3 ms·
If there's a person who studies the works of George R.R. Martin, spending years cultivating writing skills based on just his works, and then writes new materia
by Dowwie 3y ago
If there's a person who studies the works of George R.R. Martin, spending years cultivating writing skills based on just his works, and then writes new material, can that person lose a lawsuit for being too similar in style?
- tapoxi 3y agoI mean, maybe. We've seen similar things in music. But AI isn't a person. You won't find a person that spends every waking moment of their life only studying the works of a specific author, they have lived experience.
- triceratops 3y agoLaws drafted with human capabilities in mind don't necessarily have to apply to machines. It takes motivated reasoning to argue that AI training is exactly the same thing as human learning.
- TillE 3y ago"Our computer program which digests massive amounts of data works kinda-sorta vaguely like a human brain" is just irrelevant. It's a computer program, and we're nowhere near the point of having serious ethical debates about science fiction AGI. The law just doesn't particularly care about the details of your ML model, OpenAI is still processing massive amounts of copyrighted work without which their software would be nearly useless. That's the interesting legal question.
- archontes 3y agoThe thing is that copyright law doesn't protect against that processing. The only argument is whether their information was scraped off the internet legally, and the supreme court has weighed in that scraping information that's publicly available is legal. If you put a picture on the internet free and clear, I can save the picture to my hard drive, and I can use it in any way whatsoever sans reproduce it. The only question is if making an AI that can reproduce it is in fact the same as reproducing it. I think the question is a very simple 'no', but we'll have to see.
- matthewmcg 3y agoUnder U.S. copyright law, yes. A sequel is a derivative work, i.e. a work based on or derived from an underlying work. Only the copyright holder of the original work may authorize derivative works. Example: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/tolkien-estate-sues-over-unauthorized-lord-of-the-rings-sequel https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/tolkien-estate-sues-ove...
- archontes 3y agoThe exact answer to his question is "no". He didn't ask about sequels, only styles, and copyright explicitly never protects style.
- matthewmcg 3y agoRight, but what are the chances that the "new material" doesn't include any elements of protected expression from the underlying work, e.g. characters? I understood the request to be about writing a sequel.
- mabster 3y agoI thought derivative works were okay if they were "transformative"? That lawsuit sounded like he had copied text verbatim. I'm not in the US, so I could easily be off base. I really enjoyed The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter, which is a sequel to The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. He's a UK author, so maybe it's different. As a society I think we are better off with this kind of remixing so I'd hope that's the direction we head in.
- bazoom42 3y agoCopying text verbatim is copyrigt violation. Plagiarism (copying ideas) is a different issue and much more of a gray zone. In general ideas are not protected, but it can be prosecuted in blatant cases. The described case seem to be a bit of both.
- bazoom42 3y agoYes, you can definitely lose a lawsuit for plagiarism if you write material too close to the original inspiration, e.g same universe and characters.