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Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rjbwork 3y agoWill be interesting to watch regulatory arbitrage play out over the next couple of years if the US and EU diverge from this take in upcoming legal disputes.
- engineer_22 3y agoIf AI is a winner-take-all industry, they are prudent to clear the way for it.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoBig if.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoMoloch wins. Too much money to be made.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoI fail to see how sensible copyright policy is equivalent to burning infants as human sacrifice to Canaanite deities.
- throwaw33333434 3y agomoloch in ginsberg's sense
- traverseda 3y agoStill though, this seems like a reasonable copyright option.
- gwd 3y agoContext: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ TLDR: A "Moloch Trap" is a generic term for situations like the the Prisoner's Dilemma, where optimal actions for the group are the opposite of optimal actions for each individual in that group.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoEven with this context, seems a little dumb. Copyright maximalists are constantly trying to invent new rights that they've never had. If a person is allowed to read training material acquired legally, then so too must their LLM experiment be allowed to read it. The LLM reading it creates no new copies. Moloch didn't win here. Everyone else did. We get new technologies, the copyright owners got everything they were promise, just not more.
- gwd 3y agoI don't think the result is as clear either as the "Moloch" commenter, nor you, seem to think. I agree that the result is not a "Moloch trap": as you say, the new technology actually does de-fang Google Search and empowers many smaller people to be able to do things they would never otherwise have been able to do. The contrary ruling would certainly have been enjoyed by "copyright maximalists" like Disney extracting value from the public domain without giving anything back. But there are more people affected than just greedy copyright maximalists. Individual artists who have spent years developing a distinctive style and making it popular are seeing their style copied ad-infinitum for free. Organizations like the NYT that invest money doing investigative journalism are having their results slurped up and regurgitated. To your comment: > If a person is allowed to read training material acquired legally, then so too must their LLM experiment be allowed to read it. The LLM reading it creates no new copies. In the past, each copyrighted work seen might train a single BNN (biological neural network). Only a small percentage of BNNs would actually study such work to learn to emulate it; only a handful would achieve parity or exceed the quality of the work. Each BNN was expensive to employ, would only work for a certain number of hours per day, and a certain number of years before retiring. Now a single ANN (artificial neural network) can study works to emulate them in a month or two. That ANN is far less expensive to employ than a BNN; can be deployed 24/7 indefinitely; and can be duplicated to as many GPUs as someone can get their hands on. Currently legally, it may be that an ANN learning from an artist's work is the same as a BNN learning from an artist's work. But from a practical perspective, from the case of individual artists, it's clearly not the same. Now maybe that's the inevitable price of progress; but 1) I don't think that's the inevitable conclusion, and 2) even if it is, we need to be honest about it.
- throwaway237289 3y agoWill be great to see Japan become world leaders in AI and for the regulators to realize they're shooting themselves in the foot.
- LegitShady 3y agosounds like many places like the US etc will no longer be able to recognize/reciprocate with Japanese copyright laws and AI products. Japanese AI products might never be able to make it to the west.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoCopyright needs reform desperately. It has been outdated and not fulfilling its purpose for decades now. This is a first step by Japan in a good direction IMO. I hope it will have some influence on the rest of the world.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dang 3y agoCan you please stop posting like this? It is excessive: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Asjfjsjdjwvwvc%20copyright&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- asah 3y agoSo wait. If I encode something near-losslessly into a neural net then it's ok? Books and music are now free ?
- ambyra 3y agoIt's easier just to pay the $10/month spotify subscription.
- asah 3y agosorry if I wasn't clear: under JP copyright, you can encode and then redistribute, presumably for a profit or other gain, and not renumerate content creators at all. True wholesale piracy which destroys the economics for all forms of content creation that don't have another obvious way to make money (e.g. authors can't sell concert tickets).
- munk-a 3y agoPretty much yea - while trying to make way for progress Japan may have accidentally blown a gigantic hole in their IP rights system that renders the whole thing essentially moot.
- tensor 3y agoBeing able to train an AI is different than using it to reproduce copyright works verbatim. I could easily see a rule where you can train a model, but it's still on you to make sure that you don't use output from it that is too close to a copyright work. This to me seems like the right approach, and is not much different from what humans do. Humans are free to read whatever source material they want, but you can't subsequently write it down from memory verbatim or nearly verbatim. edit: And if you think I'm being hypothetical, Github Copilot already does exactly this.
- wredue 3y agoHow can it possibly fall on you to verify your works? The only possible way to do this is for companies to provide a list of all of their sources and for me to then automate verification and hope it works! The real answer is that I should be able to control whether my information is used to train models or not, because we already know that models spit out verbatim results with generic queries and there’s just no way for a user to otherwise check this.
- badcppdev 3y agoSo I can see the logic in treating the inputs to the AI training data sets the same way we treat humans learning something. A potential downside is that AI systems can 'mechanise' the creation of material that potentially infringes copyright (in the same way that human generated content can infringe) But a potential upside is that we can 'mechanise' the process by which we judge whether new content infringes the copyright of older material.
- limaoscarjuliet 3y agoWe learned to make a distinction based solely on "mechanisation" aspect: - email vs spam, - phone call vs robo-call, - hand drawn vs a copy machine (to some extent), - etc.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago> So I can see the logic in treating the inputs to the AI training data sets the same way we treat humans learning something. If we don't take this approach then there will be a series of very lame legal loop-holes with putting mechanical Turks [1] in the process. Or just end up with very "I know it when I see it" legislation. So for both practical and philosophical grounds I do support this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
- JKCalhoun 3y agoAnd "clean room" AI training other AI. The end is inevitable, protecting copyright for AI training is probably a lost cause.
- vidarh 3y agoYou don't even need that. Even "just" OpenAI has a valuation large enough to just buy several major publishers and data brokers to secure access to data if they need to license. And while I expect NYT imagines that their archive is really valuable for training, they're just not that special in the sense that while they may have broken more stories on average than many others, and have had influential op eds etc., the ones that matters will have been cited and referenced and written about elsewhere - the irony is that by virtue of being so well known, their historically most important content is also less unique in terms of the accessibility of the information in it. So while I'm sure OpenAI would love their archives, I'm also sure that if OpenAI and others have to license content and NYT end up being "difficult", OpenAI will just license content from (or buy) a suitably diverse portfolio of other papers instead. In other words, beyond producing outright synthetic data, if AI companies are prevented from training on data they don't have a license to, the net effect will just be a scramble to buy licenses and/or buy companies that can provide sources of content, and the price for that content will be a lot lower than some of the people pursuing these copyright claims imagine. In the end, if we go that route, all we'll have achieved as a society is creating massive moats protecting the companies already big enough to buy access to a broad enough set of content and made open models harder.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Cieric 3y agoI feel like this will cause pseudo companies to pop up in japan just for training AI models. That way any company that wants to deflect blame can just deflect it to the pseudo company, which then has no legal obligation to respect the copyright.
- dougmwne 3y agoI think it’s a weak argument anyway. A pencil can be used to recreate copyrighted works. Why should a LLM be different? The legal responsibility always has been and should continue to be on the person publishing or making available the work. And at any rate, a country banning this tech will be missing the revolution. Protecting the buggy whip manufacturers and all that.
- ziddoap 3y agoA pencil can be used to recreate copyrighted works. Why should a LLM be different? Speed and scale make these completely unrelated in my opinion.
- cwillu 3y agoSpeed and scale also makes the printing press completely different than the pencil, but the principle that the user is responsible for the output remains practical.
- ziddoap 3y agoMy opinion is that people should just state that conclusion rather than make these silly comparisons.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- exe34 3y agoNot everybody thinks in the same way. Some, maybe most people benefit from intuition pumps such as analogies. Good analogies clarify the point, poor ones obscure it.
- ziddoap 3y ago>Good analogies clarify the point, poor ones obscure it. I definitely agree with this, but I think a "good analogy" is really rare. In this case, I think that the analogy just obscures the main point about copyright. I think the original comment would have been stronger by omitting the analogy and just discussing where the legal responsibility falls. In almost every case an analogy is made, people discuss the validity of the analogy over the actual point of the comment (I'm guilty here too! my comment ended up being about the analogy rather than the main point).
- keikobadthebad 3y agoSomething else is going to have to give... copyright applies to artists and authors not in the sense they can't learn from other peoples' content, but that they can't plagiarize it. So either that end will have to stand the same for humans and AI, one way or the other.
- LegitShady 3y agohumans and AI aren't the same. There's no reason to think it will have to be the same.
- tivert 3y ago> humans and AI aren't the same. There's no reason to think it will have to be the same. Exactly. It would be entirely legitimate to legally privilege human learning without allowing that privilege to transfer (by analogy) to machine learning. There are a lot of people who want use analogy to force the transfer of that privilege because 1) they judge they can profit handsomely and/or 2) they're technology enthusiasts who've read too much sci-fi.
- keikobadthebad 3y agoYes there is - why should a well-proven law against plagiarism just evaporate if the human gets an ai to do it instead of does it themselves? Either the law should be revoked wholesale or it will have to be applied wholesale.
- LegitShady 3y agoI don't think you understood what I wrote.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThey do have to be the same because learning is not something you can constrain with law pragmatically. Style and structure is not protected and can be mimicked so it is trivial to do parallel construction for any stylistic ideal even if the law says you can’t train on the original. Society does not benefit from these extra steps. Specific IP like characters are already perfectly well protected by copyright. It does not infringe on anything to learn about Batman. Just “training for the heck of it” without any justification for limits besides hurting the artists feelings who put their art in public kinda sucks for them but the alternative is just saying that only but doing otherwise is just asking for only large corporations to be able to train. And it’s not like artists will be comped for that either. It’ll just be them losing out because they put it on a “free” platform.
- ur-whale 3y agoI AI has only the one benefit of destroying the very idea of copyright, this in itself will be a huge win for humanity.
- skepticATX 3y agoOutput can still infringe, however. This is only talking about input.
- mjburgess 3y agoThis is just an end to copyright. There is no definition of "AI", it has always been a marketing term for monetising csci research. There is no difference between a lossy jpg, taking its pixels as weights, and the weights of a NN. So if i just zip up copyrighted images using a NN, then, what? They're public domain? Regulators here are miles away from understanding the implications -- this is what happens when you let companies whose profit motive is selling "AI" be the "Experts" on the topic. If you don't care about Disney, fine -- so what about your health records? This is also the prelude to an end to privacy
- slibhb 3y agoIt seems pretty clear what AI means in this context. > There is no difference between a lossy jpg, taking its pixels as weights, and the weights of a NN. Somehow I don't think this is going to hold up in court.
- kaibee 3y agoAt that direct level yeah probably, and I do think copyright is dumb and should be if not abolished, limited to 20 years or whatever. That said, imagine training a network from scratch entirely on Disney's catelog. Even if that model is then prompted to generate new characters, it seems weird to say that Disney's copyright wasn't infringed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwawaymaths 3y agoCompletely crazy take. Your health records are not currently protected by copyright law. If someone magically snapped their fingers and eliminated copyright law, the protections on your health data, scant though they may be, would more or less be the same (IANAL)
- mjburgess 3y ago
- nuz 3y ago90s Japan vs the US energy is back.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jasoneckert 3y agoI wonder how or if this will affect the NYT case (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941). It could potentially shift the focus from protecting the source of the data used to train models to preventing the outputs from competing with the source.
- munk-a 3y agoWell it's a different jurisdiction entirely - but if that case was happening in Japan after this ruling it'd likely be extremely easy for OpenAI to win the case.
- traverseda 3y agoHow would that effect, for example, maintaining a large corpus of pirated work for training AI on? Presume that you didn't break any other laws in the process of pirating the works? Could I license a large corpus of pirated work to people explicitly using it for AI training? Like if I downloaded all the books, and then sold access to that collection to someone for AI training, with them agreeing to a EULA preventing them from actually reading the books? All kinds of interesting legal questions.
- Ekaros 3y agoMy understanding in general with piracy is that it goes after those that do the distribution. So you downloading all possible material from where ever as long as it is not illegal is likely rather low risk/penalty. However system will absolutely destroy you if you try to sell or distribute copies of material you collected...
- xtracto 3y agoI know here we are talking about Japan, and I am not familiar with Japan stance on Downloading / Uploading and copyright violations. But here in Mexico, you can download all you want, and last time I read the law, as long as you did stuff "not for profit" you could also distribute digital content. (of course I always say that, here in Mexico it is illegal to murder people, kidnap and whatnot, and look at how much they prosecute people that do that [95% of crime goes unpunished in Mexico [1]]) [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/violent-crimes-rise-mexico-948-go-unpunished-rcna2846?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/violent-crimes-rise-mexi...
- Ekaros 3y agoCivil liability in many European countries and in USA too seems the real risk. Seed a torrent from home with wrong content and get nice "blackmail" letter from some lawyer... Go to court and end up paying thousands if not hundreds of thousands on some extremely bizarre calculations.
- traverseda 3y ago
- GreedClarifies 3y agoGood for Japan. The copyright claims are spurious, the laws were never written with such powerful algorithms in mind. If copyright applies to training, and if law is based upon principles instead of raw power then such a ruling would lead to strange places. Bravo.
- devd00d 3y agoDoes that mean they are gunning to become AI Central? I mean, this was probably going to happen in Russia anyway, or any other country that doesn't care about Copyright. So I guess that cat is out the bag? Interesting times!
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- paxys 3y agoThere is a distinction to be made between inputs and outputs when it comes to AI and copyright. Most people focus on the former, and discuss whether you can train an LLM on copyrighted works or not, but ultimately the issues really only manifest in the latter. An AI training itself on a million newspaper articles can be declared legal, sure, but what happens when it also starts spitting out the same articles with nearly no modification? Is that still fair use? This is the crux of NYT's lawsuit, and making laws about AI training isn't going to make a difference to that.
- lesuorac 3y ago> This is what the crux of NYT's lawsuit is about, and making laws about AI training isn't going to make a difference to that. The claims of NYT are more than just about training. They're claiming that as part of the ChatGPT software; it _looks up_ stuff in a database of articles. That is beyond _training_. If a human kept around a briefcase of NYT articles they didn't pay for and let you view them for a fee I think everybody would agree that's copyright infringement. The focus on "whats the difference between an AI and a Human learning" is a great slight of hand to bypass the obvious copyright infringement OpenAI is doing.
- l33tman 3y agoSounds similar to the lawsuits against Google by the newspapers of the world for them providing excerpts of their articles on the search result page or so. So essentially you can ask chatgpt to fetch and summarize a paywalled article, because openai has subscribed their crawler?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nicklecompte 3y agoI believe it really only works with GPT-4 directly, because OpenAI's prompting to make ChatGPT a chatbot ruins the effect. Specifically the NYT put in the first sentence of the article and asked GPT-4 to autocomplete it, which it did with >95% accuracy. It's really quite stark: https://nitter.net/jason_kint/status/1740146134767865895#m https://nitter.net/jason_kint/status/1740146134767865895#m The issue isn't that GPT-4 users can read NYT stories without paying for a subscription, though that is a legitimate concern. The issue is that for good-faith use cases - e.g. asking to write a summary about a recent current event - GPT-4 could very well copy an entire paragraph from NYT verbatim, without the user having any way of knowing. It's a serious problem.
- wjp3 3y agoWhat's the counter to this argument? "If you put something on the web, it's in the public domain. Free game."
- bee_rider 3y agoIt isn’t an argument, it is just a statement of something which is factual or not depending on your jurisdiction, or more importantly the jurisdiction of people who see your work.
- InsomniacL 3y ago"...whether it is content obtained from illegal sites or otherwise.” Keiko Nagaoka, Japanese Minister of Education
- Crunsher 3y agoThe source referenced is the minutes a representative made in a committee last year in april and within that a clarification question while discussing AI in education. It's not policy, not recent and not true.
- sickofparadox 3y agoThat's how I like all of my news stories - untrue, untimely, and based off of the word of one person in the legislature.
- underyx 3y agoBut at least it was written by a real human! /s
- munk-a 3y agoBut was it submitted by a real human? /s
- MichaelZuo 3y agoPlus this website looks so SEO'ed that it's unclear whether it's even a real 'association'.
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- xyproto 3y agoCopyright is a dumb system in the first place. Information wants to be free. People can still pay other people for a promise to create more content, or to create custom content. Companies can still have trademarks and patents for a couple of years. And states, royalty and rich people can still be patrons.
- breadwinner 3y agoAI training is no different than a human reading copyrighted material and training his biological brain. In neither case is the "brain" allowed to regurgitate source material in its original form. And as long as that doesn't happen there is no copyright violation.
- xigoi 3y agoWhy should LLMs have the same rights as humans?
- breadwinner 3y agoBecause LLM is just a tool, and humans have the right to use whatever tools they want.
- DarkmSparks 3y agoAs much as I want to be on the AI industries side here. rumours of chatgpt producing verbatim copies of NYT articles kinda suggests its still going to apply to the output. Obviously, there is a difference between training AI and using AI. Its very hard to make a case that training AI breaches copyright in any way. But its copyright 101 that if what that AI spits out after isn't transformative the AI retailer is getting hefty fines.
- refulgentis 3y agonot rumors, in legal docs, I haven't read the docs yet but someone else wrote a post claiming they were primed with several paragraphs of the article (I'm not sure what to believe, but the screenshots were disturbing) (n.b. this is a complex problem and the scenario isn't quite so simple, if I hire an artist that creates work with a copyrighted figure / use a site that gives me random images it created that I know to sometimes replicate copyrighted figures, its not the artist / site / even me having the image in my possession that's a problem)
- mistrial9 3y agoother comments here suggest that this is not a recent development, and it is deeply editorialized
- zelon88 3y agoI think it's notable that when the copyright holder is a business there is rarely any questioning that the copyright holder is king. But when the copyright holder is an individual or an artist, then it practically becomes a challenge for the government and/or private sector to try and strip that copyright away from you.
- redcobra762 3y agoThat’s because of publishing, mostly. Individual creators very often sign over some or all control of their work to companies in order to make more money.
- throwitaway222 3y agoFor all we know, in 5 years you could ask an AI to "reproduce the entire Supernatural TV show but change the character names, dialog and look just enough to bypass copyright issues - 7 seasons, 24 episodes each MP4 format"
- qingcharles 3y agoSeven seasons? I thought you said reproduce the entire show? 37 seasons :D
- throwitaway222 3y agoI see we have a fan of that show! :)
- exe34 3y agoIs anybody going to want to watch it other than the one who ordered it? Would anyone order this modified version before having paid for and enjoyed the original? If the market is flooded with these cheap copies, wouldn't the original have even more value for authenticity?
- xtracto 3y ago(All IMHO) Which is great! Copyright is stupid and it is time we derogated that 350 old law which at this point is stifling innovation. As I said in another thread: Sorry if your 40 hour work won't pay you $10 bucks a month forever. That's the case for most of the rest of us: we produce for 40 hours, we get paid for those 40 hours, regardless of what we do. Welcome to the club!!
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- rvz 3y agoIt is not that hard to train on public-domain content only or content that has the permission of the creators. Stability knew that they would get into trouble if they dared to evade copyright laws in the music industry with StableAudio. [0] We'll see how Sony Music Japan, Universal Music Group Japan and the rest think about this latest iteration of regulatory arbitrage with AI. [0] https://stability.ai/research/stable-audio-efficient-timing-latent-diffusion https://stability.ai/research/stable-audio-efficient-timing-...
- smurda 3y agoPolicymakers are making a tradeoff between privacy and economic value. When governments see the potential for creating large tech companies and loose copyright policy can give them an edge, they must decide to choose between privacy or economic value. South Korea has mirrored Japan's policy: https://metanews.com/south-korean-government-says-no-copyright-for-ai-content/ https://metanews.com/south-korean-government-says-no-copyrig...
- lucasyvas 3y agoIt would follow that it doesn't apply to outputs either then, yes?
- lynguist 3y agoJapan was falling behind technologically and to prevent any crazy New York Times vs OpenAI style litigations they went ahead and did this. It makes sense.
- elforce002 3y agoWell, this would be interesting. Either this will hinder innovation (why bother creating something if anyone can steal it and use it) or will create a new age of innovation based sharing knowledge between citizens. Time will tell.
- bluecalm 3y agoThe only sensible approach imo. It's copyright not readingright. AI should be judged by its output. If it's close enough to the copyrighted material then the publisher is liable. If it isn't they aren't.