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Interesting. Copyright and "intellectual property" have always been fuzzy subjects, and the legal frameworks have always struggled to catch up with changes in

Interesting. Copyright and "intellectual property" have always been fuzzy subjects, and the legal frameworks have always struggled to catch up with changes in society and technology. The origins of copyright are (I think) about publishers re-printing stuff printed by other publishers. It has come a long way with photo copiers, audio tape and with "copy" being the essential primitive of any digital computer. And now AIs can recycle creative thoughts in some sense. I suppose at some point, it makes more sense to look at what kind of law we need in practice, rather than how existing law applies to reality. Should AI models be allowed to learn from publicly available resources, without permission? Probably yes. Should AI output be owned by the AI owner, or anyone? Probably no. Can we (the world) come to an agreement? From there, can we change laws to make this work the way it should?

jillesvangurp 4y ago
> Can we (the world) come to an agreement? From there, can we change laws to make this work the way it should? I doubt there is any consensus for this. Or even a consensus on this being a problem to begin with. The easiest thing for legislators is to do nothing. Predicting that they will do exactly that is almost a foregone conclusion. After all that is what historically happens any time somebody has some issue with the way copyright works. In light of that, all judges can do is rule consistently with previous rulings. And there are a lot of those. Disregarding those is not something they can do. There's going to be lots of haggling on the details but in the end, they can't just wipe out centuries of previous cases and change e.g. the very loosely defined notion of fair use just because it is convenient for some subset of copyright holders. Replace the word AI with "child" in the your comment and you kind of have the legal situation in a nutshell. If you stop thinking about AIs as special in any way and just focus on the outcome: a brain like thing producing content that may or may not infringe on some copyrighted work when it is distributed by someone. The distributing part is going to be done by people typically and it's what creates the infringement. The simplest thing for a judge is to simply look at the content, disregard the way in which it was produced, and compare it to the original work. Either that's going to be a clear infringement under pre-existing notions of that or it isn't. The way in which that copy was created exactly is not really material to the case. There's no need to make any exceptions for there being an AI involved in some way or not. Either the content is an infringement or it is not. Of course that would require judges and lawyers to be rational and logical, which is not an assumption I'd make lightly. But usually these things have a way of coming to some kind of conclusion that big stakeholders in society can live with.
- pipo234 4y ago
  > Replace the word AI with "child" in the your comment and you kind of have the legal situation in a nutshell. Very insightful. I had not thought of it that way. In a legal way, a minor is also very similar: the parent is usually liable if child causes damage. And what about wages, royalties and intellectual property claims for child stars like Michael Jackson, Brittney Spears, etc? Indeed, just as complicated as claiming ownership of a product that's 99% attributable to "a tool" or "a third party collaborator".

jillesvangurp 4y ago

> Can we (the world) come to an agreement? From there, can we change laws to make this work the way it should? I doubt there is any consensus for this. Or even a consensus on this being a problem to begin with. The easiest thing for legislators is to do nothing. Predicting that they will do exactly that is almost a foregone conclusion. After all that is what historically happens any time somebody has some issue with the way copyright works. In light of that, all judges can do is rule consistently with previous rulings. And there are a lot of those. Disregarding those is not something they can do. There's going to be lots of haggling on the details but in the end, they can't just wipe out centuries of previous cases and change e.g. the very loosely defined notion of fair use just because it is convenient for some subset of copyright holders. Replace the word AI with "child" in the your comment and you kind of have the legal situation in a nutshell. If you stop thinking about AIs as special in any way and just focus on the outcome: a brain like thing producing content that may or may not infringe on some copyrighted work when it is distributed by someone. The distributing part is going to be done by people typically and it's what creates the infringement. The simplest thing for a judge is to simply look at the content, disregard the way in which it was produced, and compare it to the original work. Either that's going to be a clear infringement under pre-existing notions of that or it isn't. The way in which that copy was created exactly is not really material to the case. There's no need to make any exceptions for there being an AI involved in some way or not. Either the content is an infringement or it is not. Of course that would require judges and lawyers to be rational and logical, which is not an assumption I'd make lightly. But usually these things have a way of coming to some kind of conclusion that big stakeholders in society can live with.

pipo234 4y ago
> Replace the word AI with "child" in the your comment and you kind of have the legal situation in a nutshell. Very insightful. I had not thought of it that way. In a legal way, a minor is also very similar: the parent is usually liable if child causes damage. And what about wages, royalties and intellectual property claims for child stars like Michael Jackson, Brittney Spears, etc? Indeed, just as complicated as claiming ownership of a product that's 99% attributable to "a tool" or "a third party collaborator".