5 ms·

> What was originally intended to protect artists has turned into a rent-seeking game in which artists who can afford lawyers monetize the creativity of artists

by Rochus 4y ago

> What was originally intended to protect artists has turned into a rent-seeking game in which artists who can afford lawyers monetize the creativity of artists who can’t. It's rather a rent-seeking industry; the vast majority of artists benefit only marginally from copyright; an original intent, to give composers an income who would otherwise be out of the monetary loop, is long forgotten; instead, early on it was all about protecting the publishers' business by restricting copies; ironically, composers (or musicians in general) today earn best, on average, when they work as a clerk for a copyright collecting society; I don't think patent and copyright law can be fixed; they can only make it even more complicated and unwieldy, so that it gets even further away from composers and authors, and instead plays into the hands of trolls or monopolists. > fixing copyright law to accommodate works used to train AI systems, and developing AI systems that respect the rights of the people who made the works on which their models were trained And then also charge each student of art for studying original works with the intent to create new works based on what they have learned to make a living? This idea can be extended in any direction and quickly leads to a system that is rather against an open society where people benefit from each other.

ROTMetro 4y ago
The system sure seems to have created a ton of music. I know many people who have benefited from being able to actually earn money from their work and would strongly disagree with you. I respect your opinion, but that is all you have written here, your opinion, not some great truth about copyright.
- dcow 4y ago
  You present a false assertion: that owning the copyright is a predicate to receiving money for creative works.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    It is. You sell your music for $1. I sell your music (but without copyright, it's my music, really) for $0.50 in all the same locations as you do. I'll win any race to the bottom, because my cost in time is absolutely less than yours in the effort to sell my music.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      Don't most artists make the majority of their money from live performances, not recording contracts?
      - falcolas 4y ago
        No. Most artists by quantity don't do live performances. And live performances are a lot of work for not a lot of money, unless you're Taylor Swift or one of her peers. Ticket sales end up getting split about 20 different ways. For example, Miracle of Sound doesn't do live performances, because his music is all electronic and created by one person. Plus, I can take my music and do "live" performances of it too. I can also hire folks (say, DJ's) to do these "live" performances on my behalf.
      - coldtea 4y ago
        Lives were traditionally a loss leader for album sales for the majority of artists (to get their name out). Some big names with big followings that charge a premium do make profitable tours, but those are the exception.
    - ginsider_oaks 4y ago
      I'd like to present a counterexample: SNKRX[1]. It costs 3€ and is under the MIT license, you can find it on github[2]. It sold >100,000 units[3], and AFAIK no one's massively undercut the author. I guess he's kind of undercutting himself by making it available on github, but I bet most people would rather pay 3€ and have nice steam features than download and compile a game off a site they likely don't know. And yes, I do realize he's still the copyright holder for SNKRX, but he's not really enforcing it with a permissive license like MIT. [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/915310/SNKRX/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/915310/SNKRX/ [2]: https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX [3]: https://www.a327ex.com/posts/2022/ https://www.a327ex.com/posts/2022/
      - falcolas 4y ago
        Cool! I'll change a few strings and sell it under a public license on Steam and itch.io and the Epic Game Store for 1€, under a slightly different name. Maybe SNKRF. Probably see if I can compile it for mobile and throw it up for free on the app stores with tons of ads. The OC can spend their time on the updates, and I'll spend my time on marketing the new version. I'd probably want to report the original as a clone, because I can and it could help boost my own version's rankings. If the OC wants to fight that, it's his time, so cool. And should the OC actually succeed in getting that clone off the store, the other 10 I've put up while they're busy fighting against the first clone can take its place easily enough. After all, without IP - without copyright - it's mine to sell however I want to. Nobody can stop me, nobody can even really chastise me because nothing was taken and nothing was lost. That copyright you're dismissing is worth a lot. It states that it is, indeed, the owners' work. It raises potential legal ownership issues with the compiled work (which isn't under the same license as the code) and store listings. Even if he's not actively using it, it's still busy protecting his work.
- jerojero 4y ago
  Is it the system, or is it the access to technology and education? Tools like the internet allow pretty much anyone to learn so much about how to make music and not only that but being able to publish your music very easily as well as forming communities, meeting other artists, etc. I'm not sure if it's copyright that has really allowed for music to flourish, I think that's a claim that requires a bit more research behind it.
- Rochus 4y ago
  It's not just an opinion; I'm a musician myself and had many production contracts in the past; I also studied law and am well familiar with the business and the legal issues. There are indeed some people who were able to make a good living from the money they received from the copyright collecting society, though they are a small minority; all musicians I know who are members of a copyright collecting society get a few hundered Swiss francs a year and don't live from their music. Some years ago I analyzed the yearly business report of SUISA, the Swiss copyright collecting society responsible for musicians, and found that of the 120'000'000 CHF payed by the society only one sixth was given to Swiss composers ("Urheber"), and that the probability of any of those composers would get enough money from SUISA to make a decent living is less than 0.1%; for comparison, the probability of being seriously injured or killed in a traffic accident in Switzerland is > 0.2%; the vast majority (> 97%) gets nothing to less than 1900 CHF. In comparison the administrative cost to run SUISA in the same year was 26 mio CHF (compared to the 20 mio CHF payed to musicians), and the publishers received 54 mio CHF. SUISA payed ~19 mio CHF to their 166 employees; in 2006 357'000 CHF was payed to the director alone.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >The system sure seems to have created a ton of music Because of it, or in spite of it?
heavyset_go 4y ago
ML isn't the same thing as human students, it's just computational statistics with some impressive results. Consider it a black box where copyrighted work goes in and similar work pops out. Conflating what is essentially a function approximator with human beings when it comes to law is a stretch.
- Rochus 4y ago
  > a black box where copyrighted work goes in and similar work pops out If a generated work is similar to an already existing copyrighted work, it is not relevant whether the work was generated by a DNN; the author of the original work can file a claim anyway. On the other hand a work generated by a DNN by itself is not copyrightable, since a human author is required by copyright law. The use of training data for the DNN is fair use according to jurisdiction in comparable cases.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    > The use of training data for the DNN is fair use according to jurisdiction in comparable cases. That's more of an open question given that the lawsuits concerning exactly this haven't made it before a judge yet nor have concluded. There are some very sound arguments against this particular case being considered fair use, and they haven't seen the inside of a courtroom to be tested.
    - Rochus 4y ago
      There are enough similar cases for all aspects that are touched here, so that an assessment is quite clear. But of course, every court case has a certain element of surprise.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    And in fact- I think something that would be really helpful is if these models shipped with another model that detected how similar an output image is to a specific image in the training set You could get this score alongside the results if you wanted to generate images but know which ones probably shouldn't be used commercially, or you could choose to filter your results by some similarity threshold

by Rochus 4y ago

ROTMetro 4y ago

The system sure seems to have created a ton of music. I know many people who have benefited from being able to actually earn money from their work and would strongly disagree with you. I respect your opinion, but that is all you have written here, your opinion, not some great truth about copyright.

dcow 4y ago
You present a false assertion: that owning the copyright is a predicate to receiving money for creative works.
- falcolas 4y ago
  It is. You sell your music for $1. I sell your music (but without copyright, it's my music, really) for $0.50 in all the same locations as you do. I'll win any race to the bottom, because my cost in time is absolutely less than yours in the effort to sell my music.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    Don't most artists make the majority of their money from live performances, not recording contracts?
    - falcolas 4y ago
      No. Most artists by quantity don't do live performances. And live performances are a lot of work for not a lot of money, unless you're Taylor Swift or one of her peers. Ticket sales end up getting split about 20 different ways. For example, Miracle of Sound doesn't do live performances, because his music is all electronic and created by one person. Plus, I can take my music and do "live" performances of it too. I can also hire folks (say, DJ's) to do these "live" performances on my behalf.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Lives were traditionally a loss leader for album sales for the majority of artists (to get their name out). Some big names with big followings that charge a premium do make profitable tours, but those are the exception.
  - ginsider_oaks 4y ago
    I'd like to present a counterexample: SNKRX[1]. It costs 3€ and is under the MIT license, you can find it on github[2]. It sold >100,000 units[3], and AFAIK no one's massively undercut the author. I guess he's kind of undercutting himself by making it available on github, but I bet most people would rather pay 3€ and have nice steam features than download and compile a game off a site they likely don't know. And yes, I do realize he's still the copyright holder for SNKRX, but he's not really enforcing it with a permissive license like MIT. [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/915310/SNKRX/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/915310/SNKRX/ [2]: https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX [3]: https://www.a327ex.com/posts/2022/ https://www.a327ex.com/posts/2022/
    - falcolas 4y ago
      Cool! I'll change a few strings and sell it under a public license on Steam and itch.io and the Epic Game Store for 1€, under a slightly different name. Maybe SNKRF. Probably see if I can compile it for mobile and throw it up for free on the app stores with tons of ads. The OC can spend their time on the updates, and I'll spend my time on marketing the new version. I'd probably want to report the original as a clone, because I can and it could help boost my own version's rankings. If the OC wants to fight that, it's his time, so cool. And should the OC actually succeed in getting that clone off the store, the other 10 I've put up while they're busy fighting against the first clone can take its place easily enough. After all, without IP - without copyright - it's mine to sell however I want to. Nobody can stop me, nobody can even really chastise me because nothing was taken and nothing was lost. That copyright you're dismissing is worth a lot. It states that it is, indeed, the owners' work. It raises potential legal ownership issues with the compiled work (which isn't under the same license as the code) and store listings. Even if he's not actively using it, it's still busy protecting his work.
jerojero 4y ago
Is it the system, or is it the access to technology and education? Tools like the internet allow pretty much anyone to learn so much about how to make music and not only that but being able to publish your music very easily as well as forming communities, meeting other artists, etc. I'm not sure if it's copyright that has really allowed for music to flourish, I think that's a claim that requires a bit more research behind it.
Rochus 4y ago
It's not just an opinion; I'm a musician myself and had many production contracts in the past; I also studied law and am well familiar with the business and the legal issues. There are indeed some people who were able to make a good living from the money they received from the copyright collecting society, though they are a small minority; all musicians I know who are members of a copyright collecting society get a few hundered Swiss francs a year and don't live from their music. Some years ago I analyzed the yearly business report of SUISA, the Swiss copyright collecting society responsible for musicians, and found that of the 120'000'000 CHF payed by the society only one sixth was given to Swiss composers ("Urheber"), and that the probability of any of those composers would get enough money from SUISA to make a decent living is less than 0.1%; for comparison, the probability of being seriously injured or killed in a traffic accident in Switzerland is > 0.2%; the vast majority (> 97%) gets nothing to less than 1900 CHF. In comparison the administrative cost to run SUISA in the same year was 26 mio CHF (compared to the 20 mio CHF payed to musicians), and the publishers received 54 mio CHF. SUISA payed ~19 mio CHF to their 166 employees; in 2006 357'000 CHF was payed to the director alone.
coldtea 4y ago
>The system sure seems to have created a ton of music Because of it, or in spite of it?

heavyset_go 4y ago

ML isn't the same thing as human students, it's just computational statistics with some impressive results. Consider it a black box where copyrighted work goes in and similar work pops out. Conflating what is essentially a function approximator with human beings when it comes to law is a stretch.

Rochus 4y ago
> a black box where copyrighted work goes in and similar work pops out If a generated work is similar to an already existing copyrighted work, it is not relevant whether the work was generated by a DNN; the author of the original work can file a claim anyway. On the other hand a work generated by a DNN by itself is not copyrightable, since a human author is required by copyright law. The use of training data for the DNN is fair use according to jurisdiction in comparable cases.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  > The use of training data for the DNN is fair use according to jurisdiction in comparable cases. That's more of an open question given that the lawsuits concerning exactly this haven't made it before a judge yet nor have concluded. There are some very sound arguments against this particular case being considered fair use, and they haven't seen the inside of a courtroom to be tested.
  - Rochus 4y ago
    There are enough similar cases for all aspects that are touched here, so that an assessment is quite clear. But of course, every court case has a certain element of surprise.
- brundolf 4y ago
  And in fact- I think something that would be really helpful is if these models shipped with another model that detected how similar an output image is to a specific image in the training set You could get this score alongside the results if you wanted to generate images but know which ones probably shouldn't be used commercially, or you could choose to filter your results by some similarity threshold