4 ms·

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 withou

by 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.

by wmf 3y ago

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.