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Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

theregister.com

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Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#41

Post by bena »

hughesjj wrote: post #24
data-ottawa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can personally memorize and recite copyrighted works all I want, but when ChatGPT does it then it’s in a commercial context and they’re liable to be sued for infringement. If you ask ChatGPT the rules for D&D, the private sourcebooks are all in there.

> and recite copyrighted works all I want ...wait, isn't that false? legitimately asking. or is it because it was done by a corporation that makes it illegal? im thinking of how restaurants dont sing happy birthday and fair use restrictions etc

Like most things, it depends.

If I recite them to myself, in my home, it's fine. If I do it at a gathering at my house where we're playing D&D, fine. If I do it as a performance, in front of a crowd, or as a recording, now I'm no longer fine. Context matters in a copyright cases. Not to mention, to claim fair use, you do have to claim you violated copyright. Fair use is just an allowed violation.

As to Happy Birthday, that's actually ok for them to do now. The person/group that held the copyright to Happy Birthday was found to have not actually have held them in the first place. Happy Birthday is actually an older song called "Good Morning to All". Swap "Good Morning" with "Happy Birthday" and "children" with "dear [PERSON]" and you have the lyrics. This was not deemed a substantive change. And since the copyright on "Good Morning to All" has lapsed, Happy Birthday is in the public domain.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#42

Post by replwoacause »

svat wrote: post #36
replwoacause wrote: post #6

A tangential question...but does anyone know what software is used to generate legal documents that look like the PDF linked in the article? I’ve played with LaTeX templates a bit, but I seriously doubt law firms are futzing around with LaTeX for documents as complex as this. They must have some software that produces this formatting.

`pdfinfo` on the file says: Creator: Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word Producer: Adobe PDF Library 23.3.247; modified using iText® 7.1.6 ©2000-2019 iText Group NV (Administrative Office of the United States Courts; licensed version) So it was likely made in Word and exported to PDF. (One can anyway guess from the "look" of the paragraphs that they're not using anything like Knuth–Plass line-breaking, which rules out thing…

Oh cool, then that settles it. Thank you!

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#43

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mbgerring wrote: post #40

Wow, I really don’t get it, if I were to memorize billions of pages worth of people’s private messages and medical records, then recited them live in the Internet, would that be a crime??

Yeah, unless you had permission from the authors to do so.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#44

Post by chasing »

I mean, it ingested all of the content from my blog. Without my permission. It's not a major part of their corpus of data, but still -- I wasn't asked and I don't really care to donate work to large corporations like that.

So the technology is cool, but I'm firmly of the stance that they cut corners and trampled peoples' rights to get a product out the door. I wouldn't be entirely unhappy if this iteration of these products were sued into the ground and were forced to start over on this stuff The Right Way.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#45

Post by Cthulhu_ »

submeta wrote: post #9

Well, it was too good to be true. Reminds me of the early days of music sharing and Napster.

Which was never legal in the first place, but it was great because it liberated music and content to the masses. It was the necessary precursor to what is now Spotify and the like, instant access to billions of songs. The music industry didn't like that (Napster & co) because they wanted purchases and to get paid every time the music they owned was played.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#46

Post by tedivm »

knaik94 wrote: post #35

>For the 16 plaintiffs, the complaint indicates that they used ChatGPT, as well as other internet services like Reddit, and expected that their digital interactions would not be incorporated into an AI model. I don't expect this lawsuit to lead anywhere. But if it does, I hope it leads to some clear laws regarding data privacy and how TOS is binding. The recent ruling regarding web scraping makes the case against Ope…

The lawsuit is far more nuanced than you're letting on. There are several aspects that come into play-

* Was it published publicly? This is basically defined in the courts as "if you make an unauthenticated web request does the data return?". This is where scraping comes in- if you make the data available without authentication you can't enforce your TOS, because you can't validate that people actually even accepted the TOS to begin with.

* Is the data able to be copyrighted? This is where things are interesting- facts can not be copyrighted, which is why a lot of scrapers are able to reuse data (things like weather, sports scores, even "for hire" notices can be considered factual).

* If it would typically be considered covered by copyright, does fair use come into play?

* Are there any other laws that come into play? For example, GDPR, CCPA, or other privacy laws can still add restrictions to how data is collected and used (this is complicated by the various jurisdictions as well)

* Was the work done with the data transformative enough to allow it to bypass copyright protections? This goes back to when Google was scanning books. Because they were making a search engine, not a library, their search tool was considered transformative enough to allow them to continue.

It's not enough to say "because it's on the internet, it's fair game for everyone to use". This is a really complicated area where things are evolving rapidly, and there's a lot of intersecting law (and case law) that comes into play.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#47

Post by koheripbal »

knaik94 wrote: post #35

>For the 16 plaintiffs, the complaint indicates that they used ChatGPT, as well as other internet services like Reddit, and expected that their digital interactions would not be incorporated into an AI model. I don't expect this lawsuit to lead anywhere. But if it does, I hope it leads to some clear laws regarding data privacy and how TOS is binding. The recent ruling regarding web scraping makes the case against Ope…

Article titles which specify the plaintiff classroom amount are a good indicator of poor journalism.

You can usually disregard such articles as you can expect biased/incomplete reporting.

Lawsuit claim amounts have zero bearing on reality. They must be specified in any classroom, but lawyers just always specify massive amounts without justification.

Any reporting on this amount indicates ignorance in the system or intentional dishonesty.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#48

Post by ghaff »

prng2021 wrote: post #27
data-ottawa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can personally memorize and recite copyrighted works all I want, but when ChatGPT does it then it’s in a commercial context and they’re liable to be sued for infringement. If you ask ChatGPT the rules for D&D, the private sourcebooks are all in there.

I don’t get your point. Whether you use copyrighted material in commercial context or not always matters. That’s one of the most important aspects of different open source licenses.

No OSI-approved open source license prohibits the commercial use of software. In fact, the Open Source Definition expressly forbids discriminating on the basis of how the software will be used.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#49

Post by knaik94 »

WA wrote: post #8

Interesting, for once this doesn't have anything to do with the GDPR. It's by 16 (US) individuals, filing the complaint in SF.

California is the only state that has active data privacy laws. Although, I don't think there's any financial transactions, it's just public data scraping. I wonder if the company can even be held liable for the output of these LLMs. There's no direct hosting of any static data.

https://iapp.org/resources/article/us-state-privacy-legislat...

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#50

Post by calny »

svat wrote: post #36
replwoacause wrote: post #6

A tangential question...but does anyone know what software is used to generate legal documents that look like the PDF linked in the article? I’ve played with LaTeX templates a bit, but I seriously doubt law firms are futzing around with LaTeX for documents as complex as this. They must have some software that produces this formatting.

`pdfinfo` on the file says: Creator: Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word Producer: Adobe PDF Library 23.3.247; modified using iText® 7.1.6 ©2000-2019 iText Group NV (Administrative Office of the United States Courts; licensed version) So it was likely made in Word and exported to PDF. (One can anyway guess from the "look" of the paragraphs that they're not using anything like Knuth–Plass line-breaking, which rules out thing…

Yep it's Word exported to pdf. Source: Am attorney, do this all the time. You write it up in Word, save as pdf. Then upload it to the court website, which (in federal court, at least) puts the case number in blue text at the top for the officially-filed version.

The 1-28 pleading numbers on the side are annoying. They're specific to courts in California and a few other jurisdictions, and the rules of court require them. But many other courts don't have them, and they only help to cite specific lines within pages; eg "Complaint 5:4-9" means "Complaint at page 5, at lines 4 to 9". It's occasionally useful for court filings like this, but more useful for court/deposition transcripts of testimony to show precisely where a witness said something.

Related: I tried building an RNN to generate legal pleadings back around 2018/19 and gathered a bunch of docs like this from courts across the country as training data. Processing text with those pleading numbers was a pain, so I built a CNN to classify whether a document had pleading numbers or not, which affected downstream processing. Probably the wrong approach in a bunch of ways, but I was just learning.

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