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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

#351

Post by const_cast »

gruez wrote: post #350
const_cast wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason those are allowed is because they don't compete with the source material. A thumbnail of a movie is never a substitute for a movie. LLMs seek to be a for-profit replacement for a variety of paid sources. They say "hey, you can get the same thing as Service X for less money with us!" That's a problem, regardless of how you go about it. It's probably fine if I watch a movie with my friends, who cares. But di…

>The reason those are allowed is because they don't compete with the source material. A thumbnail of a movie is never a substitute for a movie. >LLMs seek to be a for-profit replacement for a variety of paid sources. They say "hey, you can get the same thing as Service X for less money with us!" What's an LLM supposed to be a substitute for? Are people using them to generate entire books or news articles, rather than…

> Are people using them to generate entire books or news articles, rather than buying a book or an issue of the new york times?

Yes.

> No one is substituting marvel movies with sora video.

Yeah because sora kind of sucks. It's great technology, but turns out text is just a little bit easier to generate than 3D videos.

Once sora gets good, you bet your ass they will.

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

#352

Post by TiredOfLife »

wnevets wrote: post #230
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.

> 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. I think most artist who had their works "trained by AI" without compensation would disagree with you.

I think most people who had even basic understanding how AI works would disagree with you.

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

#353

Post by rubslopes »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #238
gruez wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was snark intended to point out that corporations don't get to have their cake and eat it too. "have their cake and eat it too" allegations only work if you're talking about the same entity. The copyright maximalist corporations (ie. publishers) aren't the same as the permissive ones (ie. AI companies). Making such characterizations make as much sense as saying "citizens don't get to eat their cake and eat it too…

Yes they are. Look at what happened when deepseek came out. Altman started crying and alleging that deepseek was trained on OpenAI model outputs without an inkling of irony

Another example: Microsoft suing pirated Windows distributors.

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

#354

Post by wnevets »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #305
wnevets wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. All right of publicity laws are intellectual property laws but not all intellectual property laws are right of publicity laws. All copyright laws are intellectual property laws but not all intellectual property laws are copyright laws. Right of publicity laws are intellectual property laws because the right of publicity is intellectual property. I don't…

My point is that the kind of IP at issue in this post and discussion is copyright, not personality rights. If we're talking about the views of the copyright office and how that relates to artists, it's implicit that we're staying in copyright land, because there has never been a case about style-as-IP in visual art.

> . If we're talking about the views of the copyright office and how that relates to artists, it's implicit that we're staying in copyright land, because there has never been a case about style-as-IP in visual art.

This article is literally about the copyright office finding AI companies violating copyright law by training their models on copyrighted material. I'm not even sure what you're arguing about anymore.

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

#355

Post by kevlened »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #222
empath75 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with I think a case that everyone agrees with. If I were to take an image, and compress it or encrypt it, and then show you data file, you would not be able to see the original copyrighted material anywhere in the data. But if you had the right computer program, you could use it to regenerate the original image flawlessly. I think most people would easily agree that distributing the encrypted file without…

The crux of the debate is a motte and bailey. AI is capable of reproducing copyright (motte) therefore training on copyright is illegal (bailey).

This critique deserves more attention.

Humans are capable of reproducing copyright illegally, but we allow them to train on copyrighted material legally.

Perhaps measures should be taken to prevent illegal reproduction, but if that's impossible, or too onerous, there should be utilitarian considerations.

Then the crux becomes a debate over utility, which often becomes a religious debate.

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

#356

Post by achrono »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #28
achrono wrote: post #11

If anyone was skeptical of the US government being deeply entrenched with these companies in letting this blatant violation of the spirit of the law [1] continue, this should hopefully secure the conclusion. And for the future, here's one heuristic: if there is a profound violation of the law anywhere that (relatively speaking) is ignored or severely downplayed, it is likely that interested parties have arrived at an…

> If anyone was skeptical of the US government being deeply entrenched with these companies in letting this blatant violation of the spirit of the law [1] continue, this should hopefully secure the conclusion. European here, but why do you think this is so clear cut? There are other jurisdictions where training on copyrighted data has already been allowed by law/caselaw (Germany and Japan). Why do you need a conspira…

Let me answer those questions with actual evidence.

To begin with, this very case of Perlmutter getting fired after her office's report is interesting enough, but let's keep it aside. [0]

First, plenty of lobbying has been afoot, pushing DC to allow training on this data to continue. No intention to stop or change course. [1]

Next, when regulatory attempts were in fact made to act against this open theft, those proposed rules were conveniently watered down by Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and the US government lobbying against the copyright & other provisions. [2]

If you still think, "so what? maybe by strict legal interpretation it's still fair use" -- then explain why OpenAI is selectively signing deals with the likes of Conde Nast if they truly believe this to be the case. [3]

Lastly, when did you last see any US entity or person face no punitive action whatsoever despite illegally downloading (and uploading) millions of books & journal articles; do you remember Aaron Swartz? [4]

You might not agree with my assessment of 'conspiracy', but are you denying there is even an alignment of incentives contrary to the spirit of the law?

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-fires-head-us...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-for-u-s-gover...

[2] https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/04/30/big-tech-watered-do...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-co...

[4] https://cybernews.com/tech/meta-leeched-82-terabytes-of-pira...

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

#357

Post by encipriano »

datavirtue wrote: post #168
jeroenhd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pirating movies is also useful, because I can watch movies without paying on devices that apps and accounts don't work on. That doesn't make piracy legal, even though I get a lot of use out of it. Also, a person isn't a computer so the "but I can read a book and get inspired" argument is complete nonsense.

And everyone here is downloading every show and movie in existence without even a hint of guilt.

Why would u have guilt of using an unlimited resource? Youre not stealing

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

#358

Post by kbelder »

Intralexical wrote: post #153
temporalparts wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that people aren't aware that the scale and magnitude differences are large and significant. It's that the space of intellectual property LAW does not handle the robust capabilities of LLMs. Legislators NEED to pass laws to reflect the new realities or else all prior case law relies on human analogies which fail in the obvious ways you alluded to. If there was no law governing the use of death stars…

Why do you think the obvious analogy is LLM=Human, and not LLM=JPEG or LLM=database? I think you're overstating the legal uniqueness of LLMs. They're covered just fine by the existing legal precedents around copyrighted and derived works, just as building a death star would be covered by existing rules around outer space use and WMDs. Pretending they should be treated differently is IMO the entire lie told by the "AI…

If they were a database, they would be unquestionably legal, because they're only storing a tiny fraction of one percent of the data from any document, and even that data is not any particular replica of any part of the document, but highly summarized and transformed.

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

#359

Post by johnnyanmac »

rollcat wrote: post #245
oooyay wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well hell, by that logic average citizens should be able to launder corporate intellectual property because China will never follow suit in adhering to intellectual property law. I'm game if you are.

Well I always felt rebellious about the contemporary face of "rules for thee but not for me", specifically regarding copyright. Musicians remain subject to abuse by the recording industry; they're making pennies on each dollar you spend on buying CDs^W^W streaming services. I used to say, don't buy that; go to a concert, buy beer, buy merch, support directly. Nowadays live shows are being swallowed whole through excl…

We regulate it like how we did centuries ago that lead to copyright. If we already have rules we enforce it. If no one in power wants to, we put in people who will.

In the end this all comes down to needing the people to care enough.

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

#360

Post by johnnyanmac »

bigbuppo wrote: post #175
jhaile wrote: post #159

One aspect that I feel is ignored by the comments here is the geo-political forces at work. If the US takes the position that LLMs can't use copyrighted work or has to compensate all copyright holders – other countries (e.g. China) will not follow suit. This will mean that US LLM companies will either fall behind or be too expensive. Which means China and other countries will probably surge ahead in AI, at least in t…

The real problem here is that AI companies aren't even willing to follow the norms of big business and get the laws changed to meet their needs.

This is pre iselt why we need proportional fees for courts. We can't just let companies treat the law as a cost benefits analysis. They should live in fear of a court result against their favor.
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