7 ms·

IANAL, but copyright protections are pretty much tied to content and format and not to the idea itself, with the intent of preventing (or putting a price on) th

IANAL, but copyright protections are pretty much tied to content and format and not to the idea itself, with the intent of preventing (or putting a price on) the copying of original works. The Times will have a very hard time proving that their content is being re-marketed by OpenAI. Having a competing product based on your ideas. Compare: "Steve Jobs [was] a tyrant": https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/steve-jobs-defended-his-work-with-a-barbed-tongue.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/steve-jobs-def... Against: "Whether to describe SJ as a tyrant is a matter of perspective...": https://chat.openai.com/share/28633f0c-007f-48b6-a615-1581c3ef3041 https://chat.openai.com/share/28633f0c-007f-48b6-a615-1581c3... The general way LLMs work do not preserve content in it's original form: the ideas they contain are extracted and clustered statistically - as a ELI5 refresher, an LLM reads 2 million NY Times articles and records that after the word "Steve" there are a lot of "Jobs" followed by a lot of "was a genius/tyrant", "founded Apple", etc. Then LLMs recreate the user question "Who was Steve Jobs?" using this complex net of token/word stats. Is that fair use? I think OpenAI lawyers will not even tap the fair use question, they will simply state that no copy happened, just a statistical collection of words from various sources. And importantly: no LLM source is really prevalent, so the end result cannot be even be traced back to the source, especially if multiple, similar news sources are being fed to training. I have no idea how the Times is going to prove that its _theirs_ news.

simion314 3y ago
>The general way LLMs work do not preserve content in it's original form: the ideas they contain are extracted and clustered statistically - as a Is the way LLM work relevant? I can make a shitty script that has as input Microsoft proprietary code and as output something identical in purpose but the text is completely different, I would rename names with synonyms, swap some things around etc. I am not against AIs, my opinion is that if your AI uses GPL code the output should be GPL, if it uses public domain images the output should be public domain images. I mean for code if AI is actual intelligent you should be able to train an AI with C with just a few books and not with the entire GitHub open source code (and notice MS did not trained copilot on the proprietary code they have access proving they are not confident that they are in the right).
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  I don't think the process matters much, but your proposed script would output something that was obviously very similar to the original. What ChatGPT produces under normal use is not more similar to the NYT source than any other article on the same topic.
  - simion314 3y ago
    >What ChatGPT produces under normal use is not more similar to the NYT source than any other article on the same topic. ChatGPT is doing what a smart student does when he copies the homework, he combines a few sources and changes some wording. Technically there is no creativity, it is interpolating it's inputs and there is some randomness thrown in. We also know that ChatGPT put some filters to filter out copyrighted outputs after they were caught that the AI actually memorizes paragraphs of text word by word.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  > my opinion is that if your AI uses GPL code the output should be GPL If I use Inkscape is the output of my drawing subject to the same terms as Inkscape? If I use a Photoshop filter is the output subject to Photoshop's EULA and/or the copyright of the photo I started with?
  - simion314 3y ago
    If I use a Photoshop filter is the output subject to Photoshop's EULA and/or the copyright of the photo I started with? If you get my image from the internet then you resize it in Photoshop you can't claim you created some original art, you just used the resize/crop/color filter function.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Indeed. I was hoping to draw the distinction between license of the tool vs its output. AI is interesting in that its training inputs can leak out, sometimes in ways that are verbatim or insufficiently transformative to be free of copyright.
gorkempacaci 3y ago
I tend to agree with you, but, one could argue “statistical collection of words” is a form of compression? For example, you can’t write a kids version of a novel and sell that without dealing with copyright.
- contravariant 3y ago
  The part openai will have to argue is that it's not mererly compression but an irreversible transformation. Which is hard, best hope they have is trying to put the burden of proof on the nytimes to show you can make the model regurgitate their articles (with some nudging). If they manage that then nytimes is going to have a lot of trouble showing the model actually breaches their copyright, because just the information contained in their articles is not enough to constitute a copyrightable work.
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    Any form of lossy compression is an irreversible transformation. We do it all the time for video, audio and images (you can't recover the original data) and they are still copyrighted
    - max51 3y ago
      when you compress a video, it doesn't recreate a new movie with a different story, different lines of text, different scenes and a different compositions for scenes that are similar to the "orginial".
      - nextaccountic 3y ago
        But what is being compressed is the entire corpus of text. It's compressed into model weights. It's the weights that might be under copyright of the authors of the texts that trained it. The weights are also executable code (in some sense). When you query an LLM you're running this program with a given input. Yeah when it runs it tells a whole lot of things (sometimes novel combinations, sometimes verbatim repetition of trained data) but the point here isn't whether the output of the LLM is copyrighted; it's the weights.
CaptArmchair 3y ago
I think this is going to be a test of the fair use doctrine. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ Now, there's this idea that "news" is just factual and therefore falls under "fair use". However, that's only part of what section 107 says. Fair use very much is still conditional, as there are 4 factors to be considered: (a) Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (b) Nature of the copyrighted work (c) Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole and (d) Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work The big issue isn't companies training LLM's using unlicensed materials (e.g. copyright protected works); it's publishing the output to the wider world. That's where a liability is created.
- kolbe 3y ago
  Unfortunately we'll have 9 justices who know little about copyright law and nothing about tech to tell us what the law really is.
  - telotortium 3y ago
    They will be significantly assisted by Supreme Court clerks, who are generally recent graduates (2-4 years) of the top law schools in the US. Your stereotypes of uninformed Congressmen from televised Congressional hearings don't really apply here.
    - kolbe 3y ago
      26 year old law school grads will help! Oh, I stand "corrected." LOL
- sib 3y ago
  (a) looks bad, clearly commercial (b) ?? (c) looks bad, the LLM consumes "all" of the articles (d) looks bad, has a pretty significant impact on the market and value of the work
bomewish 3y ago
Discovery is how they will show that it’s their news; and if it gets that far we might finally learn what data they trained it on and how much.
marstall 3y ago
they had to make a copy of the original to get it into their system in the first place!
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  In order to render that page, it probably was copied dozens of times all over my RAM. Do I owe NYT money now?
  - dillydogg 3y ago
    Well, are you making money off of those copies?
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      Not personally, but if I was training to be a journalist then yes.
    - contravariant 3y ago
      Does reading news articles not benefit you? If not why continue reading?
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Exactly. If I read a NYT article, and decide to invest in some company, then sell the stock, make a profit. Do I owe the NYT a percentage because I used knowledge I "read" from one of their articles? I "read", input, (into my brain neural net) where it mixed with other inputs.
        Filligree 3y ago
        I think the only consistent stance would be that yes, you do.
  - marstall 3y ago
    yes. they have a hard paywall!
unixhero 3y ago
IANAL is the dumbest abbreviation the internet has come up with. I believe I first observed these things on the Groklaw discussion threads discussing the SCO legal battle against the world. Not-A-Lawyer NAL instead of the full IANAL. I just had to say it.
- ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
  IANAL is just "wacky" and "sexual" reddit tier humour, nothing more. It's boring any annoying.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    IANAL long predates the use of the term “Reddit-tier”, probably goes back to usenet in the 80s.
gmerc 3y ago
> A top concern for The Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff Sounds to me like they are trying to claim copyright over facts rather than the specific expression. That’s just not how copyright works at the moment. The framing of openAIs recent changes is telling too. OpenAI seems to have nudged their models to reject requests of querying sentence continuation for specific sources - which the press is now framing as “trying to hide the use of copyrighted data” What we are seeing here is an unprecedented attempt at expanding copyright doctrine to facts, style and information rather than specific expressions - a land grab of latent space by rights holders salivating to own factual information
- pixl97 3y ago
  >which the press is now framing as “trying to hide the use of copyrighted data” Yea, now I can't read the paper and talk about it to other people it seems. The Right to Read was a prophecy I guess?
  - HelloMcFly 3y ago
    An individual or group of individuals doing this and sharing their views/summary vs. a profit-oriented program funded by major technology companies scraping this information and spitting it back out algorithmically does seem different to me. Yes, perhaps both things are on the same "sliding scale", but I do not view them as fundamentally equivalent actions.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      >a profit-oriented program The particular problem here is this program isn't magic, it just requires a lot of electricity and hardware to train at the moment. If at some point in the future this hardware becomes cheap then now suddenly OSS LLMs would be under the same set of rules that we're applying to major technology companies. But mark my words, the large copyright holding groups don't give any shits other than how much IP they can scrape up and demand money for, for the next few human lifetimes.
onetokeoverthe 3y ago
[dead]
datavirtue 3y ago
Can't wait for the supreme Court ruling that says AI is just using data, and data is free.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  MP3 are just data too
mpweiher 3y ago
Copyright protection goes way beyond "verbatim copy". For example, fictional characters enjoy copyright protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...
wilsynet 3y ago
The NYT argument is going to be that they put up a site, own the copyright for their content and make that content available for either a human to read it for themselves, or software to index for something commonly understood as a search engine. Those terms do not entitle the training of LLMs for commercial use. Therefore, cease and desist. Oh and destroy anything that was created by violating the terms of our license. You can make arguments like a) what is ChatGPT but a different kind of search engine, or b) what is an LLM but a primitive human, or c) but but uhh we didn’t agree to these terms. But I do not think those arguments will prevail.
- ojosilva 3y ago
  Terms of Use are a thing, and if the Times can prove that OpenAI infringed their web terms by scraping, they may have a case... but terms of use probably won't monetize well or give them enough leverage to prevent OpenAI from using their data anyway and may end-up distracting from the main copyright suit.
  - colejohnson66 3y ago
    Violating TOS, at least to scrape and use later, is legal.[0] I'm not sure how the ruling interacts with LLMs, but I'm sure OpenAI's lawyers would bring it up. [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/04/18/scraping-data-from-linkedin-profiles-is-legal-appeals-court-rules/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/04/18/scrapin...
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      FYI LinkedIn actually won that case after appealing once more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
      - colejohnson66 3y ago
        Ah. I was not aware there was an update to that case. TIL.
polski-g 3y ago
If I read a story about a flood in Dubai on the NYTimes and then I write an email to my friend summarizing what I just read, it is not copyright infringement. I am not sure why it would suddenly become infringement because an LLM is composing that email for me.
- lakis 3y ago
  But if you create a company that takes the NYT articles, scans the articles for extreme weather information in Dubai and emails your paying customers every time that happens, then you are doing copyright infringement.
  - kian 3y ago
    Not if there are people doing the scanning manually (with their eyes), which is I think the GP's point?
Affric 3y ago
chatGPT it’s a terrible (truly, it’s punishing) writer but that should not always be the case.

simion314 3y ago

>The general way LLMs work do not preserve content in it's original form: the ideas they contain are extracted and clustered statistically - as a Is the way LLM work relevant? I can make a shitty script that has as input Microsoft proprietary code and as output something identical in purpose but the text is completely different, I would rename names with synonyms, swap some things around etc. I am not against AIs, my opinion is that if your AI uses GPL code the output should be GPL, if it uses public domain images the output should be public domain images. I mean for code if AI is actual intelligent you should be able to train an AI with C with just a few books and not with the entire GitHub open source code (and notice MS did not trained copilot on the proprietary code they have access proving they are not confident that they are in the right).

sebzim4500 3y ago
I don't think the process matters much, but your proposed script would output something that was obviously very similar to the original. What ChatGPT produces under normal use is not more similar to the NYT source than any other article on the same topic.
- simion314 3y ago
  >What ChatGPT produces under normal use is not more similar to the NYT source than any other article on the same topic. ChatGPT is doing what a smart student does when he copies the homework, he combines a few sources and changes some wording. Technically there is no creativity, it is interpolating it's inputs and there is some randomness thrown in. We also know that ChatGPT put some filters to filter out copyrighted outputs after they were caught that the AI actually memorizes paragraphs of text word by word.
paulryanrogers 3y ago
> my opinion is that if your AI uses GPL code the output should be GPL If I use Inkscape is the output of my drawing subject to the same terms as Inkscape? If I use a Photoshop filter is the output subject to Photoshop's EULA and/or the copyright of the photo I started with?
- simion314 3y ago
  If I use a Photoshop filter is the output subject to Photoshop's EULA and/or the copyright of the photo I started with? If you get my image from the internet then you resize it in Photoshop you can't claim you created some original art, you just used the resize/crop/color filter function.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Indeed. I was hoping to draw the distinction between license of the tool vs its output. AI is interesting in that its training inputs can leak out, sometimes in ways that are verbatim or insufficiently transformative to be free of copyright.

gorkempacaci 3y ago

I tend to agree with you, but, one could argue “statistical collection of words” is a form of compression? For example, you can’t write a kids version of a novel and sell that without dealing with copyright.

contravariant 3y ago
The part openai will have to argue is that it's not mererly compression but an irreversible transformation. Which is hard, best hope they have is trying to put the burden of proof on the nytimes to show you can make the model regurgitate their articles (with some nudging). If they manage that then nytimes is going to have a lot of trouble showing the model actually breaches their copyright, because just the information contained in their articles is not enough to constitute a copyrightable work.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  Any form of lossy compression is an irreversible transformation. We do it all the time for video, audio and images (you can't recover the original data) and they are still copyrighted
  - max51 3y ago
    when you compress a video, it doesn't recreate a new movie with a different story, different lines of text, different scenes and a different compositions for scenes that are similar to the "orginial".
    - nextaccountic 3y ago
      But what is being compressed is the entire corpus of text. It's compressed into model weights. It's the weights that might be under copyright of the authors of the texts that trained it. The weights are also executable code (in some sense). When you query an LLM you're running this program with a given input. Yeah when it runs it tells a whole lot of things (sometimes novel combinations, sometimes verbatim repetition of trained data) but the point here isn't whether the output of the LLM is copyrighted; it's the weights.

CaptArmchair 3y ago

I think this is going to be a test of the fair use doctrine. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ Now, there's this idea that "news" is just factual and therefore falls under "fair use". However, that's only part of what section 107 says. Fair use very much is still conditional, as there are 4 factors to be considered: (a) Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (b) Nature of the copyrighted work (c) Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole and (d) Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work The big issue isn't companies training LLM's using unlicensed materials (e.g. copyright protected works); it's publishing the output to the wider world. That's where a liability is created.

kolbe 3y ago
Unfortunately we'll have 9 justices who know little about copyright law and nothing about tech to tell us what the law really is.
- telotortium 3y ago
  They will be significantly assisted by Supreme Court clerks, who are generally recent graduates (2-4 years) of the top law schools in the US. Your stereotypes of uninformed Congressmen from televised Congressional hearings don't really apply here.
  - kolbe 3y ago
    26 year old law school grads will help! Oh, I stand "corrected." LOL
sib 3y ago
(a) looks bad, clearly commercial (b) ?? (c) looks bad, the LLM consumes "all" of the articles (d) looks bad, has a pretty significant impact on the market and value of the work

bomewish 3y ago

Discovery is how they will show that it’s their news; and if it gets that far we might finally learn what data they trained it on and how much.

marstall 3y ago

they had to make a copy of the original to get it into their system in the first place!

sebzim4500 3y ago
In order to render that page, it probably was copied dozens of times all over my RAM. Do I owe NYT money now?
- dillydogg 3y ago
  Well, are you making money off of those copies?
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    Not personally, but if I was training to be a journalist then yes.
  - contravariant 3y ago
    Does reading news articles not benefit you? If not why continue reading?
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Exactly. If I read a NYT article, and decide to invest in some company, then sell the stock, make a profit. Do I owe the NYT a percentage because I used knowledge I "read" from one of their articles? I "read", input, (into my brain neural net) where it mixed with other inputs.
      - Filligree 3y ago
        I think the only consistent stance would be that yes, you do.
- marstall 3y ago
  yes. they have a hard paywall!

unixhero 3y ago

IANAL is the dumbest abbreviation the internet has come up with. I believe I first observed these things on the Groklaw discussion threads discussing the SCO legal battle against the world. Not-A-Lawyer NAL instead of the full IANAL. I just had to say it.

ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
IANAL is just "wacky" and "sexual" reddit tier humour, nothing more. It's boring any annoying.
- paulmd 3y ago
  IANAL long predates the use of the term “Reddit-tier”, probably goes back to usenet in the 80s.

gmerc 3y ago

> A top concern for The Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff Sounds to me like they are trying to claim copyright over facts rather than the specific expression. That’s just not how copyright works at the moment. The framing of openAIs recent changes is telling too. OpenAI seems to have nudged their models to reject requests of querying sentence continuation for specific sources - which the press is now framing as “trying to hide the use of copyrighted data” What we are seeing here is an unprecedented attempt at expanding copyright doctrine to facts, style and information rather than specific expressions - a land grab of latent space by rights holders salivating to own factual information

pixl97 3y ago
>which the press is now framing as “trying to hide the use of copyrighted data” Yea, now I can't read the paper and talk about it to other people it seems. The Right to Read was a prophecy I guess?
- HelloMcFly 3y ago
  An individual or group of individuals doing this and sharing their views/summary vs. a profit-oriented program funded by major technology companies scraping this information and spitting it back out algorithmically does seem different to me. Yes, perhaps both things are on the same "sliding scale", but I do not view them as fundamentally equivalent actions.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >a profit-oriented program The particular problem here is this program isn't magic, it just requires a lot of electricity and hardware to train at the moment. If at some point in the future this hardware becomes cheap then now suddenly OSS LLMs would be under the same set of rules that we're applying to major technology companies. But mark my words, the large copyright holding groups don't give any shits other than how much IP they can scrape up and demand money for, for the next few human lifetimes.

onetokeoverthe 3y ago

[dead]

datavirtue 3y ago

Can't wait for the supreme Court ruling that says AI is just using data, and data is free.

nextaccountic 3y ago
MP3 are just data too

mpweiher 3y ago

Copyright protection goes way beyond "verbatim copy". For example, fictional characters enjoy copyright protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...

wilsynet 3y ago

The NYT argument is going to be that they put up a site, own the copyright for their content and make that content available for either a human to read it for themselves, or software to index for something commonly understood as a search engine. Those terms do not entitle the training of LLMs for commercial use. Therefore, cease and desist. Oh and destroy anything that was created by violating the terms of our license. You can make arguments like a) what is ChatGPT but a different kind of search engine, or b) what is an LLM but a primitive human, or c) but but uhh we didn’t agree to these terms. But I do not think those arguments will prevail.

ojosilva 3y ago
Terms of Use are a thing, and if the Times can prove that OpenAI infringed their web terms by scraping, they may have a case... but terms of use probably won't monetize well or give them enough leverage to prevent OpenAI from using their data anyway and may end-up distracting from the main copyright suit.
- colejohnson66 3y ago
  Violating TOS, at least to scrape and use later, is legal.[0] I'm not sure how the ruling interacts with LLMs, but I'm sure OpenAI's lawyers would bring it up. [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/04/18/scraping-data-from-linkedin-profiles-is-legal-appeals-court-rules/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/04/18/scrapin...
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    FYI LinkedIn actually won that case after appealing once more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
    - colejohnson66 3y ago
      Ah. I was not aware there was an update to that case. TIL.

polski-g 3y ago

If I read a story about a flood in Dubai on the NYTimes and then I write an email to my friend summarizing what I just read, it is not copyright infringement. I am not sure why it would suddenly become infringement because an LLM is composing that email for me.

lakis 3y ago
But if you create a company that takes the NYT articles, scans the articles for extreme weather information in Dubai and emails your paying customers every time that happens, then you are doing copyright infringement.
- kian 3y ago
  Not if there are people doing the scanning manually (with their eyes), which is I think the GP's point?

Affric 3y ago

chatGPT it’s a terrible (truly, it’s punishing) writer but that should not always be the case.