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AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

arstechnica.com

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Re: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

#51

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

jart wrote: post #32
JohnFen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every author should have the right to have their work remembered and immortalized by AI. Equally, every author should also have the right to not have their work ingested by AI.

That's what robots.txt does. However you'd have to delist yourself from search engines to fully prevent AIs from reading the content on your website.

That's a naive statement about robots.txt; nothing about it is binding or enforceable. It is a request that well-behaved crawlers heed. Other crawlers treat the Disallow section as a list of targets.

Re: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

#52

Post by jart »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #50
jart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without IP, information becomes controlled by centralized online services with DRM which show ads, meter access, monitor your activity, make specializations, and can take it all away at any time. That's the system we ended up with, after humanity failed to voluntarily respect IP holders rights under the old system that let you buy/own content. Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite.

This doesn't make sense. The mechanism by which "information becomes controlled by centralized online services with DRM" is copyright law. Without copyright law, "DRM" wouldn't be a thing. Without some concept of "intellectual property", there is nothing for copyright law to protect.

My point is you don't need the legal concept of intellectual property if you can't access the information. For example, people tried to sell software. But consumers didn't respect software IP and just pirated it. If IP isn't respected and isn't feasible to enforce, then it de facto doesn't exist. So now software developers run the software as a service and only allow you to interact with it through a web browser. Since copyright laws were effectively worthless to protecting developer interests, developers found a solution to commercialization that didn't require copying the software.

Re: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

#53

Post by Xinti »

And that worked well against google right? Get over yourselves. You are fucked and just don't want to admit it. Think about this I'm Google: I have literally more money than you, I can hire 10 lawyers for each of yours looking for every technicality, loophole, stalling tactic, and typo in anything any of you do.

Guess who wins? Not John and Jane Schmoe. So yeah enjoy being bent over, and just ask for lube first.

Re: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

#55

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

jart wrote: post #52
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make sense. The mechanism by which "information becomes controlled by centralized online services with DRM" is copyright law. Without copyright law, "DRM" wouldn't be a thing. Without some concept of "intellectual property", there is nothing for copyright law to protect.

My point is you don't need the legal concept of intellectual property if you can't access the information. For example, people tried to sell software. But consumers didn't respect software IP and just pirated it. If IP isn't respected and isn't feasible to enforce, then it de facto doesn't exist. So now software developers run the software as a service and only allow you to interact with it through a web browser. Sin…

Right, I misunderstood. Thanks for the additional clarification.

Re: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

#56

Post by tomrod »

gopher_space wrote: post #26
gibbitz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is a social fiction following this argument so I can just stop by your place and take yours.

Money is an analogy .

Money represents a store of value. I work an hour and get money, that represents the value of my work. I then use that value to get a pig, a string, and two oranges, with the value of those items represented by what I paid.

I could have bartered for those items. Money just made that trade easier.

Re: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

#57

Post by throw10920 »

jart wrote: post #32
JohnFen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every author should have the right to have their work remembered and immortalized by AI. Equally, every author should also have the right to not have their work ingested by AI.

That's what robots.txt does. However you'd have to delist yourself from search engines to fully prevent AIs from reading the content on your website.

This is factually false.

There's ample documentation of crawlers straight-up ignoring robots.txt.

It's not a legal control, but a technical one - and a voluntary one, which means that it's trivial to ignore.

And there's obviously nowhere to put a robots.txt for a book that you've published.

Re: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

#58

Post by kcartlidge »

Reading through the comments there seems to be some misunderstandings leading to issues with a stance that the potential class action is not taking.

The class action doesn't relate to normal training based on legally acquired materials, which US courts have already said is fair use. It is concerned specifically with training on materials obtained illegally (pirated content).

Re: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

#59

Post by BenGosub »

brentm wrote: post #30
quantified wrote: post #2

Which is more important, the rights of the infringed or of the funded and hyped business?

It's a valid question of if the rights were actually infringed here. Nothing stops you from reading books and then writing based on what you learned. Just because this is done at scale doesn't mean the output is violating the copyright.

An author has the right to choose who can consume their material, it has been like that for a long time, they can and should be able to at least opt out of training. If I don't get anything out of it, why would I let an AI company train their models from my authored material and then profit by selling the output? It doesn't make sense.

Re: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

#60

Post by jart »

throw10920 wrote: post #57
jart wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what robots.txt does. However you'd have to delist yourself from search engines to fully prevent AIs from reading the content on your website.

This is factually false. There's ample documentation of crawlers straight-up ignoring robots.txt. It's not a legal control, but a technical one - and a voluntary one, which means that it's trivial to ignore. And there's obviously nowhere to put a robots.txt for a book that you've published.

The biggest, best, most reputable organizations e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all publicly promised to respect your robots.txt file. You can make them hurt if they lie. So you know they're telling the truth. There's some people out there who don't respect robots.txt like Archive Team. However they're more likely to be treated as folk heroes here on Hacker News than trigger AI training fears.
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