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> The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources

> The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.” This is the makers of AI explicitly saying that they did use copyrighted works from a book piracy website. If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. If you downloaded all of them, you would be liable for many billions of dollars in damages. But companies like Google and Facebook get to play by different rules. Kill one person and you're a murderer, kill a million and to ask you about it is a "gotcha question" that you can react to with outrage.

Der_Einzige 3y ago
I for one am quite happy that AI folks are basically treating copyright as not existing. I strongly hope that the courts find that LLM weights, and the datasets are "fair-use" or whatever other silly legal justification. Aaron Swartz was a saint.
- suction 3y ago
  [dead]
- slashdev 3y ago
  Agreed, copyright has gone too far. I hope the advent of AI serves to weaken it.
- axblount 3y ago
  Swartz distributed information for everyone to use freely. These companies are processing it privately to develop their for-profit products. Big difference, IMO.
  - Der_Einzige 3y ago
    I am sad about closed source LLMs like ChatGPT, but Llama is in that grey area where it's freely available if you choose to ignore their silly license stuff, which of course pirates and AI developers are all too keen to ignore. Even if they win the lawsuit, LLM development will simply go underground, and as we see from what the coomers at civitai and in the stable diffusion world have done, that may in fact ironically speed up development in AI.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  While I’ma proponent of free information and loosening copyright, allowing billion dollar companies to package up the sum of human creation and resell statistical models that mimic the content and style of everyone… is a bit far. Fair use is for humans.
  - brnaftr361 3y ago
    Yeah, but hypothetically should open source projects be offered special protections? I feel like they should, and with certain caveats where, say, a company like Meta is allowed to claim fair use if and only if they free up the entire ecosystem as they deploy it. But yeah, having private ostensibly profitable models based on other people's work without giving them free access to it is not fair. Give some get some.
    - colechristensen 3y ago
      Maybe… maybe restrictions freed up for resources in the public domain… that is no patent, copyright, license or ownership rights of any kind. As in you could distribute the thing unmolested but that’s it.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Copyrights shouldn't exist, but > LLM weights, and the datasets are "fair-use" or whatever other silly legal justification. Would just be a carve out for the wealthy. If these laws don't mean anything, everyone who got harassed, threatened, extorted, fined, arrested, tried, or jailed for internet piracy are owed reparations. Let Meta pay them.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  > I for one am quite happy that AI folks are basically treating copyright as not existing. I strongly hope that the courts find that LLM weights, and the datasets are "fair-use" or whatever other silly legal justification. I would be very happy if either a court or lawmakers decided that copyright itself was unconscionable. That isn't what's going to happen, though. And I think it's incredibly unacceptable if a court or lawmakers instead decide that AI training in particular gets a special exception to violate other people's copyrights on a massive scale when nobody else gets to do that. As far as a fair use argument in particular, fair use in the US is a fourfold test: > the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; The purpose and character is absolutely heavily commercial and makes a great deal of money for the companies building the AIs. A primary use is to create other works of commercial value competing with the original works. > the nature of the copyrighted work; There's nothing about the works used for AI training that makes them any less entitled to copyright protections or more permissive of fair use than anything else. They're not unpublished, they're not merely collections of facts or ideas, etc. > the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and AI training uses entire works, not excerpts. > the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. AI models are having a massive effect on the market for and value of the works they train on, as is being widely discussed in multiple industries. Art, writing, voice acting, code; in any market AI can generate content for, the value of such content goes down. (This argument does not require AI to be as good as humans. Even if the high end of every market produces work substantially better than AI, flooding a market with unlimited amounts of cheap/free low-end content still has a massive effect.)
  - lubujackson 3y ago
    It is the equivalent of making a 3D map of a museum and getting sued by one artist of one painting in the museum. Ant individual work in an AI dataset is nearly worthless - only in aggregate does it have value. If that doesn't count as a "transformative work" I don't know what does.
    - thebears5454 3y ago
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  There's a difference between "information wants to be free" and "Facebook can produce works minimally derived from your greatest creative work at a scale you can't match". LLMs seem to aggregate that value to whoever builds the model, which they can then sell access to, or sell the output it produces. Five years from now, will OpenAI actually be open, or will it be a rent seeking org chasing the next quarterly gains? I expect the latter.
  - PostOnce 3y ago
    "Will OpenAI actually be open" That ship sailed, friend. OpenAI is no longer a charity in any meaningful sense of the word anymore, it's now an adversarial organization working against the public good with the sole aim of making a few rich men richer. After privatization, they sent their PR people to lobby congress to make it impossible for anyone to compete with them (important note: not out of any interest in actually "protecting" the public from the very AI they're building), and perhaps worst of all, they're no longer being open with the scientific theories and data behind their new models.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      we are rapidly achieving the cyberpunk future, and it's much worse than we thought.
    - two_in_one 3y ago
      > an adversarial organization working against the public good with the sole aim of making a few rich men richer. I wonder what is _not_ in the list?
amf12 3y ago
The lawsuit doesn't even mention Google.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  No, I did. What's your point?
  - fweimer 3y ago
    I think it's a reference to Google's book scanning product, which is structurally similar: they use copyrighted material to provide a new kind of service, which contains an echo of the original material. The book scanning and the related search product is supposedly legal under U.S. copyright law.
  - kccqzy 3y ago
    The point is that GP has no reason to believe Google, like Meta, also used copyrighted materials for training its AI. Why did Sarah Silverman sue OpenAI and Meta but not Google?
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      I didn't accuse Google of using copyrighted materials for training its AI. I accused Google of existing under a different set of laws than mere citizens. As an example, the mass usage of copyrighted materials to build Youtube.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - kccqzy 3y ago
        It didn't. YouTube respects creators' copyright in the videos and pays them.
rococode 3y ago
> If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. How often does this actually happen? You might get handed an infringement notice, and your ISP might terminate your service if you're really egregious about it, but I haven't ever heard of someone actually being sued for downloading something.
- TillE 3y ago
  In Germany if you torrent stuff (without a VPN), you're very likely to get a letter from a law firm on behalf of the copyright holders saying that they'll sue you unless you pay them a nice flat fee of around 1000 Euro. It's no idle threat, and they will win if it goes to court.
  - cowsup 3y ago
    That's because, when torrenting, you're typically also seeding a copy of it, i.e. you're distributing your local copy to other devices, and thus you're directly aiding in piracy. Simply downloading content from a centralized server, as explained above, is different. Although, one could argue what OpenAI & Meta are doing is closer to the torrent definition than the "simply downloading" definition, given that they're using that to redistribute information to others. It'll be an interesting case.
    - thebears5454 3y ago
      Honestly don't think our current laws are even good for this case. This clearly needs some sort of regulation or policy. It's clearly pretty bullshit if you ask chatgpt for a joke and it repeats a Sarah Silverman joke to you, while they charge you a subscription for it and she gets none of that sub money.
      - red-iron-pine 3y ago
        there is policy in most places, and the policy is fuck you pay me.
- 3y ago
buildbot 3y ago
Machine learning models have been trained with copyrighted data for a long time. Imagenet is full of copyrighted images, clearview literally just scanned the internet for faces, and I am sure there are other, older examples. I am unsure if this has been tested as fair use by a US court, but I am guessing it will be considered to be so if it is not already.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Excellent, so you're saying I'll be able to download any copyrighted work from any pirate site and be free of all consequence if I just claim that I'm training an AI?
  - JamesBarney 3y ago
    That's not was he's saying at all. He's saying you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material. If you acquire the material illegally that a separate issue that training AI doesn't give you any protection against.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      But acquiring the material illegally is the thrust of the issue, and the point of the thread here: the notion that large companies can get away with piracy if they just execute it on a large enough scale. Copyright infringment for thee but not for me.
      - startupsfail 3y ago
        Large countries seem to be doing it as well - https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/ https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-... And as long as OpenAI have an office in Japan they can absolutely legally train the models, no?
        TheCleric 3y ago
HDThoreaun 3y ago
I've pirated many books, never sued.
- erezsh 3y ago
  You mean, never caught.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
holmesworcester 3y ago
Strictly speaking, it's uploading that people get sued for, not downloading. You can download all that you want from Z-Library or BitTorrent, as long as you don't share back. And indexing copyrighted material for search is safe, or at least ambiguous.
- capableweb 3y ago
  Carefully speaking, what you say is true in many places (countries), but also not true in other places (countries). Some jurisdictions are different, as always.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  Downloading is illegal. That people do not normally get sued or prosecuted for downloading does not mean that they cannot get sued or prosecuted.
  - magoghm 3y ago
    It is distribution of copyrighted material without permission of the author that is illegal, when you download you're not distributing so it isn't illegal (unless you're using something like BitTorrent that also distributes it while you're downloading it).
    - tzs 3y ago
      In the US permission is required to make copies, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, publicly perform the work, or publicly display the work [1]. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106
      - jazzyjackson 3y ago
        Right, the question is, when my computer requests a file from your computer, which one of us is "making a copy" ? It becomes less ambiguous to ask who is doing the publishing. In a physical analogy, if someone is selling bootleg DVDs on the street, I don't think anyone ever got busted for being a customer.
makeitdouble 3y ago
If AI companies get to successfully argue the two points below, what source was used becomes irrelevant. - copyright violation happened before the intervention of the bot - what LLMs spit out is different enough from any of the source that it is not infringing on existing copyright If both stand, I'd compare it to you going to an auction site and studying all the published items as an observer, coming up with your research result, to then be sued because some of the items were stolen. Going after the theaves make sense, does going after the entity that just looked at the stolen goods make sense ?
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > - copyright violation happened before the intervention of the bot What is this supposed to mean? The bot didn't "intervene," it was executed by its operators, and it was trained on illicit material obtained by its operators. The LLM isn't on trial. It's not a person.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    I see it as the same argument as whether Google is under the hook for its crawler going through the copyright infringing sites and having an index of the content, even if it isn't surfaced (redistributed) in the user search results.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
  I'd argue that if an automated process can ingest A and spit out B, then B is inherently a derivative work of A. (Never mind that humans are also automata.)
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. Suppose I buy a copy of a book, but then I spill my drink in it and it's ruined. If I go to the library, borrow the same book and make a photocopy of it to replace the damaged one I own, that might be fair use. Let's say for sake of argument that it is. If instead I got the replacement copy from a piracy website, are you sure that's different?
holmesworcester 3y ago
Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written. While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact. And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone. Imagine a world where a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized, and could raise their children on these books!
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  I’m imagining a world that looks just about the same as this one does. A larger book library doesn’t automatically make that medium more appealing to kids than what Mr Beast, Unspeakable, and the other crap kids love are doing.
  - CactusOnFire 3y ago
    ...for the global middle class? Maybe. For the world as a whole? Definite differences. It just seems like a super jaded "kids these days" thing to hate on them for consuming easily accessed, free content- and acting like the global literacy and intellectual capital would remain unaffected.
    - aaomidi 3y ago
      Also, piracy exists and is perfectly reasonable for an individual, especially when they are not able to afford the book, to use to get access to a book.
    - WillAdams 3y ago
      How many of these kids have read what percentage of the books which are legitimately freely available? I've never encountered a kid (other than my own) who has read: https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... but have encountered many others who struggle with geometry.
LatteLazy 3y ago
I am not sure this is exactly correct. If you download a book that might be copyright infringement. But not if I download a word. How much do they need to download at a time before it becomes infringement? And if the material is never used or displayed to a human is it still infringment (if so, Google is awaiting a huge lawsuit)? Alternatively if I, a human, read a book it is copied into my memory. Is that infringment? What if I quote it? How much can I quote at what frequency before I'm infringing? If I write something similar to the book but in my own words, is that infringment? How similar does it need to be? What about derivative works and fair use? Copyright is a horrible mess of individual judgements and opinions. Written material especially. And the same applies to AI. So now we will get a judgement which is a tech-illiterate judges best guess at the intention of a law written to deal with printing presses not AIs and no room for nuances.
two_in_one 3y ago
> But companies like Google and Facebook get to play by different rules It's simple, copyrighted materials can be used for academic research. That's what they are doing. Trying new AI modes, publishing results, etc. Facebook doesn't make money on LLaMA, they even require permission to use their models for, again, academic research.
- troyvit 3y ago
  But what if those copyrighted materials were illegally gained? That's what the suit alleges.
freyes 3y ago
We need the dude who prosecuted Aaron Swartz here. This sucks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
randomcarbloke 3y ago
a machine shouldn't have to pay to read a book.
htss2013 3y ago
Copyright doesn't apply when it comes to fair use, and one of the major factors of fair use is if your use deprived the copyright owner of sales. Good luck arguing that any of the books in question lost sales because an AI was trained on them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
oarabbus_ 3y ago
Why do you blame Facebook and not ElutherAI?

Der_Einzige 3y ago

I for one am quite happy that AI folks are basically treating copyright as not existing. I strongly hope that the courts find that LLM weights, and the datasets are "fair-use" or whatever other silly legal justification. Aaron Swartz was a saint.

suction 3y ago
[dead]
slashdev 3y ago
Agreed, copyright has gone too far. I hope the advent of AI serves to weaken it.
axblount 3y ago
Swartz distributed information for everyone to use freely. These companies are processing it privately to develop their for-profit products. Big difference, IMO.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  I am sad about closed source LLMs like ChatGPT, but Llama is in that grey area where it's freely available if you choose to ignore their silly license stuff, which of course pirates and AI developers are all too keen to ignore. Even if they win the lawsuit, LLM development will simply go underground, and as we see from what the coomers at civitai and in the stable diffusion world have done, that may in fact ironically speed up development in AI.
colechristensen 3y ago
While I’ma proponent of free information and loosening copyright, allowing billion dollar companies to package up the sum of human creation and resell statistical models that mimic the content and style of everyone… is a bit far. Fair use is for humans.
- brnaftr361 3y ago
  Yeah, but hypothetically should open source projects be offered special protections? I feel like they should, and with certain caveats where, say, a company like Meta is allowed to claim fair use if and only if they free up the entire ecosystem as they deploy it. But yeah, having private ostensibly profitable models based on other people's work without giving them free access to it is not fair. Give some get some.
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    Maybe… maybe restrictions freed up for resources in the public domain… that is no patent, copyright, license or ownership rights of any kind. As in you could distribute the thing unmolested but that’s it.
pessimizer 3y ago
Copyrights shouldn't exist, but > LLM weights, and the datasets are "fair-use" or whatever other silly legal justification. Would just be a carve out for the wealthy. If these laws don't mean anything, everyone who got harassed, threatened, extorted, fined, arrested, tried, or jailed for internet piracy are owed reparations. Let Meta pay them.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
> I for one am quite happy that AI folks are basically treating copyright as not existing. I strongly hope that the courts find that LLM weights, and the datasets are "fair-use" or whatever other silly legal justification. I would be very happy if either a court or lawmakers decided that copyright itself was unconscionable. That isn't what's going to happen, though. And I think it's incredibly unacceptable if a court or lawmakers instead decide that AI training in particular gets a special exception to violate other people's copyrights on a massive scale when nobody else gets to do that. As far as a fair use argument in particular, fair use in the US is a fourfold test: > the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; The purpose and character is absolutely heavily commercial and makes a great deal of money for the companies building the AIs. A primary use is to create other works of commercial value competing with the original works. > the nature of the copyrighted work; There's nothing about the works used for AI training that makes them any less entitled to copyright protections or more permissive of fair use than anything else. They're not unpublished, they're not merely collections of facts or ideas, etc. > the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and AI training uses entire works, not excerpts. > the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. AI models are having a massive effect on the market for and value of the works they train on, as is being widely discussed in multiple industries. Art, writing, voice acting, code; in any market AI can generate content for, the value of such content goes down. (This argument does not require AI to be as good as humans. Even if the high end of every market produces work substantially better than AI, flooding a market with unlimited amounts of cheap/free low-end content still has a massive effect.)
- lubujackson 3y ago
  It is the equivalent of making a 3D map of a museum and getting sued by one artist of one painting in the museum. Ant individual work in an AI dataset is nearly worthless - only in aggregate does it have value. If that doesn't count as a "transformative work" I don't know what does.
  - thebears5454 3y ago
8organicbits 3y ago
There's a difference between "information wants to be free" and "Facebook can produce works minimally derived from your greatest creative work at a scale you can't match". LLMs seem to aggregate that value to whoever builds the model, which they can then sell access to, or sell the output it produces. Five years from now, will OpenAI actually be open, or will it be a rent seeking org chasing the next quarterly gains? I expect the latter.
- PostOnce 3y ago
  "Will OpenAI actually be open" That ship sailed, friend. OpenAI is no longer a charity in any meaningful sense of the word anymore, it's now an adversarial organization working against the public good with the sole aim of making a few rich men richer. After privatization, they sent their PR people to lobby congress to make it impossible for anyone to compete with them (important note: not out of any interest in actually "protecting" the public from the very AI they're building), and perhaps worst of all, they're no longer being open with the scientific theories and data behind their new models.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    we are rapidly achieving the cyberpunk future, and it's much worse than we thought.
  - two_in_one 3y ago
    > an adversarial organization working against the public good with the sole aim of making a few rich men richer. I wonder what is _not_ in the list?

amf12 3y ago

The lawsuit doesn't even mention Google.

pessimizer 3y ago
No, I did. What's your point?
- fweimer 3y ago
  I think it's a reference to Google's book scanning product, which is structurally similar: they use copyrighted material to provide a new kind of service, which contains an echo of the original material. The book scanning and the related search product is supposedly legal under U.S. copyright law.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  The point is that GP has no reason to believe Google, like Meta, also used copyrighted materials for training its AI. Why did Sarah Silverman sue OpenAI and Meta but not Google?
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    I didn't accuse Google of using copyrighted materials for training its AI. I accused Google of existing under a different set of laws than mere citizens. As an example, the mass usage of copyrighted materials to build Youtube.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - kccqzy 3y ago
      It didn't. YouTube respects creators' copyright in the videos and pays them.

rococode 3y ago

> If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. How often does this actually happen? You might get handed an infringement notice, and your ISP might terminate your service if you're really egregious about it, but I haven't ever heard of someone actually being sued for downloading something.

TillE 3y ago
In Germany if you torrent stuff (without a VPN), you're very likely to get a letter from a law firm on behalf of the copyright holders saying that they'll sue you unless you pay them a nice flat fee of around 1000 Euro. It's no idle threat, and they will win if it goes to court.
- cowsup 3y ago
  That's because, when torrenting, you're typically also seeding a copy of it, i.e. you're distributing your local copy to other devices, and thus you're directly aiding in piracy. Simply downloading content from a centralized server, as explained above, is different. Although, one could argue what OpenAI & Meta are doing is closer to the torrent definition than the "simply downloading" definition, given that they're using that to redistribute information to others. It'll be an interesting case.
  - thebears5454 3y ago
    Honestly don't think our current laws are even good for this case. This clearly needs some sort of regulation or policy. It's clearly pretty bullshit if you ask chatgpt for a joke and it repeats a Sarah Silverman joke to you, while they charge you a subscription for it and she gets none of that sub money.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      there is policy in most places, and the policy is fuck you pay me.
3y ago

buildbot 3y ago

Machine learning models have been trained with copyrighted data for a long time. Imagenet is full of copyrighted images, clearview literally just scanned the internet for faces, and I am sure there are other, older examples. I am unsure if this has been tested as fair use by a US court, but I am guessing it will be considered to be so if it is not already.

kibwen 3y ago
Excellent, so you're saying I'll be able to download any copyrighted work from any pirate site and be free of all consequence if I just claim that I'm training an AI?
- JamesBarney 3y ago
  That's not was he's saying at all. He's saying you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material. If you acquire the material illegally that a separate issue that training AI doesn't give you any protection against.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    But acquiring the material illegally is the thrust of the issue, and the point of the thread here: the notion that large companies can get away with piracy if they just execute it on a large enough scale. Copyright infringment for thee but not for me.
    - startupsfail 3y ago
      Large countries seem to be doing it as well - https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/ https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-... And as long as OpenAI have an office in Japan they can absolutely legally train the models, no?
      - TheCleric 3y ago

HDThoreaun 3y ago

I've pirated many books, never sued.

erezsh 3y ago
You mean, never caught.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

holmesworcester 3y ago

Strictly speaking, it's uploading that people get sued for, not downloading. You can download all that you want from Z-Library or BitTorrent, as long as you don't share back. And indexing copyrighted material for search is safe, or at least ambiguous.

capableweb 3y ago
Carefully speaking, what you say is true in many places (countries), but also not true in other places (countries). Some jurisdictions are different, as always.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Downloading is illegal. That people do not normally get sued or prosecuted for downloading does not mean that they cannot get sued or prosecuted.
- magoghm 3y ago
  It is distribution of copyrighted material without permission of the author that is illegal, when you download you're not distributing so it isn't illegal (unless you're using something like BitTorrent that also distributes it while you're downloading it).
  - tzs 3y ago
    In the US permission is required to make copies, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, publicly perform the work, or publicly display the work [1]. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
      Right, the question is, when my computer requests a file from your computer, which one of us is "making a copy" ? It becomes less ambiguous to ask who is doing the publishing. In a physical analogy, if someone is selling bootleg DVDs on the street, I don't think anyone ever got busted for being a customer.

makeitdouble 3y ago

If AI companies get to successfully argue the two points below, what source was used becomes irrelevant. - copyright violation happened before the intervention of the bot - what LLMs spit out is different enough from any of the source that it is not infringing on existing copyright If both stand, I'd compare it to you going to an auction site and studying all the published items as an observer, coming up with your research result, to then be sued because some of the items were stolen. Going after the theaves make sense, does going after the entity that just looked at the stolen goods make sense ?

pessimizer 3y ago
> - copyright violation happened before the intervention of the bot What is this supposed to mean? The bot didn't "intervene," it was executed by its operators, and it was trained on illicit material obtained by its operators. The LLM isn't on trial. It's not a person.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  I see it as the same argument as whether Google is under the hook for its crawler going through the copyright infringing sites and having an index of the content, even if it isn't surfaced (redistributed) in the user search results.
bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
I'd argue that if an automated process can ingest A and spit out B, then B is inherently a derivative work of A. (Never mind that humans are also automata.)

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. Suppose I buy a copy of a book, but then I spill my drink in it and it's ruined. If I go to the library, borrow the same book and make a photocopy of it to replace the damaged one I own, that might be fair use. Let's say for sake of argument that it is. If instead I got the replacement copy from a piracy website, are you sure that's different?

holmesworcester 3y ago

Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written. While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact. And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone. Imagine a world where a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized, and could raise their children on these books!

lotsoweiners 3y ago
I’m imagining a world that looks just about the same as this one does. A larger book library doesn’t automatically make that medium more appealing to kids than what Mr Beast, Unspeakable, and the other crap kids love are doing.
- CactusOnFire 3y ago
  ...for the global middle class? Maybe. For the world as a whole? Definite differences. It just seems like a super jaded "kids these days" thing to hate on them for consuming easily accessed, free content- and acting like the global literacy and intellectual capital would remain unaffected.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    Also, piracy exists and is perfectly reasonable for an individual, especially when they are not able to afford the book, to use to get access to a book.
  - WillAdams 3y ago
    How many of these kids have read what percentage of the books which are legitimately freely available? I've never encountered a kid (other than my own) who has read: https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... but have encountered many others who struggle with geometry.

LatteLazy 3y ago

I am not sure this is exactly correct. If you download a book that might be copyright infringement. But not if I download a word. How much do they need to download at a time before it becomes infringement? And if the material is never used or displayed to a human is it still infringment (if so, Google is awaiting a huge lawsuit)? Alternatively if I, a human, read a book it is copied into my memory. Is that infringment? What if I quote it? How much can I quote at what frequency before I'm infringing? If I write something similar to the book but in my own words, is that infringment? How similar does it need to be? What about derivative works and fair use? Copyright is a horrible mess of individual judgements and opinions. Written material especially. And the same applies to AI. So now we will get a judgement which is a tech-illiterate judges best guess at the intention of a law written to deal with printing presses not AIs and no room for nuances.

two_in_one 3y ago

> But companies like Google and Facebook get to play by different rules It's simple, copyrighted materials can be used for academic research. That's what they are doing. Trying new AI modes, publishing results, etc. Facebook doesn't make money on LLaMA, they even require permission to use their models for, again, academic research.

troyvit 3y ago
But what if those copyrighted materials were illegally gained? That's what the suit alleges.

freyes 3y ago

We need the dude who prosecuted Aaron Swartz here. This sucks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

randomcarbloke 3y ago

a machine shouldn't have to pay to read a book.

htss2013 3y ago

Copyright doesn't apply when it comes to fair use, and one of the major factors of fair use is if your use deprived the copyright owner of sales. Good luck arguing that any of the books in question lost sales because an AI was trained on them.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

oarabbus_ 3y ago

Why do you blame Facebook and not ElutherAI?