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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

#271

Post by stevenAthompson »

toast0 wrote: post #89
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…

> Doing a cover song requires permission, and doing it without that permission can be illegal. I believe cover song licensing is available mechanically; you don't need permission, you just need to follow the procedures including sending the licensing fees to a rights clearing house. Music has a lot of mechanical licenses and clearing houses, as opposed to other categories of works.

> you don't need permission, you just need to follow the procedures

Those procedures are how you ask for permission. As you say, it usually involves a fee but doesn't have to.

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

#272

Post by moralestapia »

gruez wrote: post #261
moralestapia wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree. It feels a bit like earlier days in Bitcoin world. Eventually the courts decided how it was going to be and people like CZ had to pay a visit to jail, but there is now clear jurisdiction on that.

The same will happen with AI, no one will go to jail but perhaps it is ruled out that LLMs infringe copyright.

(Same thing happened in the early days of YouTube as well, the solution was stuff like MusicDNA, etc...)

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

#273

Post by mjburgess »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #256
mjburgess wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In your case, it isnt the output that matters. Your saying "I'm conscious" isn't why we attribute consciousness to you. We would do so regardless of your ability to verbalise anything in particular.

Your radical behaviourism seems an advantage to you when you want to delete one disfavoured part of copyright law, but I assure you, it isn't in your interest. It doesnt universalise well at all. You do not want to be defined by how you happen to verbalise anything, unmoored from your intention, goals, and so on.

The law, and society, imparts much to you that is never measured and much that is unmeasurable. What can be measured is, at least, extremely ambiguous with respect to those mental states which are being attributed. Because we do not attribute mental states by what people say -- this plays very little role (consider what a mess this would make of watching movies). And none of course in the large number of animals which share relevant mental states.

Nothing of relevance is measured by an LLM's output. It is highly unambigious: the LLM has no mental states, and thus is irrelevant to the law, morality, society and everything else.

It's a obcene sort of self-injury to assume that whatever kind of radical behaviourism is necessary to hype the LLM is the right sort. Hype for LLMs does not lead to a credible theory of minds.

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

#274

Post by dmonitor »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #252
dmonitor wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People would use that service instead of Steam, publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc.

The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).

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

#275

Post by pc86 »

pergadad wrote: post #185
pc86 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The government doesn't make tanks, it just shells out gigantic amounts to companies to make them. That said, there are plenty of successful government actions across the world, where Europe or Japan probably have a good advantage with solid public services. Think streets, healthcare, energy infrastructure, water infrastructure, rail, ...

We're talking about the US government though

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

#276

Post by dmonitor »

pitaj wrote: post #137
dmonitor wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There can be many incentives for people to use official sources: early access, easy updates, live events, etc

There's no reason FreeSteam can't also do that, though. There's no copyright, so just have an extension of the steamapp that changes it to point to your server when downloading games / checking ownership. Piracy stops being a service issue when pirates are allowed to make nice services.

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

#277

Post by Jensson »

ben_w wrote: post #263
palmotea wrote: post #196

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". 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 canno…

> 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?

That is even worse without copyright, as then every previous work would be free and you would have to compete with better works that are also free for people.

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

#278

Post by dfxm12 »

gruez wrote: post #249
dfxm12 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't make this claim. Feel free to bring a cogent argument to a commenter who did.

>I didn't make this claim ??? Did you not literally comment the following? >A new research paper is obviously materially different from "rearranging that text to create a marginally new text". What did you mean by that, if that's not your claim?

I made that comment, but the bit in quotes is not my claim. I was quoting a grandparent post. If you read from the top, the quotation marks and general flow of the thread should make this clear.

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

#279

Post by dns_snek »

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…

The problem with this kind of analysis is that it doesn't even try to address the reasons why copyright exists in the first place. This belief that training LLMs on content without permission should be allowed is incompatible with the belief that copyright is useful, you really have to pick a lane here.

Go back to the roots of copyright and the answers should be obvious. According to the US constitution, copyright exists "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and according to the EU, "Copyright ensures that authors, composers, artists, film makers and other creators receive recognition, payment and protection for their works. It rewards creativity and stimulates investment in the creative sector."

If I publish a book and tech companies are allowed to copy it, use it for "training", and later regurgitate the knowledge contained within to their customers then those people have no reason to buy my book. It is a market substitute even though it might not be considered such under our current copyright law. If that is allowed to happen then investment will stop and these books simply won't get written anymore.

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

#280

Post by wnevets »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #268
wnevets wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That has nothing to do with IP, it's a personality rights claim.

The US Supreme Court disagrees, the right of publicity and intellectual property law are explicitly linked.

> The broadcast of a performer’s entire act may undercut the economic value of that performance in a manner analogous to the infringement of a copyright or patent. — Justice White

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