5 ms·

Is it just me or is that really the main and most consequential claim? Title feels misleading.

tailspin2019 3y ago
Yeah agreed, and also the general direction this is heading in feels a bit strange to me - we can debate the merits of current copyright law - but the indisputable fact is that the training material came from *pirated* copies of these author’s copyrighted works. If we are to believe the much used arguments against piracy that we’ve been fed over the last 30+ years (mainly by deep pocketed media companies) then piracy is stealing and if you take stolen material and use it to produce a profitable commercial service then surely that’s a clear cut case in favour of the copyright owners? Otherwise WTF have we been prosecuting individuals for all these years for pirating movies and music etc? And here’s the injury: the authors did not get paid for their copyrighted work. Whether you agree with the law or not, OpenAI at the very least should have bought a copy of every book they trained on - and that doesn’t even get into the question of whether they even had the right to train on that material even if they had paid for it. They didn’t do that. They used stolen copies instead. I don’t understand how it could go any other way. I do get the judge’s reluctance to decide that every bit of output of ChatGPT constitutes copyright infringement - that’s much harder to argue. I’m not passionately against OpenAI - I pay them money - but I am concerned about this “training material” sourcing issue just being swept under the rug. AI advancements clearly do impact artists, authors and other creators of works… they’ll be even more screwed if we just throw copyright law completely out of the window at the same time.
- wmf 3y ago
  The piracy argument can be fixed by OpenAI buying one copy of each work. The overall question of whether they're allowed to train on copyrighted material without permission seems much larger and more interesting.
  - salawat 3y ago
    May not be that easy. It may be the case we'll find that (in much the way as tech has made popular ironically) authors/IP creators aren't willing to sell "machine training rights" to their work. A concept that could find itself magicked into existence by artists/publishers.
    - KoolKat23 3y ago
      Legally if they sell it, they no longer own it and can't determine how it is used. If they license it, that's a different story (they can make a claim of how I breached terms of use, still no copyright issue though). They have absolutely no say in how I use the book they sold to me. Only if I reproduce that book, the actual physical reproduced work is of concern to copyright law, nothing else (my use of the book I bought from you is of no concern).
      - salawat 3y ago
        All it takes is a EULA page in the book they sell you to remedy that; a practice well trod by the tech industry to establish the licensing vs. Assumed First Sale relationship. I find it naive to simply assume that publishers won't play tit-for-tat with those that are trying to indirectly monetize their output. I had hope that a return to First Sale sanity may win the day, but as of late I have a dread we're briskly walking down the path where no one is going to be "selling" in the conventional sense anymore. Not with the stakes at hand.
        KoolKat23 3y ago
        You're 100% and raise a good point.It would only work with digital goods though. At some point people seriously have to realise copyright is just a tool with pro's and con's, a balancing act between differing interests. I agree the principle of first sale should apply even to digital goods. There's some hope in the EU that this is on occasion the case, but much room for improvement everywhere.
  - solid_fuel 3y ago
    Can you even buy a digital copy of most recent work that doesn't come with Terms & Conditions attached? A physical book is one thing but it's really hard to buy digital media without agreeing to strict terms, often allowing access to the media to be revoked post-sale (what would that even mean after you use it to train a model?) I've assumed for a while that avoiding the nightmare of all those different agreements was one of the main reasons they chose to pirate the works instead.
  - brookst 3y ago
    If learning from a purchased, copyrighted work is illegal, colleges are in real trouble. Textbook publishers will be thrilled though: this book is $200 to read, but you need an additional license to learn anything from it.
    - vundercind 3y ago
      Learning and then reproducing parts of a work already is illegal, depending on context. Also, “learning” here isn’t the same thing as what college students do. For one thing, you can’t copy-paste a college student’s whole brain. You can’t own and sell their brains (well, ah, you know what I mean—not the organ trade). For another… it’s simply not the same thing. It might be, we suppose, similar to some parts of how human learning work, but it’s plainly not identical and may not be especially close. We use the same word for what LLMs do because it’s a convenient and useful-enough analogy, but that doesn’t mean we can prove anything else simply based on our having re-used the word “learn” here. “That’s learning, this is learning, so all things that apply to one apply to the other”—no, that doesn’t follow, it takes more than that.
      - KoolKat23 3y ago
        Only the reproduction is judged whether or not it is too close to the original or not (the physical reproduced item, not the reproduction process or concept). Nothing else is subject to copyright. Copyright protection does not extend to ideas, procedures, processes, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles, or discoveries. Copyright protects only the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
      - brookst 3y ago
        Sure, “learning and then reproducing” is just as illegal as “learning and then dumping toxic waste in a river”. If the complaint is with the second action, as it should be, the learning part is irrelevant.
  - maronato 3y ago
    Exactly! They just need to pay for it! The same way that they should pay for using news articles and people’s images/comics.
    - wmf 3y ago
      There are two versions of "just pay for it" though: 1. Pay retail price for one copy then train on it. 2. Pay a recurring license fee that probably amounts to the majority of your revenue (Spotify-style). AI companies can't really afford #2.
- stale2002 3y ago
  > Otherwise WTF have we been prosecuting individuals for all these years for pirating movies and music etc? We don't. Nobody got prosecuted for downloading movies. Because that isn't illegal. Whats illegal is distributing copies to other people. Its OK though. Its a common misconception that internet piracy is illegal. Only the distribution part has ever been successfully prosecuted. > They didn’t do that. They used stolen copies instead. Using stolen copies isn't illegal. It is completely legal to use other people's work without their permission. Distributing copies is the only part that is illegal. > if we just throw copyright law completely out of the window at the same time. Nothing is being throw out the window. The facts that I have described have always been true.
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    I imagine you'd still be liable as some sort of accomplice? Unless you had a reasonable belief that you obtained a legal copy, or had the copy forced onto you somehow.
  - tailspin2019 3y ago
    It’s not just distribution. Making unauthorised reproductions of copyrighted work is also copyright infringement. I take your point that prosecutions are focused more on the sharers than individual downloaders, but OpenAI still infringed copyright by making unauthorised reproductions of the authors’ works (by downloading pirated copies of them).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - stale2002 3y ago
      > but OpenAI still infringed copyright by making unauthorised reproductions of the authors’ works (by downloading pirated copies of them). I am not aware of a single example in the history of US copyright law where someone has been successfully prosecuted for the downloading part. If such an example does not exist, then I think it is safe to say that it is not illegal. But feel free to show me this an example. Because I have so far never heard of such a case.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Fair use is non-transitive: you reviewing a pirated copy of a movie can be fair use even if that copy isn't. If training on copyrighted images is fair use then it doesn't matter how you got those images. Think about it this way: if the opposite were true, then being able to review a movie would be a privilege you have to pay for by buying the movie, rather than just something you can do because the 1st Amendment exists. A concrete example of this is Google Images. Image search is fair use, even though they index shittons of infringing images. The judge isn't going to touch the "output is infringing" argument mainly because the authors didn't actually connect the dots between their work and a specific output. That's an argument that would stick if you were suing a user of OpenAI's services, not OpenAI themselves. "Output is infringing" is going to be part of the fair use analysis anyway (specifically, the market substitution factor), so this extra claim is superfluous.
  - __loam 3y ago
    It has not been proven that AI training data is fair use.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Pretend my comment starts with "Assuming AI training is ruled to be fair use". I don't actually think it will be ruled fair use, at least not in all cases.

tailspin2019 3y ago

Yeah agreed, and also the general direction this is heading in feels a bit strange to me - we can debate the merits of current copyright law - but the indisputable fact is that the training material came from *pirated* copies of these author’s copyrighted works. If we are to believe the much used arguments against piracy that we’ve been fed over the last 30+ years (mainly by deep pocketed media companies) then piracy is stealing and if you take stolen material and use it to produce a profitable commercial service then surely that’s a clear cut case in favour of the copyright owners? Otherwise WTF have we been prosecuting individuals for all these years for pirating movies and music etc? And here’s the injury: the authors did not get paid for their copyrighted work. Whether you agree with the law or not, OpenAI at the very least should have bought a copy of every book they trained on - and that doesn’t even get into the question of whether they even had the right to train on that material even if they had paid for it. They didn’t do that. They used stolen copies instead. I don’t understand how it could go any other way. I do get the judge’s reluctance to decide that every bit of output of ChatGPT constitutes copyright infringement - that’s much harder to argue. I’m not passionately against OpenAI - I pay them money - but I am concerned about this “training material” sourcing issue just being swept under the rug. AI advancements clearly do impact artists, authors and other creators of works… they’ll be even more screwed if we just throw copyright law completely out of the window at the same time.

wmf 3y ago
The piracy argument can be fixed by OpenAI buying one copy of each work. The overall question of whether they're allowed to train on copyrighted material without permission seems much larger and more interesting.
- salawat 3y ago
  May not be that easy. It may be the case we'll find that (in much the way as tech has made popular ironically) authors/IP creators aren't willing to sell "machine training rights" to their work. A concept that could find itself magicked into existence by artists/publishers.
  - KoolKat23 3y ago
    Legally if they sell it, they no longer own it and can't determine how it is used. If they license it, that's a different story (they can make a claim of how I breached terms of use, still no copyright issue though). They have absolutely no say in how I use the book they sold to me. Only if I reproduce that book, the actual physical reproduced work is of concern to copyright law, nothing else (my use of the book I bought from you is of no concern).
    - salawat 3y ago
      All it takes is a EULA page in the book they sell you to remedy that; a practice well trod by the tech industry to establish the licensing vs. Assumed First Sale relationship. I find it naive to simply assume that publishers won't play tit-for-tat with those that are trying to indirectly monetize their output. I had hope that a return to First Sale sanity may win the day, but as of late I have a dread we're briskly walking down the path where no one is going to be "selling" in the conventional sense anymore. Not with the stakes at hand.
      - KoolKat23 3y ago
        You're 100% and raise a good point.It would only work with digital goods though. At some point people seriously have to realise copyright is just a tool with pro's and con's, a balancing act between differing interests. I agree the principle of first sale should apply even to digital goods. There's some hope in the EU that this is on occasion the case, but much room for improvement everywhere.
- solid_fuel 3y ago
  Can you even buy a digital copy of most recent work that doesn't come with Terms & Conditions attached? A physical book is one thing but it's really hard to buy digital media without agreeing to strict terms, often allowing access to the media to be revoked post-sale (what would that even mean after you use it to train a model?) I've assumed for a while that avoiding the nightmare of all those different agreements was one of the main reasons they chose to pirate the works instead.
- brookst 3y ago
  If learning from a purchased, copyrighted work is illegal, colleges are in real trouble. Textbook publishers will be thrilled though: this book is $200 to read, but you need an additional license to learn anything from it.
  - vundercind 3y ago
    Learning and then reproducing parts of a work already is illegal, depending on context. Also, “learning” here isn’t the same thing as what college students do. For one thing, you can’t copy-paste a college student’s whole brain. You can’t own and sell their brains (well, ah, you know what I mean—not the organ trade). For another… it’s simply not the same thing. It might be, we suppose, similar to some parts of how human learning work, but it’s plainly not identical and may not be especially close. We use the same word for what LLMs do because it’s a convenient and useful-enough analogy, but that doesn’t mean we can prove anything else simply based on our having re-used the word “learn” here. “That’s learning, this is learning, so all things that apply to one apply to the other”—no, that doesn’t follow, it takes more than that.
    - KoolKat23 3y ago
      Only the reproduction is judged whether or not it is too close to the original or not (the physical reproduced item, not the reproduction process or concept). Nothing else is subject to copyright. Copyright protection does not extend to ideas, procedures, processes, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles, or discoveries. Copyright protects only the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
    - brookst 3y ago
      Sure, “learning and then reproducing” is just as illegal as “learning and then dumping toxic waste in a river”. If the complaint is with the second action, as it should be, the learning part is irrelevant.
- maronato 3y ago
  Exactly! They just need to pay for it! The same way that they should pay for using news articles and people’s images/comics.
  - wmf 3y ago
    There are two versions of "just pay for it" though: 1. Pay retail price for one copy then train on it. 2. Pay a recurring license fee that probably amounts to the majority of your revenue (Spotify-style). AI companies can't really afford #2.
stale2002 3y ago
> Otherwise WTF have we been prosecuting individuals for all these years for pirating movies and music etc? We don't. Nobody got prosecuted for downloading movies. Because that isn't illegal. Whats illegal is distributing copies to other people. Its OK though. Its a common misconception that internet piracy is illegal. Only the distribution part has ever been successfully prosecuted. > They didn’t do that. They used stolen copies instead. Using stolen copies isn't illegal. It is completely legal to use other people's work without their permission. Distributing copies is the only part that is illegal. > if we just throw copyright law completely out of the window at the same time. Nothing is being throw out the window. The facts that I have described have always been true.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  I imagine you'd still be liable as some sort of accomplice? Unless you had a reasonable belief that you obtained a legal copy, or had the copy forced onto you somehow.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  It’s not just distribution. Making unauthorised reproductions of copyrighted work is also copyright infringement. I take your point that prosecutions are focused more on the sharers than individual downloaders, but OpenAI still infringed copyright by making unauthorised reproductions of the authors’ works (by downloading pirated copies of them).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > but OpenAI still infringed copyright by making unauthorised reproductions of the authors’ works (by downloading pirated copies of them). I am not aware of a single example in the history of US copyright law where someone has been successfully prosecuted for the downloading part. If such an example does not exist, then I think it is safe to say that it is not illegal. But feel free to show me this an example. Because I have so far never heard of such a case.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Fair use is non-transitive: you reviewing a pirated copy of a movie can be fair use even if that copy isn't. If training on copyrighted images is fair use then it doesn't matter how you got those images. Think about it this way: if the opposite were true, then being able to review a movie would be a privilege you have to pay for by buying the movie, rather than just something you can do because the 1st Amendment exists. A concrete example of this is Google Images. Image search is fair use, even though they index shittons of infringing images. The judge isn't going to touch the "output is infringing" argument mainly because the authors didn't actually connect the dots between their work and a specific output. That's an argument that would stick if you were suing a user of OpenAI's services, not OpenAI themselves. "Output is infringing" is going to be part of the fair use analysis anyway (specifically, the market substitution factor), so this extra claim is superfluous.
- __loam 3y ago
  It has not been proven that AI training data is fair use.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Pretend my comment starts with "Assuming AI training is ruled to be fair use". I don't actually think it will be ruled fair use, at least not in all cases.