5 ms·

Thought experiment: Say you make a big list of words and pleasing combinations of them (I have actually done something similar to make a fantasy RPG name genera

by gary_0 3y ago

Thought experiment: Say you make a big list of words and pleasing combinations of them (I have actually done something similar to make a fantasy RPG name generator.) Now convert that list into a Markov chain or whatever and quasi-randomly generate some short lengths of text. Eventually you might generate copyright-infringing haiku and short poems. Does your data/algorithm violate copyright by itself? Very doubtful; you wrote it all yourself. Only publishing the output violates copyright. (See also: http://allthemusic.info/ http://allthemusic.info/) So if that's legal, how about if, instead of entering the data manually, you write an algorithm to scan poetry and collect statistics about the words in it. Should the legal distinction be any different since all you did was automate the manual process above? Or what if you used a big list of the titles of poetry, which isn't even copyrightable information by itself? You may still succeed in extracting the aesthetic intent of the authors, and a statistical model can plausibly use that to generate copyright-infringing work. Remember, we're not talking about generating novels or paintings here, just 20 words or so (whatever the bare minimum copyrightable amount is) in trillions of generated permutations. You can see where I'm going with this. If those examples are legal, is there a cut-off for more complex statistical systems? Good luck figuring that out in a court of law.

andsoitis 3y ago
> Remember, we're not talking about generating novels or paintings here, just 20 words or so (whatever the bare minimum copyrightable amount is) From https://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/09/09/copyright_protection_for_short/ https://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/09/09/copyright_protection...: Copyright laws disfavor protection for short phrases. Such claims are viewed with suspicion by the Copyright Office, whose circulars state that, “… slogans, and other short phrases or expressions cannot be copyrighted.” [1] These rules are premised on two tenets of copyright law. First, copyright will not protect an idea. Phrases conveying an idea are typically expressed in a limited number of ways and, therefore, are not subject to copyright protection. Second, phrases are considered as common idioms of the English language and are therefore free to all. Granting a monopoly would eventually “checkmate the public” [2] and the purpose of a copyright clause to encourage creativity-would be defeated.
- gary_0 3y ago
  You could still plausibly generate (a significant portion of), let's say, "Fire And Ice" by Robert Frost, which is only 50 words. See also: https://blogs.harvard.edu/ethicalesq/haiku-and-the-fair-use-doctrine/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/ethicalesq/haiku-and-the-fair-use-...
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    If I were the copyright holder of such work, I would argue that the LLM was trained on text, including my copyrighted work, and that if the system produced text that a reasonable person who reads poetry would identify as the copyrighted work, the burden is then logically on the LLM owner to prove the LLM didn't regurgitate a piece of text from something it previously ingested. I think a jury would side with my argument.
    - gary_0 3y ago
      The issue isn't that a generator lets you evade copyright somehow; it doesn't. The output is not the issue. If I sit in paint and my assprint happens to perfectly duplicate a Picasso, that's unlikely to fly in court if I try to sell copies. Picasso painted it first. The point at issue here is that some people are arguing that the models themselves are like a giant collective copyright infringement, since they are in a vague sense simply a sum of the copyrighted works they were trained on. Those people would like to argue that distributing the models or even making use of them is mass copyright infringement. My thought experiment is a reductio ad absurdum of that reasoning.
      - sacrosancty 3y ago
        [dead]
      - andsoitis 3y ago
        I see your point now.
majormajor 3y ago
I'm not sure where we're going with the output in these examples. So let's say there's a human-written poem that's copyright. Let's say a human completely coincidentally writes an identical poem. "Accidentally" producing the same poem wouldn't give the second human any claim to copyrighting or distributing their coincidentally-identical poem. And if GPT accidentally copies large chunks of Harry Potter or Frozen or whatever other popular work, that new creation will have the same problems. But what does that say about if we should also restrict the use of copyright material in training? Just because some algorithm - or some person - can coincidentally duplicate a copyrighted work even without directly reading it doesn't seem to relate to the case of building a model by explicitly using the copyrighted material.

by gary_0 3y ago

andsoitis 3y ago

> Remember, we're not talking about generating novels or paintings here, just 20 words or so (whatever the bare minimum copyrightable amount is) From https://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/09/09/copyright_protection_for_short/ https://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/09/09/copyright_protection...: Copyright laws disfavor protection for short phrases. Such claims are viewed with suspicion by the Copyright Office, whose circulars state that, “… slogans, and other short phrases or expressions cannot be copyrighted.” [1] These rules are premised on two tenets of copyright law. First, copyright will not protect an idea. Phrases conveying an idea are typically expressed in a limited number of ways and, therefore, are not subject to copyright protection. Second, phrases are considered as common idioms of the English language and are therefore free to all. Granting a monopoly would eventually “checkmate the public” [2] and the purpose of a copyright clause to encourage creativity-would be defeated.

gary_0 3y ago
You could still plausibly generate (a significant portion of), let's say, "Fire And Ice" by Robert Frost, which is only 50 words. See also: https://blogs.harvard.edu/ethicalesq/haiku-and-the-fair-use-doctrine/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/ethicalesq/haiku-and-the-fair-use-...
- andsoitis 3y ago
  If I were the copyright holder of such work, I would argue that the LLM was trained on text, including my copyrighted work, and that if the system produced text that a reasonable person who reads poetry would identify as the copyrighted work, the burden is then logically on the LLM owner to prove the LLM didn't regurgitate a piece of text from something it previously ingested. I think a jury would side with my argument.
  - gary_0 3y ago
    The issue isn't that a generator lets you evade copyright somehow; it doesn't. The output is not the issue. If I sit in paint and my assprint happens to perfectly duplicate a Picasso, that's unlikely to fly in court if I try to sell copies. Picasso painted it first. The point at issue here is that some people are arguing that the models themselves are like a giant collective copyright infringement, since they are in a vague sense simply a sum of the copyrighted works they were trained on. Those people would like to argue that distributing the models or even making use of them is mass copyright infringement. My thought experiment is a reductio ad absurdum of that reasoning.
    - sacrosancty 3y ago
      [dead]
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      I see your point now.

majormajor 3y ago

I'm not sure where we're going with the output in these examples. So let's say there's a human-written poem that's copyright. Let's say a human completely coincidentally writes an identical poem. "Accidentally" producing the same poem wouldn't give the second human any claim to copyrighting or distributing their coincidentally-identical poem. And if GPT accidentally copies large chunks of Harry Potter or Frozen or whatever other popular work, that new creation will have the same problems. But what does that say about if we should also restrict the use of copyright material in training? Just because some algorithm - or some person - can coincidentally duplicate a copyrighted work even without directly reading it doesn't seem to relate to the case of building a model by explicitly using the copyrighted material.