4 ms·

These are not bad arguments, but I don't think they're conclusive. I am a lawyer, and I could absolutely see this going the other way. "You can't make these mac

by jrm4 3y ago

These are not bad arguments, but I don't think they're conclusive. I am a lawyer, and I could absolutely see this going the other way. "You can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy. You can see this by when they reproduce, e.g. the "getty images" deal." *this is not legal advice, dangit commenter person below

londons_explore 3y ago
It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really...
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  ...and the Supreme Court could rule however it likes. It doesn't matter what anyone else says, or what any law says, what any lawyer or other judge says. They could be completely biased, could completely ignore everyone and everything else and rule however they want. I'm almost surprised they still bother to write any kind of "legal reasoning" in their ruling and don't simply focus on what the ruling is rather than why they ruled that way. But I guess such "reasoning" still serves a propaganda purpose and still provides a fig leaf for those who still believe in the quaint absurdity that "we are a nation of laws, not men."
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Supreme court precedent seems to impact a lot of decisions... Plenty of companies who have legal teams will keep an eye on the legal landscape of court decisions, and use them to decide if our T&C's or contracts need rewriting, or if any precedent puts us at legal risk. Sure - the supreme court could overthrow its precedent anytime, but until it does, a lot of people will act as if what they say is the law.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really... Not really for practical purposes. In the long term, the Supreme Court can and does overrule its own precedent, so the first case on the specific issue to get to the Supreme Court doesn’t end the discussion. In the short-term, cases get resolved by lower courts and parties either lack funds to do the maximum level of appeals, or the Supreme Court chooses not to hear appeals (they tend to prefer an issue to be well-developed with circuit case law, often waiting till there is a conflict between the Circuit Courts of Appeal, before taking it up), so the state of the law prior to any specific ruling on the narrow topic by the Supreme Court matters quite a bit.
staunton 3y ago
This is the first time I ever saw a comment including the text "I am a lawyer". Does that mean the comment technically contains "legal advice"?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  As always, a lawyer is not necessarily your lawyer.
- mike_d 3y ago
  If you choose to pay him, sure.
m4nu3l 3y ago
> you can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy. They don't necessarily do. Think about that. You can take some copyrighted material and transform the information contained in it (for instance a fictional book). You can then write a summary. The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy. The ML model contains information that has been generalized by some degree. So it's just a grey area IMO.
- visarga 3y ago
  This is a great example. Summarizing or paraphrasing copyrighted content, or simply using it as a seed to generate input-output pairs - this kind of data transformation prior to training could solve the issues with copyright. It cleanly separates form from content.
- mike_d 3y ago
  > The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy. The summary also contains original thought, something is added to it by a human to make it unique. AI models are primarily deriviative. A better example would be: if I take 1,000 different copyrighted works and put them into a ZIP file, does that resulting file violate copyright?
  - version_five 3y ago
    That example is awful, whatever side of the debate one is on
  - kevin42 3y ago
    Let's say you take the harry potter books and create a spreadsheet with each word in it as a column, and the number of times that word appears. Would that violate the copyright? I'd be interested in the rationale if someone thinks it would.
    - mike_d 3y ago

by jrm4 3y ago

londons_explore 3y ago

It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really...

pmoriarty 3y ago
...and the Supreme Court could rule however it likes. It doesn't matter what anyone else says, or what any law says, what any lawyer or other judge says. They could be completely biased, could completely ignore everyone and everything else and rule however they want. I'm almost surprised they still bother to write any kind of "legal reasoning" in their ruling and don't simply focus on what the ruling is rather than why they ruled that way. But I guess such "reasoning" still serves a propaganda purpose and still provides a fig leaf for those who still believe in the quaint absurdity that "we are a nation of laws, not men."
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Supreme court precedent seems to impact a lot of decisions... Plenty of companies who have legal teams will keep an eye on the legal landscape of court decisions, and use them to decide if our T&C's or contracts need rewriting, or if any precedent puts us at legal risk. Sure - the supreme court could overthrow its precedent anytime, but until it does, a lot of people will act as if what they say is the law.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really... Not really for practical purposes. In the long term, the Supreme Court can and does overrule its own precedent, so the first case on the specific issue to get to the Supreme Court doesn’t end the discussion. In the short-term, cases get resolved by lower courts and parties either lack funds to do the maximum level of appeals, or the Supreme Court chooses not to hear appeals (they tend to prefer an issue to be well-developed with circuit case law, often waiting till there is a conflict between the Circuit Courts of Appeal, before taking it up), so the state of the law prior to any specific ruling on the narrow topic by the Supreme Court matters quite a bit.

staunton 3y ago

This is the first time I ever saw a comment including the text "I am a lawyer". Does that mean the comment technically contains "legal advice"?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
As always, a lawyer is not necessarily your lawyer.
mike_d 3y ago
If you choose to pay him, sure.

m4nu3l 3y ago

> you can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy. They don't necessarily do. Think about that. You can take some copyrighted material and transform the information contained in it (for instance a fictional book). You can then write a summary. The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy. The ML model contains information that has been generalized by some degree. So it's just a grey area IMO.

visarga 3y ago
This is a great example. Summarizing or paraphrasing copyrighted content, or simply using it as a seed to generate input-output pairs - this kind of data transformation prior to training could solve the issues with copyright. It cleanly separates form from content.
mike_d 3y ago
> The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy. The summary also contains original thought, something is added to it by a human to make it unique. AI models are primarily deriviative. A better example would be: if I take 1,000 different copyrighted works and put them into a ZIP file, does that resulting file violate copyright?
- version_five 3y ago
  That example is awful, whatever side of the debate one is on
- kevin42 3y ago
  Let's say you take the harry potter books and create a spreadsheet with each word in it as a column, and the number of times that word appears. Would that violate the copyright? I'd be interested in the rationale if someone thinks it would.
  - mike_d 3y ago