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I wonder how this affects things like the Oxford English Dictionary, wiktionary, and other corpus-based linguistics, which rely on sample sentences of the word
by rhdunn 3y ago
I wonder how this affects things like the Oxford English Dictionary, wiktionary, and other corpus-based linguistics, which rely on sample sentences of the word usage in order to determine the context.
Because language is an evolving thing, it is almost certain that they have referenced sentences from copyrighted sources. E.g. I'm willing to bet that they have the sentence where Cory Doctorow introduces the term "enshittification". (The OALD 7ed in it's foreword even states "Corpus analysis now makes it possible to draw authentic examples from a vast range of attested contemporary usage. A concordance will display hundreds or thousands of them to choose from.")
I suspect that the inclusion of a few sentences -- especially those that introduce a new word or usage of a word -- are fair use, but the inclusion of the entire texts is not.
This then brings up an interesting point where the computer scientists/linguists developing tools like WordNet or other NLP databases would be at an advantage to those that take the approach of throwing a lot of data into a neural network and hoping for the best. Yes, it is a lot more work/effort to develop those NLP databases, but in the end they may end up being more robust, especially around the question of copyright.
- PeterisP 3y agoIt shouldn't affect corpus linguistics but the other way around, because all these things have long ago (even before computers) been legally contested by authors and publishers w.r.t. what can be done to text by dictionary makers and corpora managers without the authors' permission, so unless new laws get passed, the current precedents establishing what's permissible for corpus linguistics would still be valid and also be relevant for treatment of machine learning models. In essence, the long established principles for text analysis is that facts about text (concordances, collocation statistics, n-gram counts) are neither copyrightable nor derived work, and thus can be calculated, gathered, used and distributed even if copyright holders of the source data object. Now a court might judge that training a large language model is substantially different or that it's effectively the same, but such a decision wouldn't affect corpus linguistics and how they use sample sentences, only whether LLMs get the same treatment or not.
- rhdunn 3y agoInteresting, thanks!
- jsmith99 3y agooed.com has 0 results for "enshittification" yet.
- astrange 3y agoThankfully. People should really stop using words that make them sound like especially zany comic book characters.
- crote 3y agoSample sentences like those in the OED are pretty much the textbook example of fair use. They are obviously transformative (the whole "dictionary" part), copy factual information (use of a word, not what the sentence itself is saying), are not substantial (one sentence out of many thousands), and do not impact the original work's value (nobody would buy a dictionary instead of a novel because it contains a sample phrase from that novel). The OED cites its sources, which also strengthens its case. Compare that to AI, which is more than happy to write a short story to the prompt "Write a story about Bucky and Captain America falling in love, and living happily ever after in a mountain cabin." (Transformative? Maybe. Factual? No. Substantial? Yes. Impacts value? Yes.) Works like the AI's output have been dealt with in lawsuits like Salinger v. Colting, and it simply is not allowed. The big question right now is: what about the AI model itself?
- __loam 3y agoThe funniest thing about this whole debacle has been seeing how little tech bros understand fair use.
- artninja1988 3y agoA real legal scholar over here. You're not like other guys...