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It’s not as cut and dried as you’re making it out to be. For years we’ve accepted that search engines, for example, can grab all the code on GitHub and use it

It’s not as cut and dried as you’re making it out to be. For years we’ve accepted that search engines, for example, can grab all the code on GitHub and use it to build a search index. Google image search, in particular, ‘regurgitates’ all the images it has indexed when it thinks they match a search term. It has a little disclaimer it shows next to the results saying that ‘images may be copyrighted’ - figuring out if they are copyrighted and if so by whom is left as an exercise for you the searcher. Depending on what you are using the image search for, the copyright of the images may, after all, not be relevant. Like, if you’re using a Google image search to get inspiration for home decor designs, do you care who owns the copyright of each image? Should Google? GPT poses similar risks to that. It has the explicit disclaimer that things it produces might be subject to copyright. Depending on what you’re using the output for, the copyright may or may not be relevant.

notahacker 3y ago
There seems to be a fairly clear distinction between importing copyrighted material to make an index for the narrow purpose of directing people towards the copyrighted material at its original location in its original form, and importing copyrighted material to make an index which improves their own service's ability to generate unattributed derivative work. It's a bit muddier when it comes to things like image searches, but they're not exactly difficult to opt out of. Google actually pays license fees to News Corp to excerpt their content in Google News following a legal challenge so it's not exactly conclusively established that search engines have global rights to do what they do anyway. But search engines are mostly beneficial to contact creators rather than mostly competitive with them.
- jameshart 3y ago
  Google does its best, but there are limits to “directing people towards the copyrighted material at its original location in its original form” - not everything in the intellectual property world is ‘internet native’. The original form of a song lyric or a movie screenplay doesn’t have an ‘original location’ you can be directed to. You can be directed to various online sources that may or may not accurately reproduce the original, and may or may not be scrupulous about attribution, and may or may not have legitimate copyright license to distribute it in the first place.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Yes, Google will often unwittingly point to other people's copyright violations (it's useful like that!) and will usually only take down the cache/link when requested to do so by the copyright holder. This is irrelevant to original point about the purpose of a search engine being to highlight rather than replace existing information sources, and OpenAI's purpose for indexing content and policy of not engaging with copyright holders being completely different

notahacker 3y ago

There seems to be a fairly clear distinction between importing copyrighted material to make an index for the narrow purpose of directing people towards the copyrighted material at its original location in its original form, and importing copyrighted material to make an index which improves their own service's ability to generate unattributed derivative work. It's a bit muddier when it comes to things like image searches, but they're not exactly difficult to opt out of. Google actually pays license fees to News Corp to excerpt their content in Google News following a legal challenge so it's not exactly conclusively established that search engines have global rights to do what they do anyway. But search engines are mostly beneficial to contact creators rather than mostly competitive with them.

jameshart 3y ago
Google does its best, but there are limits to “directing people towards the copyrighted material at its original location in its original form” - not everything in the intellectual property world is ‘internet native’. The original form of a song lyric or a movie screenplay doesn’t have an ‘original location’ you can be directed to. You can be directed to various online sources that may or may not accurately reproduce the original, and may or may not be scrupulous about attribution, and may or may not have legitimate copyright license to distribute it in the first place.
- notahacker 3y ago
  Yes, Google will often unwittingly point to other people's copyright violations (it's useful like that!) and will usually only take down the cache/link when requested to do so by the copyright holder. This is irrelevant to original point about the purpose of a search engine being to highlight rather than replace existing information sources, and OpenAI's purpose for indexing content and policy of not engaging with copyright holders being completely different