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Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

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Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#71

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

saulpw wrote: post #56
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> simply training a model on illegally distributed text should not be copyright infringement You can train a model on copyrighted text, you just can't distribute the output in any way without violating copyright. (edit: depending on the other fair use factors). One of the big problems is that training is a mechanical process, so there is a direct line between the copyrighted works and the model's output, regardless o…

If that mechanical process is not reversible, then it's not a copyright violation. For instance, I can compute the SHA256 hashes for every book in existence and distribute the resulting table of (ISBN, SHA256) and that is not a copyright violation.

That's actually within the other fair use factors. So your hash table is fair use because its transformative and doesn't substitute for the original work.

I edited my post to make it a bit clearer.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#72

Post by zozbot234 »

anon373839 wrote: post #69
JackC wrote: post #23

Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721... The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model th…

This is an interesting opinion, but there are aspects of it that I doubt will stand the test of time. One aspect is the court’s ruling that West’s headnotes are copyrightable even when they merely quote a court opinion verbatim, because the editorial decision to quote the material itself shows a “creative spark”. It really isn’t workable — in law specifically - for copyright to attach to the mere selection of a quote…

If close paraphrase can be detected, this ought to be proof enough that some non-trivial element of creativity was involved in the original text. Because purely functional and necessary elements are not protected by copyright, even when they would otherwise be creative (this is technically known as the 'scenes à faire' case) - and surely a "quote" which is unavoidable because it factually and unquestionably is the core of the ruling would have to fall under that.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#74

Post by fncypants »

anon373839 wrote: post #69
JackC wrote: post #23

Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721... The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model th…

This is an interesting opinion, but there are aspects of it that I doubt will stand the test of time. One aspect is the court’s ruling that West’s headnotes are copyrightable even when they merely quote a court opinion verbatim, because the editorial decision to quote the material itself shows a “creative spark”. It really isn’t workable — in law specifically - for copyright to attach to the mere selection of a quote…

I think this is the best takeaway. This case and its outcome is restricted to its facts. Most of the LLM activity today is very different than what happened here.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#75

Post by r00fus »

mmooss wrote: post #38

Thomson Reuters chose to sue Ross Intelligence, not a company like Google or even OpenAI. I wonder how deeper pockets would have affected the outcome. I wonder how the politics played out. The big AI companies could have funded Ross Intelligence, who could have threatened to sabotage their legal strategies by tanking and settling their own case in TR's favor.

What's to say that's not the next step? First step, stop your competitors who are copying your IP.

Lawyers are gonna be happy is my thought.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#76

Post by aurizon »

At the heart of this is a very greedy racket:- court reporters who 'own' the copyright to every word spoken by anyone in court that they transcribe to a transcript that they do not own the source to (judges/witnesses/lawyers/defendants in truth own it) They then milk huge fees for these transcripts and limit use/access/derivative works with huge fees. An AI verbatim transcriber would up end them, so that will be prevented, as will anything that shakes the tree.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#77

Post by AnthonyMouse »

anon373839 wrote: post #69
JackC wrote: post #23

Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721... The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model th…

This is an interesting opinion, but there are aspects of it that I doubt will stand the test of time. One aspect is the court’s ruling that West’s headnotes are copyrightable even when they merely quote a court opinion verbatim, because the editorial decision to quote the material itself shows a “creative spark”. It really isn’t workable — in law specifically - for copyright to attach to the mere selection of a quote…

> That, plus the fact that Ross was a directly competing product, is what I see as really driving this decision.

The "competing product" thing is probably the most extreme part of this opinion.

The most important fair use factor is if the use competes with the original work, but this is generally implied to be directly competes, i.e. if you translate someone else's book from English to French and want to sell the translation, the translation is going to be in direct competition for sales to people who speak both English and French. The customer is going to use the copy claiming fair use as a direct substitute for the original work, instead of buying it.

This court is trying to extend that to anything downstream from it, which seems crazy. For example, "multiple copies for classroom use" is one of the explicit examples of fair use from the copyright statute, but schools are obviously teaching people intending to go into competition with the original author, and in general the idea that you can't read something if you ever intend to write something to sell in competition with it seems absurd and in contradiction to the common practices in reverse engineering.

But this is also a district court opinion that isn't even binding on other courts, so we'll see what happens if it gets appealed.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#78

Post by marcus0x62 »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #44
echelon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the copyright holders win, the model giants will just license. This effectively kills open source, which can't afford to license and won't be able to sublicense training data. This is very bad for democratized access to and development of AI. The giants will probably want this. The giants were already purchasing legacy media content enterprises (Amazon and MGM, etc.), so this will probably further consolidation an…

License what? Every available copyrighted work? Even getting a tiny fraction is not practical. To the contrary, this just means companies can't make money from these models. Those using models for research and personal use wouldn't be infringing under the fair use tests.

> License what? Every available copyrighted work? Even getting a tiny fraction is not practical.

Maybe the strategy is something like this:

1) Survive long enough/get enough users that killing the generative AI industry is politically infeasible.

2) Negotiate a compromise similar to the compulsory mechanical royalty system used in the music business to “compensate” the rights holders whose content is used to train the models

The biggest AI companies could even run the enforcement cartels ala BMI/ASCAP to compute and collect royalties owed.

If you take this to its logical conclusion, the AI companies wouldn’t have to pre-license anything, and would just pay out all the royalties to the biggest rights holders (more or less what happens in the music industry) on the basis that figuring out what IP went into what model output is just too hard, so instead they just agree to distribute it to whomever is on the New York Times best seller list at any given moment.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#79

Post by emp17344 »

skeledrew wrote: post #35
gregschlom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A human brain doesn't need anywhere close to this volume of data, in order to be able to produce good output. Maybe not directly, but consider that our brains are the product of million of years of evolution and aren't a blank slate when we're born. Even though babies can't speak a language at birth, they already have all the neural connections in place in order to acquire and manipulate language, and require just…

Add to this, the brain is constantly processing raw sensory data from the moment it became viable, even when the body is "sleeping". It's using orders of magnitude more data than any model in existence every moment, but isn't generally deemed "intelligent" enough until it's around 18 years old.

It’s unlikely that sensory data contributes to cognitive ability in humans. People with sensory impairments, such as blind people, are not less cognitively capable than people without sensory impairments. Think of Helen Keller, who, despite taking in far less sensory information than the average person, was still more intelligent than average.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#80

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #44
echelon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the copyright holders win, the model giants will just license. This effectively kills open source, which can't afford to license and won't be able to sublicense training data. This is very bad for democratized access to and development of AI. The giants will probably want this. The giants were already purchasing legacy media content enterprises (Amazon and MGM, etc.), so this will probably further consolidation an…

License what? Every available copyrighted work? Even getting a tiny fraction is not practical. To the contrary, this just means companies can't make money from these models. Those using models for research and personal use wouldn't be infringing under the fair use tests.

> License what? Every available copyrighted work? Even getting a tiny fraction is not practical.

They don't need every copyrighted work and getting a fraction is entirely practical. They would go to some large conglomerate like Getty Images or large publishers or social media whose terms give the site a license to what you post and then the middle men would get a vig and the original authors would get peanuts if anything at all.

But in aggregate it would price out the little guy from creating a competing model, because each creator getting $3 is nothing to the creator but is real money to a small entity when there are a billion creators.

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