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>Like you can make a transformer output some part of it's training data - but not an entire work There's been many examples of getting large verbatim passages
by tyingq 3y ago
>Like you can make a transformer output some part of it's training data - but not an entire work
There's been many examples of getting large verbatim passages of text or large image regions, etc, from AI tools.
I don't think you need to use the entire work to infringe. Certainly lawsuits claiming use of part of the work have had the rights holder prevail.
- theptip 3y agoHow large? Copying some verbatim is still fine under fair use.
- dragonwriter 3y agoCopying entire works is fine under fair use in certain circumstances, too. (See, e.g., time-shifting.)
- theptip 3y agoFor written text? Not aware of any examples, can you share any? (To be clear by copying I mean repeating the text in your derived work, perhaps I should have been more explicit. The crux of this case is whether “copying into training set” counts as copying the whole work. )
- dragonwriter 3y agoThe first examples that comes to mind is reproducing an entire copyright-protected article, either a single copy for personal use by a researcher or multiple copies for classroom use.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoRight, determined fair use by the supreme court in Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States. You can walk into a library and make a wholesale copy for research purposes. The case involved a medical journal publisher suing medical doctors, who made a strong argument that their ability to make copies was a matter of life and death. Winner: Xerox. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_%26_Wilkins_Co._v._United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_%26_Wilkins_Co._v._...
- DoughnutHole 3y agoThat's an interesting example because it illustrates out how fair use is in part defined by its effect on the market. A teacher copying a New York Times article verbatim and distributing it to a classroom for the purpose of analysis or criticism is likely to be held by the courts as fair use. On the other hand a teacher photocopying an entire textbook (or distributing a PDF) would probably not be considered fair use. Both are copying educational material in full, but they have a different impact on the market. Distributing copies of an old news article to 30 students realistically isn't a direct substitute for 30 subscriptions to The New York Times. But a textbook publisher's business model specifically revolves around selling its textbooks to students - the teacher is distributing their copyrighted material to their target market and removing any incentive for the students to pay the publisher.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoYes, the damage to the market of the original is a key factor in a fair use analysis. It makes you wonder why "Open"AI started getting into legal trouble only when they closed everything down and became a commercial project. When they were a research project, stepping on copyrights was a lot more acceptible (both socially and legally).
- RC_ITR 3y agoHave you heard of 'quotations'? Plenty of works quote and cite other copywritten works and it's considered transformative because usually the work is building upon or commenting on the quote.
- tyingq 3y agoThe context was copying entire works in this particular leaf of the main thread.
- RC_ITR 3y agoYes, and plenty of people write criticisms of entire song lyrics or poems, effectively republishing the entire thing. This is actually a huge area of debate on Youtube as Google often errs on your side of the argument (they can choose to demonetize whatever they want), even if they work is technically not infringing.
- mannerheim 3y agoCopying verbatim passages can be fair use if it is transformative.
- tyingq 3y agoOutputting unattributed copies large passages of text to end customers with the implied okay to use it any way they want, though....that's what these tools do. The end user often has no idea they just received something with potential IP issues.
- lsaferite 3y agoDoes the model even have enough information to be able to _know_ that though? If it's simply using probability to ties a series of tokens together into text based on numerical probability, that doesn't store enough information to understand that _this specific sequence of tokens_ represents come specific copyrighted work. Storing that information would _actually_ seem to fall afoul of copyright. The fact that it can spit out chunks of copyrighted works is driven by the input token sequence and the model weights pointing to a specific path that have an ever so slightly higher probability of being the expected output, right? It's not like the model stores the copyrighted work directly. (Yes, I know the algorithms are more complex than what I expressed, but the general idea holds in my understanding)
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThe model doesn't know anything - people personify LLMs too much. It is a mathematical text predictor that has almost certainly ingested the text it is copying verbatim to string together the words it is reproducing. The fact that it is a highly compressed representation of its training corpus (and thus doesn't "know" that it is copying something) is not an excuse. I think you could make a good argument about this if you could prove that the text being spit out verbatim is _not_ contained in the training corpus, but that is not the situation we have today.
- lsaferite 3y ago
- dcow 3y agoYou can also get “the whole work” by asking another human to recite the lyrics to a song or draw the Finder logo from memory. What’s really happening is that AI models have much better memory than humans and are more precise in their output. It would be stupid to try and “dumb down” AI models because they’re better at remembering some licensed content. In spirit, it’s still fair use.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jonny_eh 3y ago> You can also get “the whole work” by asking another human to recite the lyrics Is that human earning money by reciting the lyrics? If so, that's already not allowed. It's called a performance.
- dcow 3y agoCovers are generally transformative, right? Edit: I guess even if they are SCOTUS recently decided that even transformative works can infringe if they compete commercially. So the question is not: “did the reciter make money performing”, it’s “did the reciter’s performance detract financially for the original artist”.
- Retric 3y agoNo, covers aren’t considered transformative. I think a great deal of this discussion comes from people not understanding copyright. https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/public-articles/intellectual-property/a-myth-cover-songs https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/public-articles/intellectu...
- dcow 3y agoI personally think our law regarding covers has been heavily influenced by record labels and is wrong about them, in practice. I’ve already heard the original enough times that if I want to hear a string quartet perform Viva La Vida it’s because it’s a new refreshing piece of art. The whole compulsory license thing indicates the law got it wrong. Anyway…