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> 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
by 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.
- Hizonner 4y ago> 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. Well, actually the stated purpose, in the US and many other places, is to do that as an instrumental subgoal. The underlying main goal is to encourage people to create and publish works, because those works existing is seen as good for the public. If you say copyright should be extended to ML models for that reason (because it definitely doesn't cover them now), then that amounts to saying that public policy should be to encourage there being more of the models. From what we've seen of how they're used and can be used, I'd say that it's not exactly obvious that creating more is a good policy to pursue. > 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, Traditionally an argument against copyright... > 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. Um, no. That sort of consideration might affect the definition people use for derivative works, but it's not the point behind things like fair use, and it had basically no role in the development of the concept. Fair use, like most limitations on copyright, is about the boundaries of what it's appropriate to let somebody control, and how tightly they should be allowed to control it, for whatever random reason. In the US, part of fair use is about trying to keep copyright law from stomping on freedom of speech. That's where all the stuff about transformative use and parody come from. A lot of the rest of fair use is about what rights you as a copyright holder should yield when you sell somebody a copy of a work. There've been plenty of fair use controversies about directly photocopying pages directly out of books. And the result was that such direct copying often can be fair use. But nobody, ever, has brought up the question of having to forget what you know in relation to fair use. That's more like the question of what constitutes a derivative work, but even there I don't think it's ever been a major argument. Also, please stop Capitalizing Random Words like "Creator". We're not talking about gods here. We do not capitalize common nouns in English, and the ONLY place you're breaking that rule is for that specific word.