2 ms·

> I don't think I need to be a SCOTUS judge or powerful Senator for those opinions. The world isn't fair. Unless you think you can imminently effect political

by ke88y 3y ago

> I don't think I need to be a SCOTUS judge or powerful Senator for those opinions. The world isn't fair. Unless you think you can imminently effect political or judicial changes, you need to ACT in the world according to how the law ACTUALLY WORKS, not how you think it morally OUGHT to work. > As for other opinions, it's not solely "my" opinion that US copyright law is automatic and thus needs to be proven when copyright doesn't apply. You've completely lose the plot here. This is completely irrelevant to my last two posts. Automatic copyright -- or fuck, even specific terms saying "you owe me a billion dollars if you use this as training data" -- doesn't help you if training is fair use. Fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright violation. And these companies are arguing that using copyrighted data is fair use. We'll see. But if using text as training data turns out to be fair use, then you'll just be wasting your money and in some jurisdictions possibly risking counter-suit if you try to enforce your copyright. The question is not whether you have copyright. You do. The question is whether the courts will grant model trainers and users an affirmative defense against your copyright claims.

WorldMaker 3y ago
I never suggested robots.txt was "fair", I suggested it is a cultural convention long established at this point and ignoring it is wrong for moral reasons nothing to do with legal reasons. Morals/ethics and laws are different frameworks (though, related, naturally, and hopefully interacting). I don't think I've lost the plot when talking about automatic copyright. The article's suggestion that copyright notices should be more useful than robots.txt only makes sense if you assume that copyright applies in general and LLM scraping is not fair use. Following that assumption to its logical conclusion then automatic copyright is a legal problem for all crawling/scraping by the LLM companies and they are at drastic legal risk for that. Beyond the already huge issues with their moral/ethical risk in doing that and ignoring things like robots.txt files. "LLM crawlers should ignore robots.txt and instead look for CC licenses and copyright notices" is only good moral "advice" if you think model trainers will eventually lose the "fair use" argument and from that standpoint it is both ethically and legally wrong from the automatic copyright protection standpoint to suggest stuff without META tags or visible copyright notices is "fair game"/"uncopyrighted". In the case that we are presuming "fair use" can apply to this data, then all arguments about which copyright licenses to claim is indeed facile, because it doesn't matter, but that's not an interesting argument to have here. If robots.txt isn't the answer and copyright claims aren't the answer: what is? At that point, yes, all legal protections cease. If they've already proven to be a bad actor (ethically speaking) willing to ignore robots.txt, what hope do you have that they won't ignore llms-please-ignore-this-site.txt or X-LLM: Please Ignore headers or anything else? There's not really a discussion to have in that case, just a judgment to make that whatever those companies are: that's evil and unethical. (Call that if you like a strong opinion, but that's how ethics works, in the court of public opinion.)

by ke88y 3y ago

WorldMaker 3y ago

I never suggested robots.txt was "fair", I suggested it is a cultural convention long established at this point and ignoring it is wrong for moral reasons nothing to do with legal reasons. Morals/ethics and laws are different frameworks (though, related, naturally, and hopefully interacting). I don't think I've lost the plot when talking about automatic copyright. The article's suggestion that copyright notices should be more useful than robots.txt only makes sense if you assume that copyright applies in general and LLM scraping is not fair use. Following that assumption to its logical conclusion then automatic copyright is a legal problem for all crawling/scraping by the LLM companies and they are at drastic legal risk for that. Beyond the already huge issues with their moral/ethical risk in doing that and ignoring things like robots.txt files. "LLM crawlers should ignore robots.txt and instead look for CC licenses and copyright notices" is only good moral "advice" if you think model trainers will eventually lose the "fair use" argument and from that standpoint it is both ethically and legally wrong from the automatic copyright protection standpoint to suggest stuff without META tags or visible copyright notices is "fair game"/"uncopyrighted". In the case that we are presuming "fair use" can apply to this data, then all arguments about which copyright licenses to claim is indeed facile, because it doesn't matter, but that's not an interesting argument to have here. If robots.txt isn't the answer and copyright claims aren't the answer: what is? At that point, yes, all legal protections cease. If they've already proven to be a bad actor (ethically speaking) willing to ignore robots.txt, what hope do you have that they won't ignore llms-please-ignore-this-site.txt or X-LLM: Please Ignore headers or anything else? There's not really a discussion to have in that case, just a judgment to make that whatever those companies are: that's evil and unethical. (Call that if you like a strong opinion, but that's how ethics works, in the court of public opinion.)