4 ms·

Don't news publishers have an even harder time making a case here than (say) software publishers? At least with software, there are explicit licenses governing

Don't news publishers have an even harder time making a case here than (say) software publishers? At least with software, there are explicit licenses governing how you're presumably allowed to use them. Is the New York Times going to claim people are agreeing to a license before reading their news?

ziddoap 3y ago
>Is the New York Times going to claim people are agreeing to a license before reading their news? They don't need to. They have implicit, automatic copyright on the published original works. The lawsuit shows examples of GPT using the NYT work verbatim.
- dagaci 3y ago
  To discover than a particular LLM is able to output verbatim a sections of NYT works when queried in certain ways is different from explicitly publishing a set of NYC works... i think. OpenAI does not distribute it models, so the violation of copywrite if found to be a violation will be limited to the amount of people who queried the LLM in the same way that NYT did.
  - ziddoap 3y ago
    My comment was directed solely at the part I quoted regarding licenses -- the NYT does not need to claim anything about licenses because they have implicit copyright. How that copyright shakes out in the end (what your statements focus on) is yet to be determined.
- dataflow 3y ago
  You completely missed my point. I'm saying that between "you're violating copyright law" and "you're violating copyright law and you supposedly agreed you a license that contractually prevented you from doing this", the second sounds like a stronger claim.
  - nicklecompte 3y ago
    The reason the current license ecosystem exists for open-source software is that there's a huge difference between owning the code and owning the binary distribution. This difference doesn't exist for newspaper articles (or books, visual art, etc). Even technical manuals are not machines in the way that software is. The fact that software is both text and tool means the legal issues are different and need clarification. So existing copyright law was sufficient for written media, but didn't quite work for software. OTOH it seems that GPL-style copyleft licenses are being used more by writers and artists, so it's not like these issues exist in a vacuum. I expect copyleft will be more appealing to artists going forward given Midjourney et al.
- NemoNobody 3y ago
  I understand their claim to copyright of recent material but the real reason so much of their information was used is bc we are talking about the, essentially historical, NYT archives that date back to likely the early era of the newspaper itself. I don't think they should have a right to the records of people who lived before simply bc they underpaid, over worked human journalists to exploit their creativity - largely to make the "Newspaper Barons" rich. I don't think they ought to have implicit, automatic copyright on older stuff. How old is my only debate. What good is old news really? Real old is good for college papers but news from 4 years ago... who cares?

ziddoap 3y ago

>Is the New York Times going to claim people are agreeing to a license before reading their news? They don't need to. They have implicit, automatic copyright on the published original works. The lawsuit shows examples of GPT using the NYT work verbatim.

dagaci 3y ago
To discover than a particular LLM is able to output verbatim a sections of NYT works when queried in certain ways is different from explicitly publishing a set of NYC works... i think. OpenAI does not distribute it models, so the violation of copywrite if found to be a violation will be limited to the amount of people who queried the LLM in the same way that NYT did.
- ziddoap 3y ago
  My comment was directed solely at the part I quoted regarding licenses -- the NYT does not need to claim anything about licenses because they have implicit copyright. How that copyright shakes out in the end (what your statements focus on) is yet to be determined.
dataflow 3y ago
You completely missed my point. I'm saying that between "you're violating copyright law" and "you're violating copyright law and you supposedly agreed you a license that contractually prevented you from doing this", the second sounds like a stronger claim.
- nicklecompte 3y ago
  The reason the current license ecosystem exists for open-source software is that there's a huge difference between owning the code and owning the binary distribution. This difference doesn't exist for newspaper articles (or books, visual art, etc). Even technical manuals are not machines in the way that software is. The fact that software is both text and tool means the legal issues are different and need clarification. So existing copyright law was sufficient for written media, but didn't quite work for software. OTOH it seems that GPL-style copyleft licenses are being used more by writers and artists, so it's not like these issues exist in a vacuum. I expect copyleft will be more appealing to artists going forward given Midjourney et al.
NemoNobody 3y ago
I understand their claim to copyright of recent material but the real reason so much of their information was used is bc we are talking about the, essentially historical, NYT archives that date back to likely the early era of the newspaper itself. I don't think they should have a right to the records of people who lived before simply bc they underpaid, over worked human journalists to exploit their creativity - largely to make the "Newspaper Barons" rich. I don't think they ought to have implicit, automatic copyright on older stuff. How old is my only debate. What good is old news really? Real old is good for college papers but news from 4 years ago... who cares?