7 ms·

> What you described is entirely fair use, actually Just like during the pandemic how everyone became an epidemiologist, suddenly everyone's a copyright lawyer

> What you described is entirely fair use, actually Just like during the pandemic how everyone became an epidemiologist, suddenly everyone's a copyright lawyer. I'll just dispute your assertion by saying: 1. Questions of fair use are famously gray, and anyone who declares something as "entirely fair use", with no caveats, is nearly always wrong except for the must obvious cases, which the given example is most definitely not. A judge has wide latitude in determining fair use. 2. People should familiarize themselves with the four factors of fair use determination. In particular, if a work is purely derivative of a source work and substantially negatively impacts the market for the original work, it's very likely to not be considered fair use. A great overview is https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

NegativeK 3y ago
> suddenly everyone's a copyright lawyer Roll back 20+ years ago on Slashdot and you'll see the exact same thing. Copyright has been a hot button issue on the internet for decades. People end up thinking (rightly or wrongly) that they understand it without being a lawyer.
- Teever 3y ago
  One of my biggest gripes is a somewhat adjacent issue where everyone thinks they're an American copyright lawyer and that American copyright law is universal. It's very possible that the example provided above is an example of fair use in some country, and that the website offering that service could be hosted there.
- whoknowsidont 3y ago
  > that they understand it without being a lawyer. Quite literally, not even the lawyers or courts understand it. This is very much a "learn as you go" exercise for humanity in general at this point in time.
  - Mattbrown7531 3y ago
    It seems like everything in tech is in the learn as you go phase. Everything is changing so rapidly that there can’t be experts. Just people that are able to adapt quickly. I only see this phenomenon speeding up. Strange times.
- Vicinity9635 3y ago
  Legality aside I think copyright of digital things in the digital age is a net negative to humanity.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Completely agree. Copyright should be abolished. All intellectual work is information, information is just bits and bits are just numbers. It's quite simply delusional to believe you can own numbers in the 21st century, the age of information and ubiquitous globally networked pocket supercomputers. This is just a felony contempt of business model issue. Computers invalidated their business models and they're doing everything they possibly can to hang on for dear life. Society needs to move on already.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      This goes too far. Digital media are not only long series of numbers. They are often difficult-to-create expressions in image, video, and even interactive forms; regardless of their serialization format. Books are just strings of letters, yet copyright has still been useful to increase the volume and utility of books. All that said, I do find the life+70y an absurdly long time.
    - blehn 3y ago
      That seems like a great way to destroy what is left of art as we know it. Anna Karenina is just numbers. In The Mood For Love is just numbers. Right. What do you propose is the business model for artists in the absence of copyright?
      - matheusmoreira 3y ago
        I propose getting paid before doing the work for the actual labor of creation. Crowdfunding, patronage, comissions, sponsorships all seem like ethical ways to get things done sustainably. That way creators get paid before they work, not after. We must strengthen these business models that don't depend on artificial scarcity because this number selling nonsense was over the second computers were invented. It's as dumb as asserting that you need permission to use memcpy or the mov CPU instruction.
- bomewish 3y ago
  This seems a bit disingenuous. Lawyers DISAGREE on this stuff (as we will see in this case) and a court will decide the reality by fiat.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paulddraper 3y ago
> if a work is purely derivative of a source work CliffNotes, Wikipedia, etc. have huge quantities of summarized copyrighted work.
- caesil 3y ago
  Summarization generally isn't considered a derivative work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
- btilly 3y ago
  First, you missed the "and". Do CliffNotes, Wikipedia, etc. substantially impact the market for the original work? For example CliffNotes does not - people who buy the CliffNotes version typically already have the original work as well (for example from coursework). And Wikipedia may well do more to interest people in the original work than to replace it. Second, you ignored the "purely derivative" bit. You have to look at to what extent the use is derivative or transformative. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use for a bit about that. (Note, this is a legal term defined by various precedents. OpenAI can't just argue, "Turning it into an LLM is a transform, so it is transformative!") Since CliffNotes is educational and Wikipedia is nonprofit, it is relatively easy for both to qualify as transformative. As a result your response underscores the point that was made. There are a lot of shades of grey. You really can't just seize on a couple of phrases and key points, then jump straight to the answer. You have to understand how the courts will decide, and then accept that there is an actual judgment call whose outcome depends on the judge judging. (I'm not a lawyer, but I have had excessive exposure to them in the past.)
  - joegahona 3y ago
    > people who buy the CliffNotes version typically already have the original work as well (for example from coursework) Is there data that supports this? I’d be interested to know what % of people who buy a Cliffs Notes have already _bought_ the original.
    - 3y ago
shkkmo 3y ago
> Questions of fair use are famously gray, and anyone who declares something as "entirely fair use", with no caveats, is nearly always wrong except for the must obvious cases, which the given example is most definitely not. A judge has wide latitude in determining fair use. You're the one presenting unfounded claims with confidence here. There is well established case law about not being able to copyright facts. If you are actually fully paraphrasing a presentation of facts / ideas and not just altering a couple of words here and there, then there is a very strong case for non-infringement.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > You're the one presenting unfounded claims with confidence here. No, I'm not. On the contrary, I'm really looking forward to this case because I believe it will be a great test of a bunch of concepts that are totally novel in the world of copyright law as it applies to generative AI. The only things I am presenting with confidence are: 1. That anyone who declares that something is unambiguously fair use (or, contrarily, unambiguously infringing) is likely wrong. There is simply too much latitude by judges, and there have certainly been cases where a ruling went one way, only to be overturned on appeal. 2. While I certainly have an opinion on how I think this case will be decided, I'm not presenting that with unwarranted confidence. Instead, I linked that great article on the 4 factors of fair use determination because it's clear to me lots of people are saying "fair use!" on one side or the other with no understanding of the factors judges must actually consider when making a determination.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - shkkmo 3y ago
    You seem to be shifting the topic of this thread. The GP comment is about paraphrasing news articles while I don't see anything in the NYT lawsuit about paraphrasing. Rather, the NYT is concerned with exact reproduction or near exact reproduction. I too am very curious about the outcome of this case and wouldn't care bet either way on the outcome. I do have an opinion on what precedent would be better for our society but that doesn't mean I think that outcome is more likely. However, none of that matters in this particular thread. There are well established precedents about paraphrasing news articles and they do not support the claim you made
caesil 3y ago
>if a work is purely derivative of a source work This is the weakest part of the case(s) against OpenAI. "Derivative work" is a legal term of art meaning a direct adaptation, like writing a screenplay of a book or translating a book into another language. NYT has a stronger case than Sarah Silverman here because they can show actual 'memorized' text rather than just summarization, but given that those memorizations are a) an unintended failure mode of the training process, and b) from an older version of the model that has been updated to no longer regurgitate memorized text, it's not really clear how in current form GPT could possibly be considered a derivative work.
- avidiax 3y ago
  A question is whether the new model still intrinsically embeds the source text, but this is later filtered in the output, or if it no longer embeds the text at all. The latter is more defensible.
  - skygazer 3y ago
    I would think an existing model could bootstrap a copyright free training corpus by completely rewriting/paraphrasing copyrighted material with semantic fidelity for training of the next model to completely eliminate memorization of copyrighted works. That might pose an interesting obstacle to copyright challenges, bootstrapping your way into a clean room. Although, tweaking the architecture to either eliminate memorization, or eliminate high fidelity reproduction of verbatim training data seems far more expedient and less costly.
- dchichkov 3y ago
  "Transformative" seems to fit a lot more that "Derivative". On the other hand, it's understandable why NYT is worried. OpenAI itself says that occupations like: Writers and Authors, Web and Digital Interface Designers, News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, Proofreaders and Copy Markers are "90-100% exposed" to what OpenAI is building.
  - paledot 3y ago
bsenftner 3y ago
I personally appreciate the semi truck sized loophole that is satire. One can include an entire copy written work within one's own work as long as the treatment of that other copy written work is parody / satire. This is a provision of US copyright law put in place to protect political satire, which can be anything, because politics is everything.

NegativeK 3y ago

> suddenly everyone's a copyright lawyer Roll back 20+ years ago on Slashdot and you'll see the exact same thing. Copyright has been a hot button issue on the internet for decades. People end up thinking (rightly or wrongly) that they understand it without being a lawyer.

Teever 3y ago
One of my biggest gripes is a somewhat adjacent issue where everyone thinks they're an American copyright lawyer and that American copyright law is universal. It's very possible that the example provided above is an example of fair use in some country, and that the website offering that service could be hosted there.
whoknowsidont 3y ago
> that they understand it without being a lawyer. Quite literally, not even the lawyers or courts understand it. This is very much a "learn as you go" exercise for humanity in general at this point in time.
- Mattbrown7531 3y ago
  It seems like everything in tech is in the learn as you go phase. Everything is changing so rapidly that there can’t be experts. Just people that are able to adapt quickly. I only see this phenomenon speeding up. Strange times.
Vicinity9635 3y ago
Legality aside I think copyright of digital things in the digital age is a net negative to humanity.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Completely agree. Copyright should be abolished. All intellectual work is information, information is just bits and bits are just numbers. It's quite simply delusional to believe you can own numbers in the 21st century, the age of information and ubiquitous globally networked pocket supercomputers. This is just a felony contempt of business model issue. Computers invalidated their business models and they're doing everything they possibly can to hang on for dear life. Society needs to move on already.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    This goes too far. Digital media are not only long series of numbers. They are often difficult-to-create expressions in image, video, and even interactive forms; regardless of their serialization format. Books are just strings of letters, yet copyright has still been useful to increase the volume and utility of books. All that said, I do find the life+70y an absurdly long time.
  - blehn 3y ago
    That seems like a great way to destroy what is left of art as we know it. Anna Karenina is just numbers. In The Mood For Love is just numbers. Right. What do you propose is the business model for artists in the absence of copyright?
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      I propose getting paid before doing the work for the actual labor of creation. Crowdfunding, patronage, comissions, sponsorships all seem like ethical ways to get things done sustainably. That way creators get paid before they work, not after. We must strengthen these business models that don't depend on artificial scarcity because this number selling nonsense was over the second computers were invented. It's as dumb as asserting that you need permission to use memcpy or the mov CPU instruction.
bomewish 3y ago
This seems a bit disingenuous. Lawyers DISAGREE on this stuff (as we will see in this case) and a court will decide the reality by fiat.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

paulddraper 3y ago

> if a work is purely derivative of a source work CliffNotes, Wikipedia, etc. have huge quantities of summarized copyrighted work.

caesil 3y ago
Summarization generally isn't considered a derivative work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
btilly 3y ago
First, you missed the "and". Do CliffNotes, Wikipedia, etc. substantially impact the market for the original work? For example CliffNotes does not - people who buy the CliffNotes version typically already have the original work as well (for example from coursework). And Wikipedia may well do more to interest people in the original work than to replace it. Second, you ignored the "purely derivative" bit. You have to look at to what extent the use is derivative or transformative. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use for a bit about that. (Note, this is a legal term defined by various precedents. OpenAI can't just argue, "Turning it into an LLM is a transform, so it is transformative!") Since CliffNotes is educational and Wikipedia is nonprofit, it is relatively easy for both to qualify as transformative. As a result your response underscores the point that was made. There are a lot of shades of grey. You really can't just seize on a couple of phrases and key points, then jump straight to the answer. You have to understand how the courts will decide, and then accept that there is an actual judgment call whose outcome depends on the judge judging. (I'm not a lawyer, but I have had excessive exposure to them in the past.)
- joegahona 3y ago
  > people who buy the CliffNotes version typically already have the original work as well (for example from coursework) Is there data that supports this? I’d be interested to know what % of people who buy a Cliffs Notes have already _bought_ the original.
  - 3y ago

shkkmo 3y ago

> Questions of fair use are famously gray, and anyone who declares something as "entirely fair use", with no caveats, is nearly always wrong except for the must obvious cases, which the given example is most definitely not. A judge has wide latitude in determining fair use. You're the one presenting unfounded claims with confidence here. There is well established case law about not being able to copyright facts. If you are actually fully paraphrasing a presentation of facts / ideas and not just altering a couple of words here and there, then there is a very strong case for non-infringement.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> You're the one presenting unfounded claims with confidence here. No, I'm not. On the contrary, I'm really looking forward to this case because I believe it will be a great test of a bunch of concepts that are totally novel in the world of copyright law as it applies to generative AI. The only things I am presenting with confidence are: 1. That anyone who declares that something is unambiguously fair use (or, contrarily, unambiguously infringing) is likely wrong. There is simply too much latitude by judges, and there have certainly been cases where a ruling went one way, only to be overturned on appeal. 2. While I certainly have an opinion on how I think this case will be decided, I'm not presenting that with unwarranted confidence. Instead, I linked that great article on the 4 factors of fair use determination because it's clear to me lots of people are saying "fair use!" on one side or the other with no understanding of the factors judges must actually consider when making a determination.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- shkkmo 3y ago
  You seem to be shifting the topic of this thread. The GP comment is about paraphrasing news articles while I don't see anything in the NYT lawsuit about paraphrasing. Rather, the NYT is concerned with exact reproduction or near exact reproduction. I too am very curious about the outcome of this case and wouldn't care bet either way on the outcome. I do have an opinion on what precedent would be better for our society but that doesn't mean I think that outcome is more likely. However, none of that matters in this particular thread. There are well established precedents about paraphrasing news articles and they do not support the claim you made

caesil 3y ago

>if a work is purely derivative of a source work This is the weakest part of the case(s) against OpenAI. "Derivative work" is a legal term of art meaning a direct adaptation, like writing a screenplay of a book or translating a book into another language. NYT has a stronger case than Sarah Silverman here because they can show actual 'memorized' text rather than just summarization, but given that those memorizations are a) an unintended failure mode of the training process, and b) from an older version of the model that has been updated to no longer regurgitate memorized text, it's not really clear how in current form GPT could possibly be considered a derivative work.

avidiax 3y ago
A question is whether the new model still intrinsically embeds the source text, but this is later filtered in the output, or if it no longer embeds the text at all. The latter is more defensible.
- skygazer 3y ago
  I would think an existing model could bootstrap a copyright free training corpus by completely rewriting/paraphrasing copyrighted material with semantic fidelity for training of the next model to completely eliminate memorization of copyrighted works. That might pose an interesting obstacle to copyright challenges, bootstrapping your way into a clean room. Although, tweaking the architecture to either eliminate memorization, or eliminate high fidelity reproduction of verbatim training data seems far more expedient and less costly.
dchichkov 3y ago
"Transformative" seems to fit a lot more that "Derivative". On the other hand, it's understandable why NYT is worried. OpenAI itself says that occupations like: Writers and Authors, Web and Digital Interface Designers, News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, Proofreaders and Copy Markers are "90-100% exposed" to what OpenAI is building.
- paledot 3y ago

bsenftner 3y ago

I personally appreciate the semi truck sized loophole that is satire. One can include an entire copy written work within one's own work as long as the treatment of that other copy written work is parody / satire. This is a provision of US copyright law put in place to protect political satire, which can be anything, because politics is everything.