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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

#331

Post by skolskoly »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #326
toast0 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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?

Any live band performing a song is subject to mechanical licensing as much as a recording artist. Typically the venue pays it, just like how radio stations pay royalties. This system exists because historically, that's how music reproduction worked. You hire some musicians to play the music you want to hear. Copyright applied to the score, the lyrics, and so on. The 'mechanical' rights had to come later, because recording hadn't been invented yet!

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

#332

Post by Suppafly »

palmotea wrote: post #62
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 Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal.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…

[flagged]

>The fatal flaw in your reasoning: machines aren't humans.

I don't see how that affects the argument. The machines are being used by humans. Your argument then boils down to the idea that you can do something manually but it becomes illegal if you use a tool to do it efficiently.

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

#333

Post by School-Cotton »

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…

In the world you’re proposing, you would also not be able to make word-for-word copies of Harry Potter books, because Harry Potter wouldn’t exist.

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

#334

Post by Suppafly »

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.

>Their weights are derived from copyrighted works. Evaluating them preserves the semantic meaning and character of the source material.

That sounds like you're arguing that they should be legal. Copyright law protects specific expressions, not handwavy "smudgy and non-deterministic" things.

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

#335

Post by const_cast »

pc86 wrote: post #275
pergadad wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's nothing special about the US government that makes it uniquely shit.

The difference here is that we have people like yourself: those who have zero faith in our government and as such act as double agents or saboteurs. When people such as yourself gain power in the legislator they "starve the beast". Meaning, purposefully deconstruct sections of our government such that they have justification for their ideological belief that our government doesn't work.

You guys work backwards. The foregone conclusion is that government programs never work, and then you develop convoluted strategies to prove that.

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

#336

Post by Suppafly »

staticman2 wrote: post #167
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…

> these comparisons of llms with human artists copying are just ridiculous. I've come to think of this as the "Performatively failing to recognize the difference between an organism and a machine" rhetorical device that people employ here and elsewhere. The person making the argument is capable of distinguishing the two things, they just performatively choose not to do so.

>The person making the argument is capable of distinguishing the two things, they just performatively choose not to do so.

I think that sort of assumption of insincerity is worse than what you're accusing them of. You might not like their argument, but it's not inherently incorrect for them to argue that because humans have the right to do something, humans have the right to use tools to do that something and humans have the right to group together and use those tools to do something at a large scale.

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

#337

Post by const_cast »

Suppafly wrote: post #332
palmotea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>The fatal flaw in your reasoning: machines aren't humans. I don't see how that affects the argument. The machines are being used by humans. Your argument then boils down to the idea that you can do something manually but it becomes illegal if you use a tool to do it efficiently.

It's not about the tool, how you use it, or even how it works. It's about the end result.

I can go through and manually compress "Revenge of the Sith" and then post it online. Or, I can use a compression program like handbrake. Regardless, it is copyright infringement.

Can AI reproduce almost* the same things that exist in it's training data? Sometimes, so sometimes it's copyright infringement. Doesn't help that it's explicitly for-profit and seeks to obsolesce and siphon value from it's training material.

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

#338

Post by Suppafly »

Jensson wrote: post #277
ben_w wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 peop…

>that are also free for people

sounds like a good deal if you're people.

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

#339

Post by Suppafly »

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.

If it were that cut and dried we wouldn't have this conversation at all, so clearly your position isn't objectively true.

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

#340

Post by const_cast »

SilasX wrote: post #225
Intralexical wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The problem is, you can say all of that for human learning-from-copyrighted-works, so that point isn't definitive.

The difference is we're humans, so we get special privileges. We made the laws.

If we're going to be giving some rights to LLMs for convenient for-profit ventures, I expect some in-depth analysis on whether that is or is not slavery. You can't just anthropomorphize a computer program when it makes you money but then conveniently ignore the hundreds of years of development of human rights. If that seems silly, then I think LLMs are probably not like humans and the comparisons to human learning aren't justified.

If it's like a human, that makes things very complicated.

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