To be fair copyright is a disease. But then so is billionaires, capitalism, business, etc.
I mean, if there’s a war, and you shoot somebody, does that make you bad?
Yes and no.
I have conflicting feelings about this whole thing. If you are selling the result of training like OpenAI does (and every other company), then I feel like it’s absolutely and clearly not fair use. It’s just theft with extra steps.
On the other hand, what about open source projects and individuals who aren’t selling or competing with the owners of the training material? I feel like that would be fair use.
What keeps me up at night is if training is never fair use, then the natural result is that AI becomes monopolized by big companies with deep pockets who can pay for an infinite amount of random content licensing, and then we are all forever at their mercy for this entire branch of technology.
The practical, socioeconomic, and ethical considerations are really complex, but all I ever see discussed are these hard-line binary stances that would only have awful corporate-empowering consequences, either because they can steal content freely or because they are the only ones that will have the resources to control the technology.
If giant megacorporations can benefit by ignoring copyright, us mortals should be able to as well.
Until then, you have the public domain to train on. If you don’t want AI to talk like the 1920s, you shouldn’t have extended copyright and robbed society of a robust public domain.
I think the answer is there just do what deepseek did.
Good. If I ever published anything, I would absolutely not want it to be pirated by AI so some asshole can plagiarize it later down the line and not even cite their sources.
“How are we supposed to win the race if we can’t cheat?!”
That’s a good litmus test. If asking/paying artists to train your AI destroys your business model, maybe you’re the arsehole. ;)
Not only that, but their business model doesn’t hold up if they were required to provide their model weights for free because the material that went into it was “free”.
There’s also an argument that if the business was that reliant on free things to start with, then it shouldn’t be a business.
No-one would bat their eyes if the CEO of a real estate company was sobbing that it’s the end of the rental market, because the company is no longer allowed to get houses for free.
Businesses relying on free things. Logging, mining, ranching, and oil come to mind. Extracting free resources of the land belonging to the public, destroying those public lands and selling those resources back to the public at an exorbitant markup.
You misspelled capitalism.
Unregulated capitalism. That’s why people in dominant market positions want less regulation.
Entrenched companies often want more regulation to prevent startup competition. Pulling the ladder up behind them.
To be fair, they want more regulation n others, not on them. Specially if they’re doing shady things.
Extracting free resources of the land
Not to be contrarian, but there is a cost to extract those “free” resources; like labor, equipment, transportation, lobbying (AKA: bribes for the non-Americans), processing raw material into something useful, research and development, et cetera.
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If basic economics get you upset, then alright.
Bye o/
While true, they tend not to bare the costs of the environmental damage, at least when these activities are poorly regulated.
Was about to post the same thing
The entire internet is built on free things.
Just saying.
Doesn’t mean that businesses should allowed to be.
Agribusiness in shambles after draining the water table (it is still free)
even the top phds can learn things off the amount of books that openai could easily purchase, assuming they can convince a judge that if the works aren’t pirated the “learning” is fair use. however, they’re all pirating and then regurgitating the works which wouldn’t really be legal even if a human did it.
also, they can’t really say how they need fair use and open standards and shit and in the next breathe be begging trump to ban chinese models. the cool thing about allowing china to have global influence is that they will start to respect IP more… or the US can just copy their shit until they do.
imo that would have been the play against tik tok etc. just straight up we will not protect the IP of your company (as in technical IP not logo, etc.) until you do the same. even if it never happens, we could at least have a direct tik tok knock off and it could “compete” for american eyes rather than some blanket ban bullshit.
This particular vein of “pro-copyright” thought continuously baffles me. Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
Its totally valid to hate these AI companies. But its absolutely just industry propaganda to think that copyright was protecting your data on your behalf
Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
You are correct, copyright is ownership, not income. I own the copyright for all my work (but not work for hire) and what I do with it is my discretion.
What is income, is the content I sell for the price acceptable to the buyer. Copyright (as originally conceived) is my protection so someone doesn’t take my work and use it to undermine my skillset. One of the reasons why penalties for copyright infringement don’t need actual damages and why Facebook (and other AI companies) are starting to sweat bullets and hire lawyers.
That said, as a creative who relied on artistic income and pays other creatives appropriately, modern copyright law is far, far overreaching and in need of major overhaul. Gatekeeping was never the intent of early copyright and can fuck right off; if I paid for it, they don’t get to say no.
modern copyright law is far, far overreaching and in need of major overhaul.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
This research paper from Rufus Pollock in 2009 suggests that the optimal timeframe for copyright is 15 years. I’ve been referencing this for, well, 16 years now, a year longer than the optimum copyright range. If I recall correctly I first saw this referenced by Mike Masnick of techdirt.
Copyright does not give the holder control over every “use”, especially something as vague as “using it to undermine their skillset”.
Copyright gives the rights holder a limited monopoly on three activities: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly.
Not all uses involve making a copy, derivative, or performance.
Bingo. I was being more general in my response, but that is the more technical way of putting it.
Gatekeeping absolutely was the intention of copyright, not to provide artists with income.
By gatekeeping I mean the use of digital methods to verify or restrict use of purchased copyright material after a sale such as Digital rights management, encryption such as CSS/AACS/HDCP, or obfuscation.
The whole “you didn’t buy a copy, you bought a license” BS undermines what copyright was supposed to be IMO.
Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
Wrong in all points.
Copyright has paid artists (though maybe not enough). Copyright was intended to do that (though maybe not that alone). Copyright does currently pay artists (maybe not in your country, I don’t know that).
Wrong in all points.
No, actually, I’m not at all. In-fact, I’m totally right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI
Copyright originated create a monopoly to protect printers, not artists, to create a monopoly around a means of distribution.
How many artists do you know? You must know a few. How many of them have received any income through copyright. I dare you, to in good faith, try and identify even one individual you personally know, engaged in creative work, who makes any meaningful amount of money through copyright.
I know several artists living off of selling their copyrighted work, and no one in the history of the Internet has ever watched a 55 minute YouTube video someone linked to support their argument.
Cool. What artist?
Edit because I didn’t read the second half of your comment. If you are too up-your-own ass and anti-intellectual to educate yourself on this matter, maybe just don’t have an opinion.
I know quite a few people who rely on royalties for a good chunk of their income. That includes musicians, visual artists and film workers.
Saying it doesn’t exist seems very ignorant.
Cool. What artists?
Any experienced union film director, editor, DOP, writer, sound designer comes to mind (at least where I’m from)
Cool. Name one. A specific one that we can directly reference, where they themselves can make that claim. Not a secondary source, but a primary one. And specifically, not the production companies either, keeping in mind that the argument that I’m making is that copyright law, was intended to protect those who control the means of production and the production system itself. Not the artists.
The artists I know, and I know several. They make their money the way almost all people make money, by contracting for their time and services, or through selling tickets and merchandise, and through patreon subscriptions: in other words, the way artists and creatives have always made their money. The “product” in the sense of their music or art being a product, is given away practically for free. In fact, actually for free in the case of the most successful artists I know personally. If they didn’t give this “product” of their creativity away for free, they would not be able to survive.
There is practically 0 revenue through copyright. Production companies like Universal make money through copyright. Copyright was also built, and historically based intended for, and is currently used for, the protection of production systems: not artists.
You forgot to link a legitimate source.
A lecture from a professional free software developer and activist whose focus is the legal history and relevance of copyright isn’t a legitimate source? His website: https://questioncopyright.org/promise/index.html
The anti-intelectualism of the modern era baffles me.
Also, he’s on the fediverse!
@kfogel@kfogel.org
YouTube is not a legitimate source. The prof is fine but video only links are for the semi literate. It is frankly rude to post a minor comment and expect people to endure a video when a decent reader can absorb the main points from text in 20 seconds.
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Interesting copyright question: if I own a copy of a book, can I feed it to a local AI installation for personal use?
Can a library train a local AI installation on everything it has and then allow use of that on their library computers? <— this one could breathe new life into libraries
First off, I’m by far no lawyer, but it was covered in a couple classes.
According to law as I know it, question 1 yes if there is no encryption, and question 2 no.
In reality, if you keep it for personal use, artists don’t care. A library however, isn’t personal use and they have to jump through more hoops than a circus especially when it comes to digital media.
But you raise a great point! I’d love to see a law library train AI for in-house use and test the system!
I wonder if there’s some validity to what OpenAI is saying though (but I certainly don’t completely agree with them).
If the US makes it too costly to train AI models, then maybe China will relax any copyright laws so that Chinese AI models can be trained quickly and cheaply. This might result in China developing better AI models than the US.
Maybe the US should require AI companies to pay a large chunk of their profits to copyright holders. So copyright holders would be compensated, but an AI company would only have to pay if they generate profits.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable in this field will tell me I’m totally wrong.
No, it means that copyrights should not exist in the first place.
Maybe as a consumer product but governments will still want it
Open can suck some dick.
To be fair, they’re not wrong. We need to find a legal comprise that satisfies everyone
That sounds like a you problem.
“Our business is so bad and barely viable that it can only survive if you allow us to be overtly unethical”, great pitch guys.
I mean that’s like arguing “our economy is based on slave plantations! If you abolish the practice, you’ll destroy our nation!”
Good point. I’ve never seen it framed this way before. Poignant.
Thanks, heh, I just came back to look at what I’d written again, as it was 6am when I posted that, and sometimes I say some stupid shit when I’m still sleepy. Nice to know that I wasn’t spouting nonsense.
Business that stole everyone’s information to train a model complains that businesses can steal information to train models.
Yeah I’ll pour one out for folks who promised to open-source their model and then backed out the moment the money appeared… Wankers.
God forbid you offer to PAY for access to works that people create like everyone else has to. University students have to pay out the nose for their books that they “train” on, why can’t billion dollar AI companies?
Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!
What is the charge, officer? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?
If I’m using “AI” to generate subtitles for the “community” is ok if i have a large “datastore” of “licensable media” stored locally to work off of right?
