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"Fair use" only applies to instances of copying / redistributing. The hint is in the name: copy-right. There's a notion, which seems to have taken off among c
by harshreality 3y ago
"Fair use" only applies to instances of copying / redistributing. The hint is in the name: copy-right.
There's a notion, which seems to have taken off among creators who are paranoid about AI eating their livelihoods (which it might eat a chunk of) that copyright prevents people from doing anything with works they [legally] acquired other than personally read, listen, or watch it.
That's not how copyright, as it has existed in the past, works. You can do all the algorithmic processing of your ebook collection that you want. You might be able to display small portions of a book to others, depending on the situation.
Quoting one or two paragraphs out of an entire book seems like reasonably safe fair use, but that won't stop a copyright-maximalist creator (or their publisher) from suing you, and won't stop some copyright-maximalist judge from ruling against you, so it's probably best to minimize the amount of content from a book that you redisplay directly. But you can do all the analysis and statistics generation you want, and display those results to others.
It remains to be seen what judges will do with AI generation of works based on ingesting gigantic amounts of copyrighted work. The entire framework of copyright is going to be broken, and until Congress steps in and changes it, judges are going to go every which way. There's no bright line for 4-factor analysis; it's always been a gut-level "is this a reasonable use that doesn't impact commercial sales too much". There's no possible rational way to draw a line. AI models can generate a painting of a new subject only loosely in the style of a contemporary painter, which would not be copyright infringement, or it can generate a near-clone of an existing work with the right prompting, and depending on how clever the prompter is, a lot of intermediate stages of likeness. Who decides how close to an existing work is too close?
- palata 3y agoSay I make a tool where you can enter the title of a book, and get the full text of the book without paying for it. I assume we all agree that would be illegal, right? Now say that instead of distributing that tool as an executable, I distributed it as a library. It would contain all the same books as the illegal executable above, but some developers would need to write an actual executable that would use the library. Obviously that executable would be illegal (same as the first one above), but would the library be illegal? I would think that we all reasonably agree that my library would be illegal, because I would essentially be selling the content of books for which I don't own the copyright. Now what happens when I distribute a trained model that has the potential to generate illegal work? Is it suddenly legal for me to sell it, because some developers write legal executables with it? How is that different from my library example above?
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoCuriously that is a pretty close description of a normal neighborhood library.
- palata 3y agoPretty close, and yet so different. Don't you agree that I am allowed to buy a physical book and then resell it, but that I am not allowed to buy a physical book, make copies of it, and sell those copies?
- harshreality 3y agoThe doctrine of first sale would never be allowed today if it hadn't already been enshrined in law over 100 years ago. Stakeholders would insist that creators wouldn't create if people could fund community libraries and thereby shrink the book market. They'd demand the same thing for physical books that they've implemented for almost all ebooks: a pay-per-lend system. The effect would be a substantially higher cost for each loan-out. Congress would go along, just as they went along with a new copyright term of min(120, life+70) years. In the U.S., in 1909 when the doctrine of first sale was codified, the copyright term was 28 years + 28 years upon renewal, and copyright had to be registered. That would never be accepted by copyright interests today, either.
- mythhabit 3y agoA car has the potential to be used for illegal activities. In fact happens every second, but that does not mean we go out of our ways to make them illegal. That said, it is still an open question if the content generated by LLM is illegal. It only generates content that is inspired by some authors work, it is not recreating their work, only their style. Humans copy each other all the time in writing, music, art, you name it.
- palata 3y agoEither you completely missed my point, or you genuinely believe that my first executable is legal. Which one is it?
- dontupvoteme 3y agoThere's also the much more complex part of other jurisdictions. Japan already has largely said everything is fair game in AI.