply that same logic to any IP breaches though, not just AI

Your employee steals your source code and sells it to multiple competitors. Why should you have any right to go after those competitors?

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

#268

Post by EMIRELADERO »

wnevets wrote: post #265
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Waits v. Frito-Lay. The court held that his voice and style were part of his brand and thus protected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0H_hcRc0MA

That has nothing to do with IP, it's a personality rights claim. The decision explicitly refuses to involve Copyright, saying that voices (and by proxy the styles) are not copyrightable. What mattered there were specific rights of publicity, not IP.

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

#269

Post by stevenAthompson »

datavirtue wrote: post #165
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…

"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.

> If the user publishes the output without attribution, NOW you have a problem.

I didn't meant to imply that the AI can't quote Shakespeare in Context, just that it shouldn't try to pass off Shakespeare as it's own or plagiarize huge swathes of the source text.

> People are being so rabid and unreasonable here.

People here are more reasonable than average. Wait until mainstream society starts to really feel the impact of all this.

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

#270

Post by [deleted] »

nadermx wrote: post #191
mdhb wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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