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.
“How are we supposed to win the race if we can’t cheat?!”
Let’s say I write a book.
If I don’t want people copying it, people shouldn’t be copying it. I don’t care if it’s been 500 years. It’s my book.
This is a weird thread. Lots of people for artists losing control of their creations quickly while simultaneously against artist creations being used by others without consent. Just my perspective but why should artists lose control of their own creations at all? The problem in copyright is tech companies doing patent thickets; not artists.
Even artistic creations held by corporations. Waiting for Marvel stuff to hit public domain to publish a bunch of Marvel novels since they can’t protect their creations any more? Why is that acceptable? If someone creates something and doesn’t want it stolen, I don’t give a fuck what the law says, stealing it is theft. The thief should instead be using Marvel stuff as inspiration as they make their own universe; not just waiting an amount of time before stealing someone else’s creation without consent. It isn’t holding progress back at all to make novel artistic creations instead of steal others. Art = very different from tech.
when I publish a book, to steal it is consenting to be Luigi’d; no matter how long ago it came out.
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?
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?
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.
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.
deleted by creator
If basic economics get you upset, then alright.
Bye o/
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.
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 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.
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!
No, it means that copyrights should not exist in the first place.
Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!
What is the charge, officer? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?
I hope generative AI obliterates copyright. I hope that its destruction is so thorough that we either forget it ever existed or we talk about it in disgust as something that only existed in stupider times.
I find that very unlikely to happen. If AI is accepted as fair use by the legal system, then that means they have a motive to keep copyright as restrictive as possible; it protects their work but allows them to use every one else’s. If you hate copyright law (and you should) AI is probably your enemy, not your ally.
I suspect your assessment is at best subconsciously biased and at worst in bad faith. You’ll need to elaborate on the mechanism of how they’d “keep copyright as restrictive as possible” in a world where it is not possible to copyright AI generated works.
Thing is that copywrite did serve a purpose and was for like 20 years before disney got it extended to the nth degree. The idea was the authors had a chance to make money but were expected to be prolific enough to have more writings by the time 20 years was over. I would like to see with patents that once you get one you have a limited time to go to market. Maybe 10 years and if you product is ever not available for purchase (at a cost equivalent to the average cost accounted for inflation or something) you lose the patent so others can produce it. So like stop making an attachment for a product and now anyone can.
"Thing is, land ownership also served a purpose before lord’s/landlord’s/capitalists decided to expand it to the point of controlling and dictating the lives of serfs/renters/workers. "
Creation’s are not that of only the individual creator, they come from a common progress, culture, and history. When individual creator’s copyright their works and their works become a major part of common culture they slice up culture for themselves, dictating how it may be used against the wishes of the masses. Desiring this makes them unworthy of having any cultural control IMO. They become just as much of an authoritarian as a lord, landlord, or capitalist.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that copyright also harms individual creators once culture has been carved up: Producing brand new stories inevitably are in some way derivative of previous existing works so because they are locked out of the existing IP unless they sign a deal with the devil they’re usually doomed to failure due to no ability to have a grip on cultural relevance.
Now, desiring the ability to make a living being an individual creator? That’s completely reasonable. Copyright is not the solution however.
yeah and its sorta silly to even pretend that there is private ownership of land given property tax and regulations. The truth is the state owns the land that it holds by military might and the citizens rent portions for their needs.
The problem with these systems is that the more they are bureaucratized and legalized, the more publishing houses and attorney’s offices will ultimately dictate the flow of lending and revenue. Ideally, copywrite is as straighforward as submitting a copy of your book to the Library of Congress and getting a big “Don’t plagiarize this” stamp on it, such that works can’t be lifted straight from one author by another. But because there’s all sorts of shades of gray - were Dan Brown and JK Rowling ripping off the core conceits of their works, or were religious murder thrillers and YA wizard high school books simply done to death by the time they went mainstream? - a lot of what constitutes plagarism really boils down to whether or not you can afford extensive litigation.
And that’s before you get into the industrialization of ghostwriters that end up supporting “prolific” writers like Danielle Steele or Brian Sanderson or R.L. Stein. There’s no real legal protection for staff writers, editors, and the like. The closest we’ve got is the WGA, and that’s more exclusive to Hollywood.
yeah its the same with patent. I often think both should only be given to individuals and entities should not be able to have them.
Interesting take. I’m not opposed, but I feel like the necessary reverse engineering skill base won’t ramp up enough to deal with SAS and holomorphic encryption. So, in a world without copyright, you might be able to analog hole whatever non-interactibe media you want, but software piracy will be rendered impossible at the end of the escalation of hostilities.
Copyright is an unnatural, authoritarian-imposed monopoly. I doubt it will last forever.
Copyright is a good idea. It was just stretched beyond all reasonable expectations. Copyright should work like Patents. 15 years. You get one, and only one, 15 year extension. At either the 15 or 30 year mark, the work enters the public domain.
This more closely aligns with my perspective, although I also believe no work should be able to be covered by both copyright and patent (e.g. software).
I’m even willing to give longer terms as long as they are limited by the lifespan of the living sentient creator, and not subject to legal games around corporate personhood.
But, I can certainly see the motivations behind eliminating copyright entirely.
Absolutely, copyright or patent, not both. Though if, and only if, they function identically in duration, I wouldn’t see the downside of having both other than additional expenses actually filing for both
Lightly edited copy paste of my response elsewhere:
Creation’s are not that of only the individual creator, they come from a common progress, culture, and history. When individual creator’s copyright their works and their works become a major part of common culture they slice up culture for themselves, dictating how it may be used against the wishes of the masses. Desiring this makes them unworthy of having any cultural control IMO. They become just as much of an authoritarian as a lord, landlord, or capitalist.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that copyright also harms individual creators once culture has been carved up: Producing brand new stories inevitably are in some way derivative of previous existing works so because they are locked out of the existing IP unless they sign a deal with the devil they’re usually doomed to failure due to no ability to have a grip on cultural relevance.
Now, desiring the ability to make a living being an individual creator? That’s completely reasonable. Copyright is not the solution however.
I don’t think they’re wrong in saying that if they aren’t allowed to train on copyrighted works then they will fall behind. Maybe I missed it in the article, but Japan for example has that exact law (use of copyright to train generative AI is allowed).
Personally I think we need to give them somewhat of an out by letting them do it but then taxing the fuck out of the resulting product. “You can use copyrighted works for training but then 50% of your profits are taxed”. Basically a recognition that the sum of all copyrighted works is a societal good and not just an individual copyright holders.
This sounds like socialism is good for capitalists
Technofascism on its way to legalize my 30TB trove of backups
I’m fine for them to use copyrighted material, provided that everyone can do the same without reprecautions Fuck double standards. Fuck IP. People should have access to knowledge without having to pay.
PS. I know this might be an unpopular opinion
Edit: typos
On the other side, creators should be paid for their labor.
I couldn’t agree more. The thing with IP is that it tends to last almost forever, thus it almost never enters public domain, at least in a man’s lifetime. The result is it stifles innovation and prevents knowledge NAD entertainment to the masses. Lastly almost always, it’s not the creator that benefits of it, rather than a huge corp
Then perish, OpenAI. If your only innovation is a legal loophole then you did nothing.
