Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 64 posts

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#31

Post by zzo38computer »

puppycodes wrote: post #26

i really dont get this and i personally beleive the world would be a better place without IP in any form. But also no one is selling "your book", the product is completely different in literally every conceivable way. you have never (and no one ever should) own words arranged in a certain way. You own the right to sell a book. Not the words themselves. meta does bad things and im not a fan, but this really pales in c…

I agree with you. I think that copyright is bad, and patents is also bad.

It is a different issue if they steal your private data or your power (I mean the electrical power for the computers, in case that isn't already clear).

Making copies of published books, music, etc (and doing what you want with them) is not the bad things.

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#32

Post by philistine »

puppycodes wrote: post #29
card_zero wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you own copyright for a song, you can claim licensing fees for any public performance of those lyrics. I wonder if an equivalent to Performance Rights Organizations will emerge as a channel for LLM publishers (so to speak) to pay fees.

and that is equally atrocious and should be eliminated from a society that wants to share ideas freely. Idk if your in the US but you also massively oversimplify in your example, copyright law is waaaaaaaay more complex than that and it would take a set of special circumstances way beyond doing what you say it siphon money from an infringment claim

Copyright law is enshrined in a knotted web of trade deals across the world, meaning it will never change for as long as anyone on this board is alive. It's so tiring on here with the constant copyright law shouldn't exist. We know! How do we get rid of it? What's your argument for everyone to break all the world's trade deals to give you this one thing that would unmake our whole artistic sector?

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#33

Post by philistine »

throwaway150 wrote: post #23
moscoe wrote: post #11

The idea that you can’t train on copyrighted materials is ludicrous, imho. So apparently you don’t want humanity and the future of intelligence to benefit from your work? You just want it to keep it locked up in some archive that virtually no one ever reads? Might as well say the people who read your books aren’t allowed to teach the concepts or theories. Completely asinine argument. If you don’t want the knowledge t…

> The idea that you can’t train on copyrighted materials is ludicrous, imho. Let us for a minute accept that it is ok to train on copyrighted materials. I don't believe that but I'll humor you. So let's accept it. To train on copyrighted materials, they need to purchase the copyrighted materials, correct? If you wanted to train a model on all O'reilly books, you'd purchase the O'reilly books first, wouldn't you? Do y…

People on this board have mischaracterized this case so much it looks like Facebook employees trying to astroturf.

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#34

Post by spatialspice »

It feels like there are two equally valid sides to this argument that get muddied because of our current model’s/regulations inability to differentiate one over the other.

On the free-information side, I don’t think anyone would argue that AI shouldn’t be allowed to offer a general synopsis of a given book / series. From an author/creator’s POV, it feels like extortion to be able to summarize/recreate any given chapter/subsection to the point that the entire work could be reproduced near-verbatim.

IMO the question is, can we meaningfully draw a line between the two, and if so, how?

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#35

Post by rich_sasha »

spatialspice wrote: post #34

It feels like there are two equally valid sides to this argument that get muddied because of our current model’s/regulations inability to differentiate one over the other. On the free-information side, I don’t think anyone would argue that AI shouldn’t be allowed to offer a general synopsis of a given book / series. From an author/creator’s POV, it feels like extortion to be able to summarize/recreate any given chapt…

I don't think anyone is stopping AI learning on the synopses of books. Or learning on books having paid licensing costs. It's the wanting to have cake, eat cake and for free that is falling.

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#36

Post by alanfranz »

ricardobeat wrote: post #9
alanfranz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does fair use imply that pirating copyrighted material is ok? I mean, it’s a serious question; I don’t see this as really connected. As long as an AI can “understand” the content of a book and spit out a summary of it, or even leverage what it learned to perform further inference, I’d be inclined to say that this is fair use; a human would do the same. But this has nothing to do with using pirated material for traini…

I get the commercial/legal angle, but from the viewpoint of AI being something we as a society have an interest in developing, how should this work? Do you want to severely limit evolution of models by having them pick (and buy) a tiny subset of all books? Should every training run put money into a pool that gets paid out to every rights holder of every book that has ever been published ? Should Meta buy a physical o…

> Should Meta buy a physical or electronic copy of every book they want to use for training?

Yes, and probably, if training in parallel, multiple copies, just as multiple people will need multiple books.

Multiply this by the amount of GPUs and AI model providers, and the revenue impact is not zero.

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#37

Post by verzali »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #3

(Shrug) We'll see what the courts say, Gary. If training AI doesn't constitute fair use, you will lose more than you could ever possibly hope to gain. As will the rest of us. Meanwhile, sublimate your dudgeon towards advocating for free access to the resulting models. That's what's important. Meta is not the company you want to go after here, since they released the resulting model weights.

Are you also willing to work for OpenAI for free then? Have you contacted them with such an offer?

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#38

Post by bernb »

puppycodes wrote: post #26

i really dont get this and i personally beleive the world would be a better place without IP in any form. But also no one is selling "your book", the product is completely different in literally every conceivable way. you have never (and no one ever should) own words arranged in a certain way. You own the right to sell a book. Not the words themselves. meta does bad things and im not a fan, but this really pales in c…

Put 10,000 hours into writing a book. Watch somebody with more resources or media coverage take full credits for it and/or make money instead of yourself. Copyright is a good thing. Same principle applies to the core of similar laws.

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#39

Post by bernb »

puppycodes wrote: post #29
card_zero wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you own copyright for a song, you can claim licensing fees for any public performance of those lyrics. I wonder if an equivalent to Performance Rights Organizations will emerge as a channel for LLM publishers (so to speak) to pay fees.

and that is equally atrocious and should be eliminated from a society that wants to share ideas freely. Idk if your in the US but you also massively oversimplify in your example, copyright law is waaaaaaaay more complex than that and it would take a set of special circumstances way beyond doing what you say it siphon money from an infringment claim

Copyright doesn't apply to ideas. It applies to concrete works.

Re: Meta pirated at least 101 of my books, and others

#40

Post by bernb »

zzo38computer wrote: post #31
puppycodes wrote: post #26

i really dont get this and i personally beleive the world would be a better place without IP in any form. But also no one is selling "your book", the product is completely different in literally every conceivable way. you have never (and no one ever should) own words arranged in a certain way. You own the right to sell a book. Not the words themselves. meta does bad things and im not a fan, but this really pales in c…

I agree with you. I think that copyright is bad, and patents is also bad. It is a different issue if they steal your private data or your power (I mean the electrical power for the computers, in case that isn't already clear). Making copies of published books, music, etc (and doing what you want with them) is not the bad things.

How would you replace the incentives for R&D for medication, for example? That often costs billions of dollars.
Post reply on HN