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

theregister.com

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

#81

Post by jrajav »

madeofpalk wrote: post #53
mattxxx wrote: post #51

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigat…

> Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against Humans get litigated against this all the time . There is such thing as, charitably, being too inspired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagi...

If you follow these cases more closely over time you'll find that they're less an example of humans stealing work from others and more an example of typical human greed and pride. Old, well established musicians arguing that younger musicians stole from them for using a chord progression used in dozens of songs before their own original, or a melody on the pentatonic scale that sounds like many melodies on the pentatonic scale do. It gets ridiculous.

Plus, all art is derivative in some sense, it's almost always just a matter of degree.

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

#82

Post by dmonitor »

Zambyte wrote: post #40
School-Cotton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

It took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...

You need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.

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

#83

Post by ceejayoz »

mattxxx wrote: post #51

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigat…

> Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against.

You're still not gonna be allowed to commercially publish "Hairy Plotter and the Philosophizer's Rock".

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

#85

Post by rurban »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #26
tempeler wrote: post #18

I think, A new chapter is about to begin. It seems that in the future, many IPs will become democratized — in other words, they will become public assets.

"Democratized" as in large corporations are free to ingest the IPs and then reinterpret and censor them before they feed their version back to us, with us never having free access to the original source?

"Democratized" in the meaning of fascistoized, right? Laws do not apply to the cartels, military, executive and secret services.

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

#86

Post by otterley »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #48
School-Cotton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Because the concept of owning an idea is really gross. Copyright means I can’t write about whatever I want in my own home even if I never distribute it or no one ever sees it. I’m breaking the law by privately writing Harry Potter fanfic in my journal or whatever. Copyright is supposed to be about encouraging intangibles, and the reality is that it only massively stifles it

Copyright doesn’t protect ideas. It protects expression of those ideas.

Consider how many books exist on how to care for trees. Each one of them has similar ideas, but the way those ideas are expressed differ. Copyright protects the content of the book; it doesn’t protect the ideas of how to care for trees.

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

#87

Post by ceejayoz »

sophrocyne wrote: post #84

The USCO report was flawed, biased, and hypocritical. A pre-publication of this sort is also extremely unusual. https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/05/12/opinion-why-t...

What in https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/about/ says "ah, yes, trustworthy unbiased analysis" to you? Why should I trust this source's opinion?

Pre-publication reports aren't unusual. https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/current

https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/using-federalreg...

> The Federal Register Act requires that the Office of the Federal Register (we) file documents for public inspection at our office in Washington, DC at least one business day before publication in the Federal Register.

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

#88

Post by Workaccount2 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #67
mattxxx wrote: post #51

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigat…

Pirating movies is also useful, because I can watch movies without paying on devices that apps and accounts don't work on. That doesn't make piracy legal, even though I get a lot of use out of it. Also, a person isn't a computer so the "but I can read a book and get inspired" argument is complete nonsense.

It's only complete non-sense if you understand how humans learn. Which we don't.

What we do know though is that LLMs, similar to humans, do not directly copy information into their "storage". LLMs, like humans, are pretty lossy with their recall.

Compare this to something like a search indexed database, where the recall of information given to it is perfect.

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

#89

Post by toast0 »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #65
mattxxx wrote: post #51

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigat…

Doing a cover song requires permission, and doing it without that permission can be illegal. Being inspired by a song to write your own is very legal. AI is fine as long as the work it generates is substantially new and transformative. If it breaks and starts spitting out other peoples work verbatim (or nearly verbatim) there is a problem. Yes, I'm aware that machines aren't people and can't be "inspired", but if the…

> Doing a cover song requires permission, and doing it without that permission can be illegal.

I believe cover song licensing is available mechanically; you don't need permission, you just need to follow the procedures including sending the licensing fees to a rights clearing house. Music has a lot of mechanical licenses and clearing houses, as opposed to other categories of works.

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

#90

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

jobigoud wrote: post #76
palmotea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We are talking about the rights of the humans training the models and the humans using the models to create new things. Copyright only comes into play on publication. It's only concerned about publication of the models and publication of works. The machine itself doesn't have agency to publish anything at this point.

It's not only publication, otherwise people wouldn't be able to be successfully sued for downloading and consuming copyrighted content, it would only be the uploaders who get into trouble.
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