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Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

technomancers.ai

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Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#271

Post by kazinator »

soraminazuki wrote: post #255
swfsql wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the other way around, their usual crazy gung ho on copyright enforcement against individuals is disgusting. This new stance is marvellous and examplifies how free people should interact.

Don’t get your hopes up, because the article is a complete lie. If you look at the original Japanese source, the minister was just reaffirming the current legal status. Neither politicians mentioned in the article expressed any hint of endorsement. The fact that they were even discussing copyright and AI likely means that more regulation is upcoming.

Yikes you are right!

This technomancers.ai article is completely made up; there is nothing in the linked-to Japanese source to substantiate the claims in the article.

The entire site seems to be low substance; I suspect it is AI-generated salad.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#272

Post by lmm »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #270
lmm wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When training a model you are deriving a function that takes some input and produces an output. The issue with copyright and licensing here is that a copy is made and reproduced numerous times when training. How's that any different from what happens inside a human's brain when learning? > The model is not walking around a museum where it is an authorized viewing. The training data could well be from an online muse…

>> When training a model you are deriving a function that takes some input and produces an output. The issue with copyright and licensing here is that a copy is made and reproduced numerous times when training. >How's that any different from what happens inside a human's brain when learning? I don't know, nor does anyone else. So let me ask you - how is that the same as what happens inside a human's brain when learni…

> I don't know, nor does anyone else.

We don't know the details. But it's pretty implausible that the process of learning wouldn't involve the brain having some representation of the thing it's learning, or wouldn't involve repeatedly "copying" that representation. Every way we know of processing data works like that. (OK, there are theoretical notions of reversible computation - but it's more complex and less effective than the regular kind, so it seems very unlikely the brain would operate that way)

And a human who has learned to perform a task has certainly "derived a function that takes some input and produces an output".

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#274

Post by lmm »

carom wrote: post #263
lmm wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When training a model you are deriving a function that takes some input and produces an output. The issue with copyright and licensing here is that a copy is made and reproduced numerous times when training. How's that any different from what happens inside a human's brain when learning? > The model is not walking around a museum where it is an authorized viewing. The training data could well be from an online muse…

It is different from a human brain in that it is not a human brain. It is a statistical function that produces some optimized outputs for some inputs. I have made no mention of things being authorized in public. In the US you are allowed to take a photo of anything you want in public. These models are not being trained on datasets collected wholly in public though, it is very insidious to suggest that they are. The i…

> It is a statistical function that produces some optimized outputs for some inputs.

So is a human mind.

> In the US you are allowed to take a photo of anything you want in public. These models are not being trained on datasets collected wholly in public though, it is very insidious to suggest that they are.

How so? What non-public training data are they using, and why does it matter?

> The internet is not "the public". It is a series of digital properties that define terms for interacting with them. Now, a lot of material is publicly accessible online, but that does not mean that it is not still governed by copyright. For example, my code on Github is publicly accessible, but that doesn't mean you can disregard the license.

It does mean you can read the code and learn from it without concern for the license (morally, if not legally).

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#275

Post by sgk284 »

lamontcg wrote: post #132
nl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree with this. There's a distinction between "learning from" and "copying". "Learning from" is a transformative process that distills from the observation. This distillation can be as simple as indexing for a search engine, or as complex as a deep neural network. Simply because a neural network can create something that is a copyright violation doesn't mean the training process itself it. A human can see…

> There's a distinction between "learning from" and "copying". Neural nets can memorize their training data. Generally that isn't what you want, and you strive to eliminate it. However, it could instead be encouraged to happen if someone wanted to exploit this law in order to abuse copyrights.

Humans learn on copyrighted works as a matter of standard training. And certainly humans can memorize those works and replicate them – and we rely on the legal system to ensure that they don't monetize them.

The same will apply to neural nets. They can learn from others, but must make sufficiently distinct new works of art from what they've learned.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#276

Post by mordae »

I have changed my mind on this recently.

Sure, exploiting free software to the benefit of private corps is bad but if the law would allow us to train an open source net on LibGen (with all the copyrighted books and papers) and then to distribute the weights legally, I am all for that.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#277

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

lmm wrote: post #229
kelnos wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. Lossy or not, the training data provides value . If all the various someones had not spent time making all the stuff that ends up as training data, then the model it trains would not exist. If you are going to use someone else's work in order to make something that you are going to…

> If you are going to use someone else's work in order to make something that you are going to profit off of, I believe that original author should be compensated. And should also be able to decide they don't want their work used in that way. > Note that I'm not talking about what existing copyright law says; I'm talking about how I believe we should be regulating this new facet of the industry. Is it really new? Hum…

> Humans have always learnt by studying what's out there already. Our whole culture is built on what's been done and published before

Are you implying that educators should not be compensated or credited? Because that is not how it works in the real world.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#278

Post by qprofyeh »

So having the movie Titanic as source data to a generative model finetuned for a specific prompt “output the whole movie” to dump the movie as playable mkv, then distributing only the model and the prompt would be considered legal in Japan?

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#279

Post by WalterBright »

kelnos wrote: post #138
fnordpiglet wrote: post #19

I think this should generally be true. The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. It may produce stuff that violates copyright, but the way you use or distribute the product of the model that can violate copyright. Making it write code that’s a clone of copyright code or making it make pictures with copy right imagery in it or…

> The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. Lossy or not, the training data provides value . If all the various someones had not spent time making all the stuff that ends up as training data, then the model it trains would not exist. If you are going to use someone else's work in order to make something that you are going to…

Society and the economy will do just fine without copyright law. Some things would probably go away, like blockbuster movies. But a lot of other things would flower.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#280

Post by WalterBright »

nl wrote: post #89
fnordpiglet wrote: post #19

I think this should generally be true. The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. It may produce stuff that violates copyright, but the way you use or distribute the product of the model that can violate copyright. Making it write code that’s a clone of copyright code or making it make pictures with copy right imagery in it or…

I strongly agree with this. There's a distinction between "learning from" and "copying". "Learning from" is a transformative process that distills from the observation. This distillation can be as simple as indexing for a search engine, or as complex as a deep neural network. Simply because a neural network can create something that is a copyright violation doesn't mean the training process itself it. A human can see…

Copying a logo is trademark infringement, not copyright infringement.
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