4 ms·

>It's not clear that training violates copyright. Training a model essentially creates a derivative work from the input data. GPL licensed code requires keepin

by ginko 4y ago

>It's not clear that training violates copyright. Training a model essentially creates a derivative work from the input data. GPL licensed code requires keeping the same license for derivative work. BSD-style licenses at the very least require retaining the copyright statement. It feels pretty clear to me that the trained model and code generated from it would have to adhere to the original license. In a way ML is a bit like lossy compression. Would you think JPEG encoding and decoding an image strips the result of its original copyright?

andybak 4y ago
I agree that this is one likely interpretation but it's not the only one and it's yet to be tested in the courts.
wongarsu 4y ago
There is a point where a derivative work is so transformative that the original copyright no longer matters. In the US you would argue via fair use, where the precedent is "The more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use" [1], and other jurisdictions have equivalent ways to excempt works that are different or transformative enough. So the big question is how transformativ a given model is. And at least for language models I'm not sure we even understand Transformer models enough to give a qualified answer. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use
- staindk 4y ago
  I think this is true, but currently you can coax e.g. stable diffusion to generate art in the style of a specific person, and if you do things right, it will even have a smudge-y version of their monogram/signature in the bottom right. Pretty clear indication that something is not yet 'transformative enough', IMO. Same happens with Copilot and such - you can get it to spit out tens of lines of code verbatim pulled from someone else's project, with comments and all. These kinds of things just don't sit right with me.
  - andybak 4y ago
    > I think this is true, but currently you can coax e.g. stable diffusion to generate art in the style of a specific person, and if you do things right, it will even have a smudge-y version of their monogram/signature in the bottom right. You're conflating two things here: 1. SD can generate art in the style of a specific person 2. It also adds signatures to some pieces These are independent things. Sometimes it does 1 without 2 and sometimes 2 without 1. And the signature can appear on the wrong artist - or the signature is a weird mix of different signatures. It's just that it's been trained on "paintings with signatures" so it includes them. It's not the damning evidence some claim it to be.
  - archontes 4y ago
    It's worth noting that copyright doesn't protect code in the instance that the function cannot be divorced from the creative expression. Comments and all would almost certainly be an infringement, as they are completely expressive and non-functional. But you'll find that if you strip out those comments, it's possible that it would fail the test of the idea being separable from the expression [1]. [1] https://casetext.com/case/kern-river-gas-transmission-v-coastal-corp https://casetext.com/case/kern-river-gas-transmission-v-coas...
  - Renaud 4y ago
    Producing art in the style of someone else is perfectly fine. It's been done for centuries. What is not fine is claiming that this is from the artist whose style is being copied. That makes your work a counterfeit. To me, the legal protections for artists already exist: copyright offers protections against verbatim copying, laws against counterfeiting protect against original work made to be passed as if it were from the artist. Whether these laws are still adequate in the face of AI-generated content is debatable and my guess is that we are in for interesting tests and debates around the subject. Artists should have the means to protect their work. It's a condition to create a society where art can flourish in public. Everyone benefits. However, artists should not be able to suppress the means of creation. Technology has always been a boon to Art. It can be the cause of huge shifts and some types of art may disappear in favour of new ones, but it's never hindered our innate need for creating art.
archontes 4y ago
This is almost certainly false. Derivative work is a category of copyrightable material where an existing work was further creatively transformed in order to create said derivative work. For example painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. That creates a derivative work, which has a separate copyright on the creative addition (the moustache). Training an AI has been found to be not creative work. The AI weights, as a result, are not a derivative work, and likely cannot be copyrighted. Your GPL example is an unexpectedly poignant one, as well, though it will be to your chagrin. If you publish your GPL code, and I learn from it and produce code that does the same thing, that is not restricted by copyright. Furthermore, if it's found that the expression of the code itself cannot be separated from the function, the expression is not copyrightable in the first place, and the GPL is redundant. It's only in the instance that I reproduce your code exactly and the function is separable from the creative expression that your copyright is valid. Regarding your JPEG compression, it's possible that a ML model will produce outputs that, of themselves, are copyright infringement. A recognizable picture of Ariel, for example. That doesn't mean that the training, the model, or anything else it produces is infringing.
- ginko 4y ago
  > This is almost certainly false. Derivative work is a category of copyrightable material where an existing work was further creatively transformed in order to create said derivative work. For example painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa has been in public domain for several centuries, so it's a pretty bad example.
  - archontes 4y ago
    It's literally the example, so... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work#Examples_of_derivative_works_under_U.S._law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work#Examples_of_de...

by ginko 4y ago

andybak 4y ago

I agree that this is one likely interpretation but it's not the only one and it's yet to be tested in the courts.

wongarsu 4y ago

There is a point where a derivative work is so transformative that the original copyright no longer matters. In the US you would argue via fair use, where the precedent is "The more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use" [1], and other jurisdictions have equivalent ways to excempt works that are different or transformative enough. So the big question is how transformativ a given model is. And at least for language models I'm not sure we even understand Transformer models enough to give a qualified answer. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use

staindk 4y ago
I think this is true, but currently you can coax e.g. stable diffusion to generate art in the style of a specific person, and if you do things right, it will even have a smudge-y version of their monogram/signature in the bottom right. Pretty clear indication that something is not yet 'transformative enough', IMO. Same happens with Copilot and such - you can get it to spit out tens of lines of code verbatim pulled from someone else's project, with comments and all. These kinds of things just don't sit right with me.
- andybak 4y ago
  > I think this is true, but currently you can coax e.g. stable diffusion to generate art in the style of a specific person, and if you do things right, it will even have a smudge-y version of their monogram/signature in the bottom right. You're conflating two things here: 1. SD can generate art in the style of a specific person 2. It also adds signatures to some pieces These are independent things. Sometimes it does 1 without 2 and sometimes 2 without 1. And the signature can appear on the wrong artist - or the signature is a weird mix of different signatures. It's just that it's been trained on "paintings with signatures" so it includes them. It's not the damning evidence some claim it to be.
- archontes 4y ago
  It's worth noting that copyright doesn't protect code in the instance that the function cannot be divorced from the creative expression. Comments and all would almost certainly be an infringement, as they are completely expressive and non-functional. But you'll find that if you strip out those comments, it's possible that it would fail the test of the idea being separable from the expression [1]. [1] https://casetext.com/case/kern-river-gas-transmission-v-coastal-corp https://casetext.com/case/kern-river-gas-transmission-v-coas...
- Renaud 4y ago
  Producing art in the style of someone else is perfectly fine. It's been done for centuries. What is not fine is claiming that this is from the artist whose style is being copied. That makes your work a counterfeit. To me, the legal protections for artists already exist: copyright offers protections against verbatim copying, laws against counterfeiting protect against original work made to be passed as if it were from the artist. Whether these laws are still adequate in the face of AI-generated content is debatable and my guess is that we are in for interesting tests and debates around the subject. Artists should have the means to protect their work. It's a condition to create a society where art can flourish in public. Everyone benefits. However, artists should not be able to suppress the means of creation. Technology has always been a boon to Art. It can be the cause of huge shifts and some types of art may disappear in favour of new ones, but it's never hindered our innate need for creating art.

archontes 4y ago

This is almost certainly false. Derivative work is a category of copyrightable material where an existing work was further creatively transformed in order to create said derivative work. For example painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. That creates a derivative work, which has a separate copyright on the creative addition (the moustache). Training an AI has been found to be not creative work. The AI weights, as a result, are not a derivative work, and likely cannot be copyrighted. Your GPL example is an unexpectedly poignant one, as well, though it will be to your chagrin. If you publish your GPL code, and I learn from it and produce code that does the same thing, that is not restricted by copyright. Furthermore, if it's found that the expression of the code itself cannot be separated from the function, the expression is not copyrightable in the first place, and the GPL is redundant. It's only in the instance that I reproduce your code exactly and the function is separable from the creative expression that your copyright is valid. Regarding your JPEG compression, it's possible that a ML model will produce outputs that, of themselves, are copyright infringement. A recognizable picture of Ariel, for example. That doesn't mean that the training, the model, or anything else it produces is infringing.

ginko 4y ago
> This is almost certainly false. Derivative work is a category of copyrightable material where an existing work was further creatively transformed in order to create said derivative work. For example painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa has been in public domain for several centuries, so it's a pretty bad example.
- archontes 4y ago
  It's literally the example, so... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work#Examples_of_derivative_works_under_U.S._law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work#Examples_of_de...