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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

#321

Post by gruez »

FireBeyond wrote: post #307
Pooge wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is still what Facebook did, if I'm not mistaken. There's no way they torrented and managed to upload less than 1 bit.

You're right. They claimed they made efforts to minimize seeding, but minimal is not none, as you say.

You can make a patched torrent client that never uploads any pieces to peers. It'd definitely be within Meta's capability to do so. The real problem is that unlike typical torrenting lawusits, they weren't caught red-handed in the act, and would therefore be hard to go after them. This might seem unfair, but it's not any different than you openly posting on Reddit that you torrent, but it'd be tough for rights holders to go after you even with such admission.

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

#322

Post by otterley »

93po wrote: post #188
otterley wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright doesn’t protect ideas. It protects expression of those ideas. Consider how many books exist on how to care for trees. Each one of them has similar ideas, but the way those ideas are expressed differ. Copyright protects the content of the book; it doesn’t protect the ideas of how to care for trees.

Disney has a copyright over Moana. I would argue Moana is an idea in the sense that most people think of as ideas. Moana isn't tangle, it's not a physical good. It's not a plate on my table. It only exists in our heads. If I made a Moana comic book, with an entirely original storyline and original art and it was all drawn in my own style and not using 3D assets similar to their movies, that is violating copyright. Mo…

> [Moana] only exists in our heads.

Moana and Moana 2 are both animated movies that have already been made. They're not just figures of one's imagination.

> If I made a Moana comic book, with an entirely original storyline and original art and it was all drawn in my own style and not using 3D assets similar to their movies, that is violating copyright

It might be, or it might not. Copyright protects the creation of derivative works (17 USC 101, 17 USC 103, 17 USC 106), but it's the copyright holder's burden to persuade the court that the allegedly infringing work with the character Moana in it is derivative of their protected work.

Ask yourself the question: what is the value of Moana to you in this hypothetical? What if you used a different name for the character and the character had a different backstory and personality?

> I still don't agree with the idea that I can't make my own physical copies of Harry Potters books

You might think differently if you had sunk thousands of hours into creating a new novel and creative work was your primary form of income.

> But still, it's infringing copyright for me to make Moana comic books in my own home, in private, and never showing them to anyone.

It seems unlikely that Disney is would go after you for that. Kids do it all the time.

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

#323

Post by palmotea »

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…

> 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".

Eh. I don't know the history, but my understanding was they were created because the printing press allowed others to deny the original creators the profits to their work, and direct those profits to others who had no hand in it.

After all, in market terms: a publisher that pays its authors can't compete with another that publisher that publishes the same works but without paying any authors. A word without copyright is one where some publisher still makes money, but it's a race to the bottom for authors.

> 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?

Here's a hole in your thinking: if you like fantasy, would you be content to just re-read Tolkien over and over, forever? Don't you think that'd get boring no matter how good he was?

And empirically, "new creative [people]" manage to complete with Pratchett or Tolkien all the time, as new fantasy works are still being published and read. Do you remember that "Game of Thrones" was a mass cultural phenomenon not too long ago?

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

#324

Post by Workaccount2 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #220
Workaccount2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only complete non-sense if you understand how humans learn. Which we don't. What we do know though is that LLMs, similar to humans, do not directly copy information into their "storage". LLMs, like humans, are pretty lossy with their recall. Compare this to something like a search indexed database, where the recall of information given to it is perfect.

Well, you don't get to pick and choose in which situations an LLM is considered similar to a human being and in which not. If you argue that it similarly to a human is lossy, well let's go ahead and get most output checked by organizations and courts for violations of the law and licenses, just like human work is. Oh wait, I forgot, LLMs are run by companies with too much cash to successfully sue them. I guess we jus…

Youtube built probably the most complex and proactive copyright system any organization has ever seen, for the sole purpose of appeasing copyright holders. There is no reason to believe they won't do the same thing for LLM output.

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

#325

Post by palmotea »

Intralexical wrote: post #149
ulbu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these comparisons of llms with human artists copying are just ridiculous. it’s saying “well humans are allowed to break twigs and damage the planet in various ways, so why not allow building a fucking DEATH STAR”. abstracting llms from their operators and owners and possible (and probable) ends and the territories they trample upon is nothing short of eye-popping to me. how utterly negligent and disrespectful of fell…

It's a very consistently Silicon Valley mindset. Seems like almost every company that makes it big in tech, be it Facebook and Google monetizing our personal data, or Uber and Amazon trampling workers' rights, makes money by reducing people to objects that can be bought and sold, more than almost any other industry. No matter the company, all claimed prosocial intentions are just window dressing to convince us to be…

> That's also why I'm really not worried about the "AI singularity" folks. The hype is IMO blatantly unsubstantiated by the actual capabilities, but gets pushed anyway only because it speaks to this deep-seated faith held across the industry. "AI" is the culmination of an innate belief that people should be replaceable, fungible, perfectly obedient objects, and such a psychosis blinds decision-makers to its actual limits. Only trouble is whether they have the political power to try to force it anyway.

I'm worried because decision-makers genuinely don't seem to be bothered very much by actual capabilities, and are perfectly happy to trade massive reductions in quality for cost savings. In other worse, I don't think the limits of LLMS will actually constrain the decision-makers.

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

#326

Post by stevenAthompson »

toast0 wrote: post #304
stevenAthompson wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

(in the US) Mechanical licenses are compulsory; you don't need permission, you can just follow the forms and pay the fees set by the Copyright Royalty Board (appointed by the Librarian of Congress). You can ask the rightsholder to negotiate a lower fee, but there's no need for consent of the rightsholder if you notify as required (within 30 days of recording and before distribution) and pay the set fees.

Thanks for clarifying. Sometimes I forget that HN has a lot experts floating around who take things in a very literal and legalistic way. I was speaking in more general terms, and missed that you were being very precise with your language.

Compulsory licenses are interesting aren't they? It just feels wrong. If Metallica doesn't want me to butcher their songs, why should the be forced to allow it?

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

#327

Post by gruez »

breakingcups wrote: post #297
gruez wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this relevant? >The RIAA accused her of downloading and distributing more than 1,700 music files on file-sharing site KaZaA Emphasis mine. 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.

Well, Facebook torrented the copyrighted material they used for training, which means they distributed all those files too. With the personal approval of Zuck. What is the difference according to you? Source: https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-trained-ai-pirated-bo...

Addressed this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43966888

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

#328

Post by KoolKat23 »

"But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries."

I honestly can't see how this directly addresses fair use, it's a odd sweeping statement. It implies inventing something that borrows little from many different copyrighted items is somehow not fair use? If it was one for one yes, but it's not it's basically saying creativity is not fair use. If it's not saying this and refers to competition in the existing market they're making a statement about the public good, not fair use. Basically a matter for legislators and what the purpose of copyright is.

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

#329

Post by gruez »

empath75 wrote: post #313
gruez wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 law…

No -- the controversy is also over whether distributing the weights and software is a copyright violation. I believe that is. The copyrighted material is present in the software in some form, even if the process for regenerating it is quite convoluted.

It's not as clear-cut as you think. The courts have held that both google thumbnails and google books are fair use, even though they're far closer to verbatim copies than an AI model.

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

#330

Post by sdenton4 »

Intralexical wrote: post #179
sdenton4 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are certainly not a jpeg or a database... The google news snippets case is, in my non-lawyer opinion, the most obvious touch point. And in that case, it was decided that providing large numbers of snippets in search results was non-infringing, despite being a case of copying text from other people at-scale... And the reasons this was decided are worth reading and internalizing. There is not an obvious right answ…

> LLMs are certainly not a jpeg or a database... Their weights are derived from copyrighted works. Evaluating them preserves the semantic meaning and character of the source material. And the output directly competes against the copyrighted source materials. The fact they're smudgy and non-deterministic doesn't change how they relate to the rights of authors and artists.

Nothing in copyright law talks about 'semantic meaning' or 'character of the source material'. Really, quite the opposite - the 'expression-idea dichotomy' says that you're copyrighting the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

(Leaving aside whether the weights of an LLM does actually encode the content of any random snippet of training text. Some stuff does get memorized, but how much and how exactly? That's not the point of the LLM, unlike the jpeg or database.)

And, again, look at the search snippets case - these were words produced by other people, directly transcribed, so open-and-shut from a certain point of view. But the decision went the other way.

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