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There's no IP war coming over facts derived from books because copyright doesn't cover facts derived from books and the other forms of IP (trademarks, patents)
by PeterisP 7y ago
There's no IP war coming over facts derived from books because copyright doesn't cover facts derived from books and the other forms of IP (trademarks, patents) are even less relevant.
I've done some work with corpus linguistics and quantitative linguistics, and large parts of these disciplines essentially are about facts derived from books in some manner. Modern approaches tend to involve machine learning, deep neural networks and other things fashionable on hackernews, but in general that's an old, traditional area that was working on facts derived from books for decades before the "ML era".
To work on facts derived from books, we're sourcing all kinds of books and other written language, such as newspapers. Some publishers and authors are cooperative and helpful for such research, some are uncooperative and prefer to intentionally make working on their sources difficult - but in any case, even in the case of disagreement and conflict there's no "IP war", the conflict in our case tends to be about practical convenience of access, not about IP, because they don't really have a leg to stand on in claiming a copyright violation. They hold the copyright on the original text, which gives them certain exclusive rights, there's a bunch of intermediary data that we can't make available to public without their permission, but these rights don't extend to facts derived from that text, and we legally don't need their permission to work on, analyze, transform, publish and use stuff based on facts in the text or facts about the text, we can do that openly even if they've explicitly made it clear that they don't want us to do that. That's nothing new, that's established law that probably predates modern computers.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago> copyright doesn't cover facts derived from books EU database right can and does.
- mehh 7y agoAre there any instances of that actually happening, in regards to a book being treated as a database? It kinda makes sense, Guinness Book of Records, being an example.
- kragen 7y agoWestlaw page numbers and Lexis citations. Carl Malamud has been involved in a number of struggles in the US. Mostly since Feist things have gone in the direction of intellectual freedom in the US and intellectual privatization in the EU.
- PeterisP 7y agoYes, EU database directive is relevant to local copyright law and can apply in certain cases (dictionaries is probably a very relevant example, and other types of books that are close to printed databases), but they do not apply in the vast majority of cases, for the 'stereotypical book'. For example, the database rights would not apply to extracting facts out of a physics textbook, and it would not apply to extracting a model of author's style from their complete works.
- tastroder 7y agoContrary to your original comment there is lots of room for uncertainty, especially seen globally, in this area. While the copyright / fact extraction framing the author chose might not be the correct one in the years to come, this is certainly an area of volatility - at least here in the EU. Your comment w.r.t. "convenience of access" is pretty restricted here, no ML algorithm just boots up, grows legs, and magically walks into a public library to read books for fact finding. The process of extracting facts from books includes lots of steps that are subject to IP and other legislation over here (from crawling the content in the first place if your source is the internet, duplicating/storing the content if it is subject to copyright, ...). While I'm not trying to suggest that your ultimate conclusion might not turn out to be correct, especially in the context of US legislation, that's far from settled and I expect to see quite a few lawsuits whenever this hypothetical actually affects a major player with some market power.
- brlewis 7y agoA single fact isn't protected by copyright, but if I understand correctly, collections of facts are, if creative work is involved. The article seems to describe digesting all the facts in a book, and making them available to third parties in a way that competes with the book itself. I can see copyright being an issue there.
- vanniv 7y agoThe classic example of this in copyright law is the recipe. A recipe can not be protected by copyright. This is one of the reasons that online recipe pages have turned in to long personal stories with (incidentally) a recipe at the bottom. A recipe book, however, does have protection -- due to the creative work found in organizing the recipes, choosing which ones to include and to out near each other, and any creative work associated with introductions, photos, or other new expression. That means that legally, you could buy a ton of recipe books, and then make your own by copying and pasting just the ones you like. You could use the recipes unchanged, but you can't reuse the photos or any descriptive text, or anything but the bare recipe. Similar logic should apply to the publication or reuse of bare facts. Of course, law is complicated and nuanced, and lawyers/judges/legislators don't always understand new technology well enough to apply existing principles properly to new worlds
- paulie_a 7y ago> This is one of the reasons that online recipe pages have turned in to long personal stories with (incidentally) One of the most annoying features of a cooking site, a ten page story about your childhood Michigan is not necessary for a peach pie recipe
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago"The coming IP landgrab of facts derived from books". There probably will be such an attempt, making it at least as far as hearings in Congress. (Hopefully no further - hopefully no attempted legislation.)
- incompatible 7y agoNothing done by an algorithm is copyrightable either, as far as I know. It comes into the non-human "monkey selfie" category. The only copyrightable output would be taken directly from human-created copyrightable input, i.e., the original books.
- imvetri 7y agoCopyright law is flawed.
- Arelius 7y agoIs this true? What are the extents of this? There are many movies that have tons of imagery created by algorithms that are surely covered by copyright. Is it enough for the algorithm itself to express creative expression? How about the inputs? Is any creative expression enough?
- Iv 7y agoI found it interesting from a legal point of view when someone pointed out that the recent "AI dungeon generator" that was using BERT to act like a game master was in some occurrences basically copying (relevant) excerpts from books. Can an AI commit copyright infringment? BERT probably "knows" that Cthulhu is a giant thing evoking squids, tentacle and non-orthonormic dimensions. These are facts based on books, but you can produce copyright infrigement based on those facts. It is called "producing a derived work". In the past years I never managed to get anyone with legal knowledge interested in what they saw as a totally impossible scenario: the idea that AI could one day produce original work y learning its craft, like human do, from copyrighted works. Their criterion was "if you fed copyrighted work into an algorithm to produce a new work, then that's a derived work". Humans are somehow imbued with a magic property that allows them to watch read WH40K books, alien and predator movies, then produce the Starcraft universe, and have it count as original work. We do have a philosophico-legal discussion to have there. And way overdue, if I may. The state of copyright is already late in acknowledging internet, DL-generated work will be even more of a conundrum for it.
- sdan 7y agoI think it comes down to who publishes it. If someone posts it on their blog, then it’s technically them writing it. Pretty sure ai and ghost writers fall into the same legal situation.
- Arelius 7y ago> Humans are somehow imbued with a magic property that allows them to watch read WH40K books, alien and predator movies, then produce the Starcraft universe, and have it count as original work. I feel like this is speculation. Do you have any citations? It seems to me that in this fuzzy area an AI will be judged identically to a human. While you give an example where he StarCraft universe is created and considered original work. There are many cases where a human learns their craft from copyright work, and creates a derived work, fanfic is a huge genre of example. I suspect that in the legal arena the nature and content of the new work will be far more influential in the status of the copyright, than the details of how the new work was created. So, while I think it's likely that something that is generated by an AI that looks like original work will be considered original work. I think a question that is less clear, and much more important is if the AI itself would be considered a derived work. In some ways, it can be argued that an AI is a transformation of the original representation, and that substantial portions of the original work are/can be maintained within the AI itself, just how a work can be transformed by a compressor, but still be considered to maintain the copyright. However afaik this question likely remains still untested. IANAL and all. Also, I think: > BERT probably "knows" that Cthulhu is a giant thing evoking squids, tentacle and non-orthonormic dimensions. Is highly debatable.
- imvetri 7y agoCopyright law is gonna change pretty soon.