5 ms·

The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrig

The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.

mouse_ 4y ago
Yeah but our current implementation of law is entirely subjective and exists solely to benefit those Fortune 500 organizations.
tester756 4y ago
>Bing, Google ~~robots.txt~~ ai.txt for code repos? :P
- captaincaveman 4y ago
  robots.txt lacks nuance about copyright, it doesn't really serve the same purpose.
chongli 4y ago
I think it comes down to use. Web crawlers like Google are fine because they index the web and then the search engine directs users to the original source. If instead Google recycled all the content they crawled and hosted everything on google.com while scrubbing all attributions from the pages then they’d fall afoul of copyright law (specifically the moral rights [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
- kossTKR 4y ago
  They already do though. I've read several articles about people's blogs plummeting after google adopted their text into an "info box", same as the Google News controversy a few years ago where newspapers lost traffic. It's all bad. They really should pay the "little man" not just publishers with lawyer budgets - same with AI.
  - chongli 4y ago
    That's a separate issue and definitely a problem! There's no way they would get away with that if they were a small company. The fact that they can and do so routinely is yet another piece of damning evidence that our laws are broken because they don't apply equally to regular people and big corporations.
- rootlocus 4y ago
  Google has stolen data from pages and showed it without attribution on their search page: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG-116-JU05-20190716-SD015.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...
wwweston 4y ago
If you're a rideshare or cab driver and you also happen to see / recognize billboards nobody is going to hassle you for storing those in your neural net or suggest law should do so. If you're a designer and you take "billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted" as stored in your head as the basis for something you're working on, you will need to consider ways in which your derivative work may be infringing. Similarly, no, the space where copyright meets training data doesn't "means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal." Nobody is going to care if a driving or search neural net has that billboard or t-shirt data, because their function isn't to output copies or derivative works. If the function of what you're building is to output billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that's copyrighted, then you may violating the spirit of copyright law whether you're wetware or using silicon. And whether or not the letter of the law has been refined carefully to apply to the issues at hand.
- kragen 4y ago
  actually google got sued for this in multiple countries already, as the article sort of mentions
- gitfan86 4y ago
  The creators of photoshop didn't build it intending that the output be used to create labels for counterfeit products. But that is what some people use it for. The creators of stable diffusion didn't create it with the intent helping people infringe on copyrights either. But some people will use it for that purpose.
carom 4y ago
Most training cases are covered by fair use. The problem is when the work is licensed with specific clauses about derivative works. The weights are a derivative work of the open source code on which they were trained.

mouse_ 4y ago

Yeah but our current implementation of law is entirely subjective and exists solely to benefit those Fortune 500 organizations.

tester756 4y ago

>Bing, Google ~~robots.txt~~ ai.txt for code repos? :P

captaincaveman 4y ago
robots.txt lacks nuance about copyright, it doesn't really serve the same purpose.

chongli 4y ago

I think it comes down to use. Web crawlers like Google are fine because they index the web and then the search engine directs users to the original source. If instead Google recycled all the content they crawled and hosted everything on google.com while scrubbing all attributions from the pages then they’d fall afoul of copyright law (specifically the moral rights [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

kossTKR 4y ago
They already do though. I've read several articles about people's blogs plummeting after google adopted their text into an "info box", same as the Google News controversy a few years ago where newspapers lost traffic. It's all bad. They really should pay the "little man" not just publishers with lawyer budgets - same with AI.
- chongli 4y ago
  That's a separate issue and definitely a problem! There's no way they would get away with that if they were a small company. The fact that they can and do so routinely is yet another piece of damning evidence that our laws are broken because they don't apply equally to regular people and big corporations.
rootlocus 4y ago
Google has stolen data from pages and showed it without attribution on their search page: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG-116-JU05-20190716-SD015.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...

wwweston 4y ago

If you're a rideshare or cab driver and you also happen to see / recognize billboards nobody is going to hassle you for storing those in your neural net or suggest law should do so. If you're a designer and you take "billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted" as stored in your head as the basis for something you're working on, you will need to consider ways in which your derivative work may be infringing. Similarly, no, the space where copyright meets training data doesn't "means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal." Nobody is going to care if a driving or search neural net has that billboard or t-shirt data, because their function isn't to output copies or derivative works. If the function of what you're building is to output billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that's copyrighted, then you may violating the spirit of copyright law whether you're wetware or using silicon. And whether or not the letter of the law has been refined carefully to apply to the issues at hand.

kragen 4y ago
actually google got sued for this in multiple countries already, as the article sort of mentions
gitfan86 4y ago
The creators of photoshop didn't build it intending that the output be used to create labels for counterfeit products. But that is what some people use it for. The creators of stable diffusion didn't create it with the intent helping people infringe on copyrights either. But some people will use it for that purpose.

carom 4y ago

Most training cases are covered by fair use. The problem is when the work is licensed with specific clauses about derivative works. The weights are a derivative work of the open source code on which they were trained.