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Right. Most of the conversations about IP on this site seem to rely on extremely abstract reasoning or idealist thinking about what constitutes "property" or wh

Right. Most of the conversations about IP on this site seem to rely on extremely abstract reasoning or idealist thinking about what constitutes "property" or what a "copy" is. My understanding is that judges are not so easily misled. If you are selling a "replica statue of two kings" online that is clearly intended to resemble the Gates of Argonath, you are setting yourself up for a lawsuit. It doesn't matter if you built it from your memory of the LOTR films, used an AI to generate a bunch of similar looking statues and picked the ones most similar to the films, or what have you. In practice any judge will see that you are attempting to make money off of the LOTR IP. (Note: not legal advice.) Note that this doesn't mean that Stable Diffusion (and friends) are copyright infringing just because they're trained on copyrighted material. My brain doesn't infringe the LOTR copyright because of my memories of the films. If I turn my experience of fantasy epics into a new novel with a different storyline than LOTR, that's not copyright infringement. That's creativity. But those same memories can likewise be used to make works that are infringing. The question of infringement isn't in the creative act, it's in the artifact. I think it's plausible (though not certain of course) that IP questions will be settled for AIs in the same way: it's not infringement to train your AI on copyrighted material. It is infringement to use your AI to generate works that a reasonable person would conclude are intended to replicate or imitate copyrighted material.

nextaccountic 4y ago
> it's not infringement to train your AI on copyrighted material. If that's the case, it should probably should be codified in law. Copyright has a lot of exceptions, and if the existence of AI models trained with copyrighted data are in public interest then it could be an exception too, but this should not be up to the courts.
staticman2 4y ago
"My brain doesn't infringe the LOTR copyright because of my memories of the films. " I guess you can pirate Lord of the Rings on bitorrent all you want then? Cause computers are just a bunch of brains remembering things? This is not a winning legal argument. However this is resolved, no court is going to treat an intentionally designed piece of computer software as a "brain". Or the machine storage of information as equivilent to a human being's "memory".
- bscphil 4y ago
  I didn't say that? The act of piracy is an act of copyright infringement. The act of watching a legally owned copy of LOTR until my brain remembers almost every single detail down to the smallest element is not copyright infringement, obviously. I don't see how piracy is relevant here at all. Obviously if OpenAI or other AI researchers are committing media piracy as part of their research, that is something they're legally liable for. It doesn't mean that their AI "remembering" it is inherently infringing.
  - staticman2 4y ago
    My point is the brain metaphor does not work. The copyright act does not regulate "brains" but it does regulate software so what your brain remembers or does not remember is irrelevant. I predict A.I. trained on LOTR will be found to be infringing because it's a derivative work unless the court determines that use of the original work constitutes a fair use. My general point in my intentionally silly brain metaphor is brain metaphors are inapplicable and unconvincing.
    - bscphil 4y ago
      > I predict A.I. trained on LOTR will be found to be infringing because it's a derivative work unless the court determines that use of the original work constitutes a fair use. Okay, but that's just a prediction, not an argument. I don't agree with the prediction. I think it makes some sense to think about the AI training data on analogy with memories, because they contain impressions of a thing without being able to reproduce it exactly. They can both be the source of both real creativity as well as the source of infringing works. I don't see an argument for considering the training data produced by AI training a derivative work, at least not in any copyrightable sense. ChatGPT is "software"; the training data that it operates on is not "software" in the strictest sense and exists in an uncomfortable middle space at present with respect to copyright law. That's what the memory analogy is supposed to show: just like human memories aren't subject to copyright, AI training data that is similar in structure and capabilities to human memories is likewise not subject to copyright. More precisely, my point is that that's one entirely reasonable way courts could rule: AI training data represents "fair use" of its sources (provided they are legally obtained of course), but the products of an AI trained on those sources might not be.

nextaccountic 4y ago

> it's not infringement to train your AI on copyrighted material. If that's the case, it should probably should be codified in law. Copyright has a lot of exceptions, and if the existence of AI models trained with copyrighted data are in public interest then it could be an exception too, but this should not be up to the courts.

staticman2 4y ago

"My brain doesn't infringe the LOTR copyright because of my memories of the films. " I guess you can pirate Lord of the Rings on bitorrent all you want then? Cause computers are just a bunch of brains remembering things? This is not a winning legal argument. However this is resolved, no court is going to treat an intentionally designed piece of computer software as a "brain". Or the machine storage of information as equivilent to a human being's "memory".

bscphil 4y ago
I didn't say that? The act of piracy is an act of copyright infringement. The act of watching a legally owned copy of LOTR until my brain remembers almost every single detail down to the smallest element is not copyright infringement, obviously. I don't see how piracy is relevant here at all. Obviously if OpenAI or other AI researchers are committing media piracy as part of their research, that is something they're legally liable for. It doesn't mean that their AI "remembering" it is inherently infringing.
- staticman2 4y ago
  My point is the brain metaphor does not work. The copyright act does not regulate "brains" but it does regulate software so what your brain remembers or does not remember is irrelevant. I predict A.I. trained on LOTR will be found to be infringing because it's a derivative work unless the court determines that use of the original work constitutes a fair use. My general point in my intentionally silly brain metaphor is brain metaphors are inapplicable and unconvincing.
  - bscphil 4y ago
    > I predict A.I. trained on LOTR will be found to be infringing because it's a derivative work unless the court determines that use of the original work constitutes a fair use. Okay, but that's just a prediction, not an argument. I don't agree with the prediction. I think it makes some sense to think about the AI training data on analogy with memories, because they contain impressions of a thing without being able to reproduce it exactly. They can both be the source of both real creativity as well as the source of infringing works. I don't see an argument for considering the training data produced by AI training a derivative work, at least not in any copyrightable sense. ChatGPT is "software"; the training data that it operates on is not "software" in the strictest sense and exists in an uncomfortable middle space at present with respect to copyright law. That's what the memory analogy is supposed to show: just like human memories aren't subject to copyright, AI training data that is similar in structure and capabilities to human memories is likewise not subject to copyright. More precisely, my point is that that's one entirely reasonable way courts could rule: AI training data represents "fair use" of its sources (provided they are legally obtained of course), but the products of an AI trained on those sources might not be.