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I feel like a number of AI applications are a bit like this. In this case, the training set could be the original book text, and an audiobook reading of the boo
by new299 7y ago
I feel like a number of AI applications are a bit like this. In this case, the training set could be the original book text, and an audiobook reading of the books (over thousands of books). When trained on that dataset the audio recordings are used to regenerate the original text.
So training set==test set and you don't care because the only purpose of the model was to circumvent certain potential copyright issues.
I feel this same issue exists in many other areas too. A model gets trained on a bunch of copyrighted data, and then can generate similar data... It seems like a kind of gray area. On one hand you might say the learning process is just "inspired" by the copyrighted material... someone else might say it's just derived from it (and should require licensing).
This often seems to get overlooked, particularly in image generation applications. Yea, of course you can generate interesting looking pictures. The question that often remains unanswered is how novel are these images... what is the closest image in the original dataset.
- v4dok 7y agoIf you don't have 1:1 match in the text, I see no reason why it would be considered an infrigement. Isn't it what people also do? There is no parthenogenesis so a system that "learns" and doesn't reproduce should be treated the same as a human who reads and then writes
- dannyw 7y agoI don't think you can pick a book from your library, narrate it, and then start selling the audiobook without permission from the copyright holders.
- chrisco255 7y agoAudible books are licensed though. The author is still compensated for an audio version of a book. If I bought a movie and had a smart TV that performed AI based closed captioning would that be some sort of copyright violation?
- dillonmckay 7y agoYes. Captions have copyright.
- chrisco255 7y agoThey're not reselling it nor redistributing it. The captions are derived from the AI and presented to the user. It may need some court precedent for this sort of thing, but I believe this would fall under "Fair Use". Fair Use Within copyright law there is a doctrine of law known as fair use. Although fair use does not actually give permission to make copies of a work or otherwise use a work without consent, the doctrine provides a defense to copyright infringement. The factors considered when applying the doctrine of fair use include: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount of the work used, and the effect the use has upon the market for the copyrighted work.
- v4dok 7y agoBut if I bought a book, read it, and then recited from memory as good as I could (which is obviously not 1:1, but a vague idea of the story), adding things from other books where I didn't really remember what was happening. I think, I've seen thousands of movies/books promoted as original content, but made this way
- dannyw 7y agoWhat you describe would be a derivative work, and you still won't be able to sell it without a license.
- dagw 7y agoIt all boils down to a very complex function of exactly how close to the original you are and how good your lawyers are. The better your lawyers, the closer to the original you can go.
- JoeSmithson 7y agoDo you feel the same about Cambridge Analytica deleting their FB data but not deleting the ML models learned from it?
- v4dok 7y agoNot at all, the very act of learning from that data was (arguably) illegal. Reading a book is not illegal.
- fabatka 7y agoIANAL, but I would guess you can't simply use everything for professional purposes, this depends on the licence/copyright of said stuff. In other words if you use copyrighted/lincenced stuff in any form or in any phase of your product without having permission to do that, you are breaking the law.
- __Joker 7y agoNot sure copyright of a Audio version of a book include to use for other uses such as training models. If this is not mentioned in copyright, I would still assume publisher can a make a strong case about it is used for not the intended purpose.
- MatekCopatek 7y agoI don't see a practical way to prove this though. The software is developed behind closed doors and unless someone explicitly leaks this information, it's just a caption feature working really well. Amazon could claim they trained it on a legit data set they had all the necessary rights for. Or am I missing something and they're openly admitting they used it?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dillonmckay 7y agoJust because it is difficult to prove does not make it less of a violation.
- chii 7y ago> Not sure copyright of a Audio version of a book include to use for other uses such as training models. it must. I am using the audio book to train my meat-brain implementation of a neural network. This is no different than training an electron-brain neural network. I have purchased the book and the information contained within must be usable in any form i desire, except for copying and redistributing the text.
- new299 7y agoLegally I believe this distinction is quite clear (IANAL) between these two cases. You can memorize a whole book, and it's not copyright infringement. If you, create a compressed zip of book you that infringes if you don't own the copyright. If a trained model really doesn't infringe, then that's it copyright is dead. Because it's not difficult to overfit a model such that it can replicate the original work. And if that model is no longer under the original copyright it can be shared without restriction.
- Ajedi32 7y agoIt's an interesting question. Arguably, any model trained on copyrighted works could be said to be a derivative of those works, as the model is composed entirely of the copyrighted works run through a deterministic computational process. But on the other hand, we certainly wouldn't apply that same standard to a human who "learned" from copyrighted works, so where do we draw the line?
- Ensorceled 7y ago> But on the other hand, we certainly wouldn't apply that same standard to a human who "learned" from copyrighted works, so where do we draw the line? Are you actually having trouble figuring out the line between commercial ML product and human being?
- Ajedi32 7y agoNo, I'm talking about the line between learning and memorization. Not the overall line between human intelligence and modern-day AI (where there are certainly obvious distinctions). Let's say, for example, that a human who was not a native-born English speaker taught themselves to speak English solely by listening to hundreds of copyrighted English fiction audio books, and comparing them to translations of those same works of fiction in their own native language. (Maybe not the easiest way to learn English, but entirely possible.) Now suppose that human used their newfound mastery of the English language to teach someone else to speak English. Since their knowledge of English was solely derived from copyrighted works, would their knowledge of English be considered a derivative work and therefore subject to copyright? Obviously not. Now suppose the same thing occurred with an AI. The AI learned to translate some other language into English by reading hundreds of thousands of translated books in both languages. Is the AI model a derivative work, and therefore subject to copyright?
- Ensorceled 7y agoThere are ton of things humans can legally do that the computers/corporations can't. I can memorize a copyrighted work (make a mental copy) without triggering a copyright infringement. I can remember a friends email address without triggering GDPR. Why is this suddenly a difficult question just because it's machine learning versus machine copying/storing? That still leaves the question about should ML training sets do/should count as copyright infringement, but that's completely distinct from the idea that a human can do it without causing a copyright infringement.