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re: 2... if you copyright a work, then surely you also hold rights to a zip file of that work. So why not also the probability distribution of letters in that w

re: 2... if you copyright a work, then surely you also hold rights to a zip file of that work. So why not also the probability distribution of letters in that work?

kmeisthax 3y ago
If the probability distribution is enough to reproduce a copyrighted work to the level of substantial similarity, then yes, a copy has legally been made. However, that's not the only question involved in a copyright lawsuit[0]. So far most of the evidence of copying has been circumstantial: a regurgitated Quake lighting function here, a Getty Images watermark there, but everything else has looked like wholly original output. We know from how these models are trained that copyrighted work is involved somewhere, but a court could just say it's Fair Use to scrape data and train a model on it. However, that defense is way harder to make if we can actually open up a model and show "ok, this is where and how it's storing copied training set data". At a minimum, it takes the "how much was used" Fair Use factor from "a few watermarks" to "your honor, the entire fucking Internet". [0] As usual we will assume jurisdiction in US court
- noduerme 3y ago
  Just to play devil's advocate, if I were on Microsoft's team, I'd say: You just proved our case. Having the "whole fucking internet" == having general knowledge. Synthesizing general knowledge is fair use. If it was trained only on the works of a certain artist, it would be plagiarism. But if it's trained on all artists, it's not really trained on anyone.
zarzavat 3y ago
To be precise, you don’t hold rights to a zip file, copyright doesn’t know anything about files. You hold rights to a work, an abstract legal concept. Your rights to the work allow you to control the reproduction of that work, and distributing a zip file is an instance of reproducing the work. Probability distributions don’t contain enough information to reproduce a work (since they don’t preserve order). They are not copyrightable in and of themselves, and distributing a probability distribution of a work doesn’t amount to reproduction.

re: 2... if you copyright a work, then surely you also hold rights to a zip file of that work. So why not also the probability distribution of letters in that work?

kmeisthax 3y ago

If the probability distribution is enough to reproduce a copyrighted work to the level of substantial similarity, then yes, a copy has legally been made. However, that's not the only question involved in a copyright lawsuit[0]. So far most of the evidence of copying has been circumstantial: a regurgitated Quake lighting function here, a Getty Images watermark there, but everything else has looked like wholly original output. We know from how these models are trained that copyrighted work is involved somewhere, but a court could just say it's Fair Use to scrape data and train a model on it. However, that defense is way harder to make if we can actually open up a model and show "ok, this is where and how it's storing copied training set data". At a minimum, it takes the "how much was used" Fair Use factor from "a few watermarks" to "your honor, the entire fucking Internet". [0] As usual we will assume jurisdiction in US court

noduerme 3y ago
Just to play devil's advocate, if I were on Microsoft's team, I'd say: You just proved our case. Having the "whole fucking internet" == having general knowledge. Synthesizing general knowledge is fair use. If it was trained only on the works of a certain artist, it would be plagiarism. But if it's trained on all artists, it's not really trained on anyone.

zarzavat 3y ago

To be precise, you don’t hold rights to a zip file, copyright doesn’t know anything about files. You hold rights to a work, an abstract legal concept. Your rights to the work allow you to control the reproduction of that work, and distributing a zip file is an instance of reproducing the work. Probability distributions don’t contain enough information to reproduce a work (since they don’t preserve order). They are not copyrightable in and of themselves, and distributing a probability distribution of a work doesn’t amount to reproduction.