8 ms·

The Authors Guild v Google decision about Google Books seems relevant: > In late 2013, after the class action status was challenged, the District Court granted

by moyix 4y ago

The Authors Guild v Google decision about Google Books seems relevant: > In late 2013, after the class action status was challenged, the District Court granted summary judgement in favor of Google, dismissing the lawsuit and affirming the Google Books project met all legal requirements for fair use. The Second Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the District Court's summary judgement in October 2015, ruling Google's "project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law." The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently denied a petition to hear the case. [...] > The court's summary of its opinion is: [...] > Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Google’s commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... This doesn't touch on the ethics of course – at minimum I think allowing people to exclude themselves or their work from a dataset is necessary.

authpor 4y ago
> I think allowing people to exclude themselves or their work from a dataset is necessary. or they could open it all up for everybody and stop protecting the rights of death people (authors dead less then 70 years ago) then again, that will make the publishers starve... but why pretend publishing corporations need food?
- noduerme 4y ago
  Why pretend that other corporations that vacuum up content and repackage it have rights to resell art that you want to strip from the original publishers? At least the publishers actually made a contract with the artists.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  This is larger than publishers, this is every artist, film-maker, photographer, every writer, every engineer, anybody who has ever written or created something and shared it publicly is liable to have their work assimilated and an infinite amount of derivatives produced with no control over how they're used and by whom. Comment generated with gpt-neox prompt: Comment about AI and data collection and generation and its pitfalls, expressing concern, emphasis on professions, emphasis on automation, written by Stephen King, creative writing, award winning, trending on reddit, trending on hacker news, written by Greg Rutkowski, written by Zola, written by Voltaire, written by authpor, written by moyix. (Just kidding, it wasn't AI generated but you see my point.)
  - mkaic 4y ago
    > anybody who has ever written or created something and shared it publicly is liable to have their work assimilated and an infinite amount of derivatives produced with no control over how they're used and by whom. This has been the case ever since people started putting their art on the Internet publicly. The only difference is that now it's algorithms creating the derivatives, not people.
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
      This is not remotely the same, scale and barrier to entry matter. With stable diffusion I can pick any artist right now and create over 1000 derivative works by tomorrow morning in his style to the same degree of expertise with no training involved and no work required.
      - jstanley 4y ago
        That's good! Acting like it's a bad thing is just ludditery.
        ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
        I wouldn't be so confident one way or another, this is too new. I think it's going to make a lot of things way more accessible and enable people to express their creative voice who couldn't before. On the other hand you're looking at the destruction of a lot of professions, and possibly overnight with the speed things are moving at. I think if we told every software engineer their skills were entirely obsolete and they had change career tomorrow the reception would be much colder. I remember when I started working on generative models in 2015, you could barely generate a picture of a blurry 40x40 pixels face. Two years later 1024x1024 almost indistinguishable from reality. Now every week we have a new revolutionary application coming out.
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  My personal ideal outcome is that there's no opting out of having your intellectual output included in the training, but the resulting model is as a result available freely to the public. In my utopia, the end results are models containing the sum total of human output, available to everyone. What I think is unconscionable is training the models on public works and then retaining them exclusively for private use.
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
- visarga 4y ago
  For the first time there is a chance for Mickey Mouse to be free, I mean "In-the-style-of-Mickey-Mouse", his new name. When did we ever get such a chance for information freedom?
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
    The Renaissance comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance
echelon 4y ago
Do we allow artists to withhold their works from the minds of eager, learning children? [1] Tell me how ML is different than the mind of a toddler ravenous for new information. For every billion dollar start-up using data at scale, there are tens of thousands more researchers and hobbyists doing the exact same, producing wonderful results and advances. If we stop this growth dead in the tracks, other countries more willing to look past the IP laws will jump ahead. And if Stability locks away their secret sauce, some new party will come and give away the keys to the kingdom yet again. You can't block the signal. Except, of course, by legislating against it in some Luddite hope we can prevent the future from happening. Instead of worrying careers will end, we should look at this as being the end of specialization. No longer do we need to pay 20,000 hours to learn one thing to the exclusion of all others we would like to try. Now we'll be able to clearly articulate ourselves with art, music, poetry. We'll become powerful beings of thought and expression. Humans aren't the end or the peak of evolution. We should be excited to watch this unfold. [1] Maybe Disney would like you to pay more for a premium learning plan for your child, but thankfully that's not (yet) possible.
- nightski 4y ago
  Well a toddler isn’t making money off the information they are absorbing for one. If these are open to the public models that is one thing. But no, these are proprietary models whose sole purpose is to make money for large corporations.
  - echelon 4y ago
    Artists and engineers do exactly this. It just takes a decade.
    - nightski 4y ago
      They are taking your code verbatim and injecting it into numerous code bases around the world violating the license while getting paid for it?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
> the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals It does seem like generative AI systems provide a significant market substitute, so this ruling probably wouldn’t apply, in court. edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194623 for some initial thoughts on how this problem (and others) could be rectified. For example, with a database of protected works and self-censorship algorithms for generative AI systems, conscientiously objecting creatives could have a mechanism for excluding their works.
- tpmoney 4y ago
  A substitute for what though? Copyright law is only concerned with substituting the work under copyright. That is to say, the consideration is whether the infringing aspects of the secondary work would alter the demand and market for the work being infringed. In all the talk about AI data laundering there really hasn't been any indication that the AI generated item substitutes for the item it's alleged to infringe on. Substituting for a whole profession and its practitioners doesn't enter into the concerns of copyright law. There might be some argument that it should (to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" as it were), but copyright law to my knowledge hasn't been used to prevent new tech from putting professionals as a whole out of business.
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
    Stock photography seems to be the obvious instance - why bother paying for the labor to make a stock photo, when you can have a generative AI system create the photo for you? And furthermore, has anyone demonstrated that it is or is not possible to fully, or substantially, recreate any given existing work using the right input prompts? I’m interested to know more of the legal details, but my understanding of copyright law is such that it preserves the value of intellectual labor. edit: on a certain level, the cat is already out of the bag, but that doesn’t mean that we should ignore the law, without some indication from lawmakers or government that they intend to adjust said laws
    - 4y ago
VanTheBrand 4y ago
I would argue (as the court did) that google's use is transformative because the end result "book search" is in a different marketplace from "books." The end result / output of these generative AI systems trained on stock media and art is..."stock media and art." That's kind of what this whole article is about. Just training the systems in research is arguably fair use but creating the entire pipeline might not be and the "loophole" here is trying to claim no responsibility for the training at the center of it because that was technically done by a 3rd party (...funded by the final creator of the full entire pipeline.)
- pavlov 4y ago
  The court’s summary also mentions this aspect of differing marketplaces: “… the revelations [i.e. the information served by Google Book Search] do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals.” This doesn’t apply to AI image generators which are clearly a “market substitute” for the protected originals used to train the system. For this reason I’d expect someone like Getty to want to revisit Authors Guild v Google sooner rather than later.
  - gpm 4y ago
    AI image generators are clearly not a market substitute for images, they are a tool that can be used to create market substitutes, but not themselves one.
    - VanTheBrand 4y ago
      Depends on what the product is. For example with openAI Dalle-2 the product is very clearly the generated image. You even pay per image. Also this is kind of what this article is about. Arbitrarily separating the pieces in order to evade copyright.
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    Can we first get an AI that's actually usefull as a Getty substitute? All I'm seeing posted is visually pleasing nonsense - as soon as I tried to use it for stuff like stock photo generator it's unusable (eg. key physical properties of the object would be off to the point where the object is useless, and in many cases it would look wrong even from a thumbnail). The only thing I did see was designers cropping out the wrong part and filling in the blanks - I suppose it's competing with stock photos in that aspect.
russellbeattie 4y ago
An important part of the opinion (on the wiki page you linked to) is completely missing in the case of AI datasets: > It generates new audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers. This is definitely not the case for artists and photographers, who don't benefit at all from the transformative nature of the AI output, and in fact are significantly harmed since it dilutes the uniqueness of their work by allowing anyone to imitate their style. Though to my knowledge "style" isn't protected by copyright - only trademark - I can't imagine there won't be lawsuits about this in the future. That one artist who complained that people can't find his original work online now because of so many imitated pics is definitely exhibit A in terms of direct harm.
dangerface 4y ago
> Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. So is digitizing a copyright vhs and hosting it via torrents also fair use? Its transformative, the public display of the video is limited, there is no market for vhs. I don't get it whats the difference other than Google having deeper pockets than me?

by moyix 4y ago

authpor 4y ago

> I think allowing people to exclude themselves or their work from a dataset is necessary. or they could open it all up for everybody and stop protecting the rights of death people (authors dead less then 70 years ago) then again, that will make the publishers starve... but why pretend publishing corporations need food?

noduerme 4y ago
Why pretend that other corporations that vacuum up content and repackage it have rights to resell art that you want to strip from the original publishers? At least the publishers actually made a contract with the artists.
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
This is larger than publishers, this is every artist, film-maker, photographer, every writer, every engineer, anybody who has ever written or created something and shared it publicly is liable to have their work assimilated and an infinite amount of derivatives produced with no control over how they're used and by whom. Comment generated with gpt-neox prompt: Comment about AI and data collection and generation and its pitfalls, expressing concern, emphasis on professions, emphasis on automation, written by Stephen King, creative writing, award winning, trending on reddit, trending on hacker news, written by Greg Rutkowski, written by Zola, written by Voltaire, written by authpor, written by moyix. (Just kidding, it wasn't AI generated but you see my point.)
- mkaic 4y ago
  > anybody who has ever written or created something and shared it publicly is liable to have their work assimilated and an infinite amount of derivatives produced with no control over how they're used and by whom. This has been the case ever since people started putting their art on the Internet publicly. The only difference is that now it's algorithms creating the derivatives, not people.
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
    This is not remotely the same, scale and barrier to entry matter. With stable diffusion I can pick any artist right now and create over 1000 derivative works by tomorrow morning in his style to the same degree of expertise with no training involved and no work required.
    - jstanley 4y ago
      That's good! Acting like it's a bad thing is just ludditery.
      - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
        I wouldn't be so confident one way or another, this is too new. I think it's going to make a lot of things way more accessible and enable people to express their creative voice who couldn't before. On the other hand you're looking at the destruction of a lot of professions, and possibly overnight with the speed things are moving at. I think if we told every software engineer their skills were entirely obsolete and they had change career tomorrow the reception would be much colder. I remember when I started working on generative models in 2015, you could barely generate a picture of a blurry 40x40 pixels face. Two years later 1024x1024 almost indistinguishable from reality. Now every week we have a new revolutionary application coming out.
TigeriusKirk 4y ago
My personal ideal outcome is that there's no opting out of having your intellectual output included in the training, but the resulting model is as a result available freely to the public. In my utopia, the end results are models containing the sum total of human output, available to everyone. What I think is unconscionable is training the models on public works and then retaining them exclusively for private use.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
visarga 4y ago
For the first time there is a chance for Mickey Mouse to be free, I mean "In-the-style-of-Mickey-Mouse", his new name. When did we ever get such a chance for information freedom?
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
  The Renaissance comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance

echelon 4y ago

Do we allow artists to withhold their works from the minds of eager, learning children? [1] Tell me how ML is different than the mind of a toddler ravenous for new information. For every billion dollar start-up using data at scale, there are tens of thousands more researchers and hobbyists doing the exact same, producing wonderful results and advances. If we stop this growth dead in the tracks, other countries more willing to look past the IP laws will jump ahead. And if Stability locks away their secret sauce, some new party will come and give away the keys to the kingdom yet again. You can't block the signal. Except, of course, by legislating against it in some Luddite hope we can prevent the future from happening. Instead of worrying careers will end, we should look at this as being the end of specialization. No longer do we need to pay 20,000 hours to learn one thing to the exclusion of all others we would like to try. Now we'll be able to clearly articulate ourselves with art, music, poetry. We'll become powerful beings of thought and expression. Humans aren't the end or the peak of evolution. We should be excited to watch this unfold. [1] Maybe Disney would like you to pay more for a premium learning plan for your child, but thankfully that's not (yet) possible.

nightski 4y ago
Well a toddler isn’t making money off the information they are absorbing for one. If these are open to the public models that is one thing. But no, these are proprietary models whose sole purpose is to make money for large corporations.
- echelon 4y ago
  Artists and engineers do exactly this. It just takes a decade.
  - nightski 4y ago
    They are taking your code verbatim and injecting it into numerous code bases around the world violating the license while getting paid for it?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago

> the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals It does seem like generative AI systems provide a significant market substitute, so this ruling probably wouldn’t apply, in court. edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194623 for some initial thoughts on how this problem (and others) could be rectified. For example, with a database of protected works and self-censorship algorithms for generative AI systems, conscientiously objecting creatives could have a mechanism for excluding their works.

tpmoney 4y ago
A substitute for what though? Copyright law is only concerned with substituting the work under copyright. That is to say, the consideration is whether the infringing aspects of the secondary work would alter the demand and market for the work being infringed. In all the talk about AI data laundering there really hasn't been any indication that the AI generated item substitutes for the item it's alleged to infringe on. Substituting for a whole profession and its practitioners doesn't enter into the concerns of copyright law. There might be some argument that it should (to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" as it were), but copyright law to my knowledge hasn't been used to prevent new tech from putting professionals as a whole out of business.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
  Stock photography seems to be the obvious instance - why bother paying for the labor to make a stock photo, when you can have a generative AI system create the photo for you? And furthermore, has anyone demonstrated that it is or is not possible to fully, or substantially, recreate any given existing work using the right input prompts? I’m interested to know more of the legal details, but my understanding of copyright law is such that it preserves the value of intellectual labor. edit: on a certain level, the cat is already out of the bag, but that doesn’t mean that we should ignore the law, without some indication from lawmakers or government that they intend to adjust said laws
  - 4y ago

VanTheBrand 4y ago

I would argue (as the court did) that google's use is transformative because the end result "book search" is in a different marketplace from "books." The end result / output of these generative AI systems trained on stock media and art is..."stock media and art." That's kind of what this whole article is about. Just training the systems in research is arguably fair use but creating the entire pipeline might not be and the "loophole" here is trying to claim no responsibility for the training at the center of it because that was technically done by a 3rd party (...funded by the final creator of the full entire pipeline.)

pavlov 4y ago
The court’s summary also mentions this aspect of differing marketplaces: “… the revelations [i.e. the information served by Google Book Search] do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals.” This doesn’t apply to AI image generators which are clearly a “market substitute” for the protected originals used to train the system. For this reason I’d expect someone like Getty to want to revisit Authors Guild v Google sooner rather than later.
- gpm 4y ago
  AI image generators are clearly not a market substitute for images, they are a tool that can be used to create market substitutes, but not themselves one.
  - VanTheBrand 4y ago
    Depends on what the product is. For example with openAI Dalle-2 the product is very clearly the generated image. You even pay per image. Also this is kind of what this article is about. Arbitrarily separating the pieces in order to evade copyright.
- moonchrome 4y ago
  Can we first get an AI that's actually usefull as a Getty substitute? All I'm seeing posted is visually pleasing nonsense - as soon as I tried to use it for stuff like stock photo generator it's unusable (eg. key physical properties of the object would be off to the point where the object is useless, and in many cases it would look wrong even from a thumbnail). The only thing I did see was designers cropping out the wrong part and filling in the blanks - I suppose it's competing with stock photos in that aspect.

russellbeattie 4y ago

An important part of the opinion (on the wiki page you linked to) is completely missing in the case of AI datasets: > It generates new audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers. This is definitely not the case for artists and photographers, who don't benefit at all from the transformative nature of the AI output, and in fact are significantly harmed since it dilutes the uniqueness of their work by allowing anyone to imitate their style. Though to my knowledge "style" isn't protected by copyright - only trademark - I can't imagine there won't be lawsuits about this in the future. That one artist who complained that people can't find his original work online now because of so many imitated pics is definitely exhibit A in terms of direct harm.

dangerface 4y ago

> Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. So is digitizing a copyright vhs and hosting it via torrents also fair use? Its transformative, the public display of the video is limited, there is no market for vhs. I don't get it whats the difference other than Google having deeper pockets than me?