4 ms·

The idea copyright is to protect the author’s specific personality in the expression of an idea while, at the same time, allowing for the free circulation of th

by leobg 4y ago

The idea copyright is to protect the author’s specific personality in the expression of an idea while, at the same time, allowing for the free circulation of the idea itself. An ML model has no personality. It is not a legal entity. Also, its outputs are in no way the direct expression of the personality of those who trained it. It is precisely this what differentiates ML from regular code: With regular code, it’s the programmer who solves the problem in a way that is similarly personal as someone writing a novel or an easy. But with ML, the specific implementation is found by the software itself. You can’t have it both ways. Both not having to write the solution itself AND claim personal ownership of the results. (But of course, we’ll see what the courts actually say.)

WalterSear 4y ago
A model weight is the result of a human creative process, and in no way less an expression of an idea than a coded program. Creative choices are made in regards to training data and in writing and running the implementation. Is the output of an ML model a creative work? I would argue that it also is. The real question, however, is whose work. Or rather, what proportion of the work was created by the original artists, and what proportion was created by the ML developers. The questions at the heart of this is similar to the one society had about samples in music. I don't think anyone today would deny that sampling can be a legitimate creative process.
- mstolpm 4y ago
  Stable Diffusion is trained on 2.3 billion images. It would take a human ~220 years to decide if an image should be included in the training set under the condition that a decision takes 1 second and the human works for 8 hours straight year-round. GPT is even worse in that regard, it was literally trained on the whole web plus other sources. I'd be surprised if a judge would follow the argument that the training data was make by creative choice instead of raw crawling power. I'd argue the size of training data makes it impossible to call for a creative selection process for the data.
  - leobg 4y ago
    That’s precisely the funny thing with copyright: If you create a work where you can clearly tell what the source was for your inspiration because you stole from another source, it’s a violation of copyright. But if you create a work and you can not tell what the source is of your inspiration, because you stole from so many different sources, not only is not a violation of copyright, but it’s actually the creation of a new copyrighted work in its own right. ML is short-circuiting this legal framework. Because now stealing from thousands of different authors, in a way that it’s no longer possible to tell the sources can now be done with the press of a button.
  - WalterSear 4y ago
    It's a thing. Someone wrote it. Raw crawling power was created. Someone made the choice to use raw crawling power. This is all a creative act. Different models do different things. If there was no creation involved, they would not.
orev 4y ago
> The idea copyright is to protect the author’s specific personality in the expression of an idea while, at the same time, allowing for the free circulation of the idea itself. Is that really the idea of copyright? I’m not sure it is. The purpose of copyright is to allow Creators to create works and then make a living from them without others making copies and reselling them for their own profit. For physical goods you don’t need anything special to ensure widgets aren’t resold infinitely, because resale of one leaves the seller without the item, and making new physical copies requires a lot of effort in materials, time, building factories, etc. so there’s a natural pressure/market forces to keep that kind of activity in check (and indeed we also have patent law to place other restrictions on this as well). But with non-physical works that can be easily duplicated, the reseller can keep the original and sell effectively infinite copies. With non-physical goods (i.e. ideas), you can’t remove them from someone’s mind after they’ve consumed them, so that’s where fair use and other balancing principles come in. Allowances are made that as long as a new work made by another Creator isn’t significantly close to the original, then copyright allows it, even if there’s room to argue that one is based off the other, because if you didn’t allow it then every part of human knowledge wouldn’t be allowed because someone else thought of it first. So what’s the difference with MLs vs. a human brain? The dataset used to train the ML can be curated by a human to ensure restricted data doesn’t get in, and the data can be removed from the ML after training (such as by reverting to a previous version of bad data was added). It then becomes a question of where did the original (training) data come from? If the human made the choice to wholesale scrape the Internet, then there’s clearly copyright violations since copyright (in the US) automatically grants Creators “all rights” unless otherwise waived (such as by adding a CC or Open Source license), and the human made the choice to ignore that distinction. The fact that most tech companies treat everything posted on the Internet as free use is going to bite them here. Only companies (like FB) that have full control of the data and user agreements where they clearly state this would be in the clear. Ultimately this is going to be a collision of current practices where everyone treats online data like the Wild West, and is only getting away with the current state of things because bad behavior is so widespread that enforcement simply cannot keep up with the enormous scale of it. The only code generating MLs that are safe to use are the ones trained using nothing but Open Source code, and even then the nuances of each type of OSS license need to be adhered to.

by leobg 4y ago

WalterSear 4y ago

A model weight is the result of a human creative process, and in no way less an expression of an idea than a coded program. Creative choices are made in regards to training data and in writing and running the implementation. Is the output of an ML model a creative work? I would argue that it also is. The real question, however, is whose work. Or rather, what proportion of the work was created by the original artists, and what proportion was created by the ML developers. The questions at the heart of this is similar to the one society had about samples in music. I don't think anyone today would deny that sampling can be a legitimate creative process.

mstolpm 4y ago
Stable Diffusion is trained on 2.3 billion images. It would take a human ~220 years to decide if an image should be included in the training set under the condition that a decision takes 1 second and the human works for 8 hours straight year-round. GPT is even worse in that regard, it was literally trained on the whole web plus other sources. I'd be surprised if a judge would follow the argument that the training data was make by creative choice instead of raw crawling power. I'd argue the size of training data makes it impossible to call for a creative selection process for the data.
- leobg 4y ago
  That’s precisely the funny thing with copyright: If you create a work where you can clearly tell what the source was for your inspiration because you stole from another source, it’s a violation of copyright. But if you create a work and you can not tell what the source is of your inspiration, because you stole from so many different sources, not only is not a violation of copyright, but it’s actually the creation of a new copyrighted work in its own right. ML is short-circuiting this legal framework. Because now stealing from thousands of different authors, in a way that it’s no longer possible to tell the sources can now be done with the press of a button.
- WalterSear 4y ago
  It's a thing. Someone wrote it. Raw crawling power was created. Someone made the choice to use raw crawling power. This is all a creative act. Different models do different things. If there was no creation involved, they would not.

orev 4y ago

> The idea copyright is to protect the author’s specific personality in the expression of an idea while, at the same time, allowing for the free circulation of the idea itself. Is that really the idea of copyright? I’m not sure it is. The purpose of copyright is to allow Creators to create works and then make a living from them without others making copies and reselling them for their own profit. For physical goods you don’t need anything special to ensure widgets aren’t resold infinitely, because resale of one leaves the seller without the item, and making new physical copies requires a lot of effort in materials, time, building factories, etc. so there’s a natural pressure/market forces to keep that kind of activity in check (and indeed we also have patent law to place other restrictions on this as well). But with non-physical works that can be easily duplicated, the reseller can keep the original and sell effectively infinite copies. With non-physical goods (i.e. ideas), you can’t remove them from someone’s mind after they’ve consumed them, so that’s where fair use and other balancing principles come in. Allowances are made that as long as a new work made by another Creator isn’t significantly close to the original, then copyright allows it, even if there’s room to argue that one is based off the other, because if you didn’t allow it then every part of human knowledge wouldn’t be allowed because someone else thought of it first. So what’s the difference with MLs vs. a human brain? The dataset used to train the ML can be curated by a human to ensure restricted data doesn’t get in, and the data can be removed from the ML after training (such as by reverting to a previous version of bad data was added). It then becomes a question of where did the original (training) data come from? If the human made the choice to wholesale scrape the Internet, then there’s clearly copyright violations since copyright (in the US) automatically grants Creators “all rights” unless otherwise waived (such as by adding a CC or Open Source license), and the human made the choice to ignore that distinction. The fact that most tech companies treat everything posted on the Internet as free use is going to bite them here. Only companies (like FB) that have full control of the data and user agreements where they clearly state this would be in the clear. Ultimately this is going to be a collision of current practices where everyone treats online data like the Wild West, and is only getting away with the current state of things because bad behavior is so widespread that enforcement simply cannot keep up with the enormous scale of it. The only code generating MLs that are safe to use are the ones trained using nothing but Open Source code, and even then the nuances of each type of OSS license need to be adhered to.