4 ms·

Whether or not training on publicly available data counts as a copyright violation is still completely up in the air legally, and clearly a lot of lawyers at al

Whether or not training on publicly available data counts as a copyright violation is still completely up in the air legally, and clearly a lot of lawyers at all of the top tech companies think they're going to end up in the clear under fair use. At some point this stuff will have to get tested by making its way up the appeals stack in the US, and IMO there is only a minuscule chance that will result in Google, MS, and Meta getting slapped with anything more than a token fine (my bet is it won't even be that), let alone paying every person who ever wrote anything that was used in these datasets for copyright violations, which would basically be everyone.

jacquesm 3y ago
There are more courts than just the US ones.
- lucubratory 3y ago
  Yes, there are other courts than the US ones, and generally the law there is significantly more favourable to TDM with regards to copyright, with the exception of the PRC. Examples: Japan: Article 30-4 of the Japanese Copyright Act. No special action on the part of companies is necessary for compliance. All models are legal so long as their output is legal. The UK: s.29A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). Models must be trained by non-profit research institutes, and can then be used by anyone (including for profit entities); similar to the Stable Diffusion model. The EU: Articles 3 & 4 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM). There are no restrictions on non-profit TDM, same as the UK. For-profit TDM is exempted from copyright so long as the data harvesting process respects an "opt-out" process, where specific contractual forms/disclosures of opting out of inclusion in the training data are respected. Singapore: Articles 243 & 244 of the Copyright Act. No special action on the part of companies is necessary for compliance. All models are legal so long as their output is legal.

jacquesm 3y ago

There are more courts than just the US ones.

lucubratory 3y ago
Yes, there are other courts than the US ones, and generally the law there is significantly more favourable to TDM with regards to copyright, with the exception of the PRC. Examples: Japan: Article 30-4 of the Japanese Copyright Act. No special action on the part of companies is necessary for compliance. All models are legal so long as their output is legal. The UK: s.29A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). Models must be trained by non-profit research institutes, and can then be used by anyone (including for profit entities); similar to the Stable Diffusion model. The EU: Articles 3 & 4 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM). There are no restrictions on non-profit TDM, same as the UK. For-profit TDM is exempted from copyright so long as the data harvesting process respects an "opt-out" process, where specific contractual forms/disclosures of opting out of inclusion in the training data are respected. Singapore: Articles 243 & 244 of the Copyright Act. No special action on the part of companies is necessary for compliance. All models are legal so long as their output is legal.