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The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

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Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#591

Post by spunker540 »

paganel wrote: post #487
spunker540 wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's likely fair use. I agree. You can even listen to the NYT Hard Fork podcast (that I recommend btw https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/podcasts/hard-fork-execut... ) where they recently had Harvard copyright law professor Rebecca Tushnet on as a guest. They asked her about the issue of copyrighted training data. Her response was: """ Google, for example, with the book project, doesn’t give you the full text and i…

Genuinely asking, is the “verbatim” thing set in stone? I mean, an entity spewing out NYTimes-like articles after having been trained on lots of NYTimes content sounds like a very grey zone, in the “spirit” of copyright law some may judge it as indeed not-lawful. Of course, I’m not a lawyer and I know that in the US sticking to precedents (which mention the “verbatim” thing) takes a lot of precedence over judging som…

There's already precedence for this in news: News outlets constantly report on each other's stories. That's why they care so much about being first on a story, because once they break it, it is fair game for everyone else to report on it too.

Here's a hypothetical: suppose there is a random fact about some news event that has only been reported in a single article. Do they suddenly have a monopoly on that fact, and deserve compensation whenever that fact gets picked up and repeated by other news articles or books or TV shows or movies (or AI models)?

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#592

Post by benrow »

8note wrote: post #396
aantix wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't AI at least cite its source? This feels like a broader problem, nothing specific to the NYTimes. Long term, if no one is given credit for their research, either the creators will start to wall off their content or not create at all. Both options would be sad. A humane attribution comment from the AI could go a long way - "I think I read something about this in the NYTimes on January 3rd, 2021." It appears t…

If you're going to consider training ai as fair use, you'll have all kinds of different people with different skill levels training ais that work in different ways on the corpus. Not all of them will have the capability to cite a source, and plenty of them won't have it make sense to cite a source. Eg. Suppose I train a regression that guesses how many words will be in a book. Which book do I cite when I do an infere…

Regression is a good analogy of the problem here. If you found a line of best fit for some datapoints, how would you get back the original datapoints, from the line?

Now imagine terabytes worth of datapoints, and thousands of dimensions rather than two.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#593

Post by tsimionescu »

aragonite wrote: post #575
JCM9 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bits you cite are legally bogus. That would be like me just photocopying a book you wrote and then handing out copies saying we’re assigning different rights to the content. The whole point of the lawsuit is that OpenAI doesn’t own the content and thus they can’t just change the ownership rights per their terms of service. It doesn’t work like that.

Their legalese is careful to include the 'if any' qualifier ("We hereby assign to you all our right, title, and interest, if any , in and to Output.") In any case, the point is that they made no claim to Output (as opposed to their code, etc) being their IP.

That's irrelevant. The main point is that they are re-distributing the content without permission from the copyright owners, so they are sort of implicitly claiming they have copy/distribution rights over it. Since they don't, then it's obvious they can't give you this content at all.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#594

Post by LeoPanthera »

I honestly thought that OpenAI had simply paid for access to the new corpus. I'm actually on the side of OpenAI here - if you put something on the web, you can't get upset when people read it. Training a neural network is not functionally different from a human reading it and remembering it.

But if I were OpenAI, I would have tried to do a deal to pay them anyway. Having official access is surely easier than scraping the web - and the optics of it is much better.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#595

Post by UrineSqueegee »

015a wrote: post #397
kbos87 wrote: post #170

Solidly rooting for NYT on this - it’s felt like many creative organizations have been asleep at the wheel while their lunch gets eaten for a second time (the first being at the birth of modern search engines.) I don’t necessarily fault OpenAI’s decision to initially train their models without entering into licensing agreements - they probably wouldn’t exist and the generative AI revolution may never have happened if…

> a more established competitor Apple is already doing this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-... Apple caught a lot of shit over the past 18 months for their lack of AI strategy; but I think two years from now they're going to look like geniuses.

didnt they just get caught for pantent infrigment? I'm sure they've done their fair share of shady stuff with the AI datasets too, they are just going to do a stellar job of conciling it.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#596

Post by nsagent »

joquarky wrote: post #457
bbkane wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters what ends up being best for humanity, and I think there are cases to be made both ways on this

People often get buried in the weeds about the purpose of copyright. Let us not forget that the only reason copyright laws exist is > To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries If copyright is starting to impede rather than promote progress, then it needs to change to remain constitutional.

The reason copyright promotes progress is that it incentives individuals and organizations to release works publicly, knowing their works are protected against unlawful copying.

The end game when large content producers like The New York Times are squeezed due to copyright not being enforced is that they will become more draconian in their DRM measures. If you don't like paywalls now, watch out for what happens if a free-for-all is allowed for model training on copyrighted works without monetary compensation.

I had a similar conversation with my brother-in-law who's an economist by training, but now works in data science. Initially he was in the side of OpenAI, said that model training data is fair game. After probing him, he came to the same conclusion I describe: not enforcing copyright for model training data will just result in a tightening of free access to data.

We're already seeing it from the likes of Twitter/X and Reddit. That trend is likely to spread to more content-rich companies and get even more draconian as time goes on.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#597

Post by voltaireodactyl »

whichfawkes wrote: post #588

It seems weird to sue an AI company because their tool "can recite [copyrighted]" content verbatim. If I paid a human to recite the whole front page of the New York Times to me, they could probably do it. There's nothing infringing about that. However, if I videotape them reciting the front page of the New York Times and start selling that video, then I 'd be infringing on the copyright. The guy that I paid to tell m…

In your analogy, AI would be the videotape, not the person, because OpenAI is selling access to it.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#598

Post by _aavaa_ »

JCM9 wrote: post #564
_aavaa_ wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can’t transfer rights to the output of it isn’t theirs to begin with. Saying they don’t claim the rights over their output while outputting large chunks verbatim is the old YouTube scheme of upload movie and say “no copyright intended”.

Exactly. And while one can easily just take down such a movie if an infringement claim is filed it’s unclear how one “removes” content from a trained model given how these models work. Thats messy.

If it’s found that the use of the material is infringing on the rights of the copyright holder than the AI company has to retrain their model without any material they don’t have a right to. Pretty clear to me

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#599

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #579
throwup238 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair use is based on a flexible proportionality test so they don't need perfect arguments on all factors. > If your "fair use" substantially negatively affects the market for the original source material, which I think is fairly clear in this case, the courts wont look favorably on that. I think it's fairly clear that it doesn't. No one is going to use ChatGPT to circumvent NYTimes paywalls when archive.ph and the No…

> we're so far in uncharted territory any speculation is useless I definitely agree with that (at least the "far in uncharted territory bit", but as far as "speculation being useless", we're all pretty much just analyzing/guessing/shooting the shit here, so I'm not sure "usefulness" is the right barometer), which is why I'm looking forward to this case, and I also totally agree the assessment is flexible. But I don't…

[deleted]

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#600

Post by belter »

devindotcom wrote: post #522
belter wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the leaks on: Secret projects, novelty training algorithms not being published anymore so as to preserve market share, custom hardware, Q* learning, internal politics at companies at the forefront of state of the art LLMs...A thunderous silence is the lack of leaks, on the exact datasets used to train the main commercial LLMs. It is clear OpenAI or Google did not use only Common Crawl. With so many press conf…

for what it's worth, i asked altman directly and he denied using libgen or books2, but also deferred to murati and her team on specifics. but the Q&A wasn't recorded and they haven't answered my follow-ups.

Really? Because the GPT-3 paper talks about "...two internet-based books corpora (Books1 and Books2)..." (see pages 8 and 9) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf

Unclear what that corpora might be, or if its the same books2 you are referring to.

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