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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

#381

Post by School-Cotton »

93po wrote: post #365
School-Cotton wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why not? people write fiction all the time and put it on the internet for free. in fact, i'd say there's significantly more unpaid fiction writing in the world than paid.

Yes, and most of it is awful, whereas Joanne Rowling is talented.

It’s very unlikely that she would (or even could) have devoted herself to writing fiction in her free time as a passion project without hope of monetary reward and without any way to live from her writing for the ten years it took to finish the Potter series.

And even if she had somehow managed, you’d never hear about it, because without publishers to act as gatekeepers it’d have been lost in the mountains of fanfic and whatever other slop amateur writers upload to the internet.

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

#382

Post by SilasX »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #368
SilasX wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Scales of effect always come into play when enacting law. If you spend a day digging a whole on the beach, you're probably not going to incur much wrath. If you bring a crane to the beach, you'll be stopped because we know the hole that can be made will disrupt the natural order. A human can do the same thing eventually, but does it so slowly that it's not an issue to enforce 99.9% of the time.

That's just the usual hand-wavy, vague "it's different" argument. If you want to justify treating the cases differently based on a fundamental difference, you need to be more specific. For example, they usually define an amount of rainwater you can collect that's short of disrupting major water flows.

So what is the equivalent of "digging too much" in a beach for AI? What fundamentally changes when you learn hyper-fast vs just read a bunch of horror novels to inform better horror novel-writing? What's unfair about AI compared to learning from published novels about how to properly pace your story?

These are the things you need to figure out before making a post equating AI learning with copyright infringement. "It's different" doesn't cut it.

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

#383

Post by arp242 »

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…

I get what you're saying, but this is just a race to the bottom, no?

It's annoying to see the current pushback against China focusing so much on inconsequential matters with so much nonsense mixed in, because I do think we do need to push back against China on some things.

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

#384

Post by seanmcdirmid »

oooyay wrote: post #183
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…

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.

In the long run private IP will eventually become very public despite laws you have, it’s been like that since the Stone Age. The American Industrial Revolution was built partially on stolen IP from Britain. The internet has just sped up diffusion. You can stop it if you are willing to cut the line, but legal action is only some friction and even then only in the short term

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

#385

Post by gruez »

FireBeyond wrote: post #372
gruez wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Meta allegedly modified torrenting settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," >Meta allegedly tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers Sounds like they used a VPN, set the upload speed to 1kb/s and stopped after the download is done. If the average Jo…

> If the average Joe copied that setup there's 0% chance he'd get sued Citation needed. RIAA used to just watch torrents and sent cease and desists to everyone who connected, whether for a minute or for months. It was very much a dragnet, and I highly doubt there was any nuance of "but Your Honor, I only seeded 1MB back so it's all good".

Did you miss the part about using a VPN?

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

#386

Post by staticman2 »

Suppafly wrote: post #336
staticman2 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Anyone writing "humans can learn from art why can't machines" or something to that effect is performatively conflating an organism and a machine.

My issue is with the rhetoric, if that isn't the rhetoric you are using I am not talking about you.

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

#387

Post by slipnslider »

glial wrote: post #33
bgwalter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The required reasoning is not very deep though: If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism. If a savant has perfect recall, remembers text perfectly and rearranges that text to create a marginally new text, he'd be sued for breach of copyright. Only large corporations get away with it.

It reminds me of the old joke. "To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research."

Einstein once said "the key to genius is to hide your sources well"

And honestly there is truth to it. Some people (at work, in rea life, wherever) might come off very inteligent but the moment they say "oh I just read that relevant fact on reddit/twitter/news site 5 minutes ago" you realize they are just like you and repeating relevant information that was consumed recently.

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

#388

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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 design, manufacture and supply of electronics is far more important than one particular usage, e.g, "LLMs". It has never been a requirement to violate copyrights to produce electronics, or computer software. In fact, arguably there would be no "MicroSoft" were it not for Gates' lobbying for the existence and enforcement of "software copyright". The "Windows" franchise, among others, relies on it. The irony of Microsoft's support for OpenAI is amusing. Copyright enforcement for me but not for thee.

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

#389

Post by noirscape »

Zambyte wrote: post #193
noirscape wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may surprise you, but artists need to buy things like food, water and pay for their basic necessities like electricity, rent and taxes. Otherwise they die or go bankrupt. In our current society, that means they need some sort of means to make money from their work. Copyright, at least in theory, exists to incentivize the creation of art by protecting an artists ability to monetize it. If you abolish copyright toda…

Amazing. Have you considered reading the articles I linked? They aren't even that long.

I did and they aren't convincing. The first is an argument of how a popular interpretation of a work still under copyright can subsume the fact the original work is in the public domain, using Alice in Wonderland as an example. (I also happen to think it's a particularly terrible example - if you want to make this argument, The Little Mermaid is by far the stronger version of this argument.) It also misidentifies Disney as the copyright boogeyman, which is a pretty common categorical error. (Disney had very little to do with the length of US copyright. The length of copyright is pretty much entirely the product of geopolitics and international agreements, not Disney.) Its an interesting argument, but not one I find particularly convincing for abolishing copyright, at most shortening the length of it. (Which I do believe is needed.)

The second one is the "just solve capitalism and we can abolish copyright entirely" argument which is... a total non-starter. Yes, in an idealized utopia, we don't need capitalism or copyright and people can do things just because they want to and society provides for the artist just because humans all value art just that much. It's a fun utopic ideal, but there's many steps between the current state of the world and "you can abolish the idea of copyright", and we aren't even close to that state yet.

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

#390

Post by dmonitor »

Zambyte wrote: post #284
dmonitor wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc. People would just delete the malware (DRM) out of the source code that is no longer restricted by copyright. If your argument is that copyright is good because it discourages DRM, I think you have a very evidently weak argument.

Copyright does discourage DRM. Even the most egregious DRM these days can be bypassed with minimal effort and is mostly just a nuisance. Take away government enforcement of copyright and how profitable your digital product is will be directly tied to how advanced you are in the DRM arms race.

Steam is the classic example of how this is effective. You compete with pirates by offering what they can't: a reliable, convenient service. DRM becomes more of a hindrance than a benefit in this situation.

Allowing pirates to offer reliable convenient pirate websites that are "so easy a normie can do it" would be a disaster for all the creative industries. You would need to radically change the rest of society to prevent a total collapse of people making money off art.

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