8 ms·

Who's winning in Sarah Silverman's copyright suit against OpenAI?

30 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

o11c 3y ago
Original source: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-02-16/column-sarah-silvermans-openai-copyright-lawsuit-ai https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-02-16/column-sar...
Spivak 3y ago
God this shit is exhausting; having a functioning legislature would actually be really helpful right now by passing a bill that spells out whether or not ML on copy-written content is a copyright violation and/or what conditions it can become a violation. But instead we have lawsuit after lawsuit leaving a blatantly ambiguous legal situation to be interpreted in as many different ways as there are courts. I wish our court system had a pathway by which a judge can rule "not enough information to make a ruling" and force the legislature to pass a bill disambiguating the situation.
- apwell23 3y ago
  > passing a bill that spells out whether or not ML on copy-written content is a copyright violation and/or what conditions it can become a violation. how would legislators know an answer to this. lawsuits provide a platform for discussion based on which a policy can emerge. Guessing wrong answer in form of legislation will be detrimental to the society.
  - practicemaths 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jethro_tell 3y ago
    Legislation can say, 'an AI/llm trained on copyrighted works needs to respect copyright/ ask or pay for permission to read/process a work' Or, It can say, if I can read it or watch it at a library, and the llm uses publicly accessible access methods, its not different then if a person had read and watched all those works and then made thoughts and determinations out of them.' Obviously, there's some complexity in both of those arguments, and its hard to see what exactly is right, but making the rules we play by would be really helpful about now.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    They don't "know" the answer, they decide the answer. Judges in these cases aren't pulling the answers from the void, they're interpreting the existing body of legislation and case law that governs copyright which was written and passed by the legislature. It's funny you say that lawsuits provide a platform for discussion that leads to policy because you're describing the legislative process. I will grant you that the structure of lawsuits and amicus briefs does lend itself to quality discussion about issues and I think the legislative process could do with a bit of that.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    I'd like to know if what I'm attempting to do is legal BEFORE I do it not after.
    - apwell23 3y ago
      There is no guarantee like that. Your airbnb can go illegal at any moment.
- duxup 3y ago
  I’m not sure I want a strict determination by a legislative body on this.
elif 3y ago
It's time to let (most of) copyright go. Ideas are copied around the world at light speed and so much content is being produced that no individual has a chance to consume all the media the world produces in a single minute. The value is in the copying not the material. In having a mechanism to spread your material to as many eyes as possible. Hanging onto Micky Mouse's anachronistic paradigm does not encourage more art, it only performs an oligopolistic role for artists already at the top, already with the copy mechanism and attention to spread their ideas.
- santoshalper 3y ago
  But in these scenarios, it is overwhelmingly large, powerful corporations using the work of individuals. Sarah Silverman has been successful as a comedian, but when it comes to her versus Microsoft, OpenAI, AWS, et al. she is the one clearly being taken advantage of by someone far wealthier and more powerful.
  - ronsor 3y ago
    I'm no fan of OpenAI's aggressive tactics, but I'd rather not risk harming open-source AI projects just to deal with them. Regardless of how any lawsuit comes out, OpenAI/Microsoft/whatever isn't going anywhere: like you said, they're powerful. They can afford to work around whatever laws or rulings that happen. OSS projects won't have this luxury. So while I have my issues with OpenAI and the other tech companies, I think advocating for more copyright is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
    - jrm4 3y ago
      What makes you think this would strongly harm open-source AI projects? Do you mean e.g. small "companies trying to make money?" If so, I see that danger, but I also kind of don't care. What I don't think it would harm is actual "free/free-ish open source, just OUT there" AI projects in terms of pure "software that's available for everyone to mess around with, regardless of legality," -- and (as a lawyer I can't recommend doing this at all of course, but) I think it would end up mostly being a good and safer thing (in the same way that having e.g. Kali Linux out there is a good thing). The models are out there and it's hard to think that any single player could have a real big advantage here. I say let the suits commence.
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
It's always their lawyers.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  FYI, one of the lawyers representing Sarah Silverman is an HNer of some note, Matthew Butterick. [1] He is the creator of Practical Typography, [2] which is posted about on HN from time to time. [3] 1: https://fortune.com/2023/07/12/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-chatgpt-book-memoir-illegal-scraped-open-secret/ https://fortune.com/2023/07/12/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-chatg... 2: https://practicaltypography.com/ https://practicaltypography.com/ 3: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=practicaltypography.com&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    It's wonderful he's part of the local conversation. But it's irrelevant to my not being wrong (am I?) =D ---- Thanks for the tangental information. Hope Sarah makes her point not too expensively, while the lawyers are fairly compensated. I personally don't see how she can win, just because of the sheer openness / unregulatability of the technologies (cat's already out of the bag). I wish them well.
jongjong 3y ago
I don't see why we need any new laws to deal with it. Existing 'fair use' legislation should suffice. The only issue I see is if the AI quotes the text word-for-word and allows the user to craft prompts in such a way that they can extract a substantial amount of copyrighted text in a predictable, organized manner. If the AI spits out short quotes from the copyrighted text in a way that is relevant to the prompt and it doesn't allow the user to use prompt-engineering to reliably obtain the full text, then I don't see a problem. If the prompt engineering required to extract the full text is highly complicated and difficult to execute in a reliable way, then I think it should not be an issue. If some third party app decides to use AI with clever prompt engineering on the back end to extract copyright text in order to bypass copyright laws (and automatically reconstruct the full text to present to their users), then the third party app should be held responsible, not the AI provider. The AI provider's responsibility should be limited to ensuring that prompts cannot be used in a predictable, repeatable way to extract a substantial, contiguous portion of the copyrighted text. The copyright violation occurs at the moment that the material is presented to the end user (a human). Merely storing the material and not presenting it to any human should not be a copyright violation... Otherwise you might as well sue Seagate and Western Digital for copyrighted material being stored on hard drives manufactured by them. It would not make sense. Your honor, I rest my case.
- croes 3y ago
  If you stole all your books you learned programming from, is your skill level totally legal? OpenAI isn't just storing the data like Seagate but all its answers are derived from that data.
  - jongjong 3y ago
    Some libraries loan out books for free. That's how a lot of people learn. It's fine. It depends on whether or not the book's text was accessed illegally.

30 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

o11c 3y ago

Original source: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-02-16/column-sarah-silvermans-openai-copyright-lawsuit-ai https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-02-16/column-sar...

Spivak 3y ago

God this shit is exhausting; having a functioning legislature would actually be really helpful right now by passing a bill that spells out whether or not ML on copy-written content is a copyright violation and/or what conditions it can become a violation. But instead we have lawsuit after lawsuit leaving a blatantly ambiguous legal situation to be interpreted in as many different ways as there are courts. I wish our court system had a pathway by which a judge can rule "not enough information to make a ruling" and force the legislature to pass a bill disambiguating the situation.

apwell23 3y ago
> passing a bill that spells out whether or not ML on copy-written content is a copyright violation and/or what conditions it can become a violation. how would legislators know an answer to this. lawsuits provide a platform for discussion based on which a policy can emerge. Guessing wrong answer in form of legislation will be detrimental to the society.
- practicemaths 3y ago
  [dead]
- jethro_tell 3y ago
  Legislation can say, 'an AI/llm trained on copyrighted works needs to respect copyright/ ask or pay for permission to read/process a work' Or, It can say, if I can read it or watch it at a library, and the llm uses publicly accessible access methods, its not different then if a person had read and watched all those works and then made thoughts and determinations out of them.' Obviously, there's some complexity in both of those arguments, and its hard to see what exactly is right, but making the rules we play by would be really helpful about now.
- Spivak 3y ago
  They don't "know" the answer, they decide the answer. Judges in these cases aren't pulling the answers from the void, they're interpreting the existing body of legislation and case law that governs copyright which was written and passed by the legislature. It's funny you say that lawsuits provide a platform for discussion that leads to policy because you're describing the legislative process. I will grant you that the structure of lawsuits and amicus briefs does lend itself to quality discussion about issues and I think the legislative process could do with a bit of that.
- zirgs 3y ago
  I'd like to know if what I'm attempting to do is legal BEFORE I do it not after.
  - apwell23 3y ago
    There is no guarantee like that. Your airbnb can go illegal at any moment.
duxup 3y ago
I’m not sure I want a strict determination by a legislative body on this.

elif 3y ago

It's time to let (most of) copyright go. Ideas are copied around the world at light speed and so much content is being produced that no individual has a chance to consume all the media the world produces in a single minute. The value is in the copying not the material. In having a mechanism to spread your material to as many eyes as possible. Hanging onto Micky Mouse's anachronistic paradigm does not encourage more art, it only performs an oligopolistic role for artists already at the top, already with the copy mechanism and attention to spread their ideas.

santoshalper 3y ago
But in these scenarios, it is overwhelmingly large, powerful corporations using the work of individuals. Sarah Silverman has been successful as a comedian, but when it comes to her versus Microsoft, OpenAI, AWS, et al. she is the one clearly being taken advantage of by someone far wealthier and more powerful.
- ronsor 3y ago
  I'm no fan of OpenAI's aggressive tactics, but I'd rather not risk harming open-source AI projects just to deal with them. Regardless of how any lawsuit comes out, OpenAI/Microsoft/whatever isn't going anywhere: like you said, they're powerful. They can afford to work around whatever laws or rulings that happen. OSS projects won't have this luxury. So while I have my issues with OpenAI and the other tech companies, I think advocating for more copyright is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
  - jrm4 3y ago
    What makes you think this would strongly harm open-source AI projects? Do you mean e.g. small "companies trying to make money?" If so, I see that danger, but I also kind of don't care. What I don't think it would harm is actual "free/free-ish open source, just OUT there" AI projects in terms of pure "software that's available for everyone to mess around with, regardless of legality," -- and (as a lawyer I can't recommend doing this at all of course, but) I think it would end up mostly being a good and safer thing (in the same way that having e.g. Kali Linux out there is a good thing). The models are out there and it's hard to think that any single player could have a real big advantage here. I say let the suits commence.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago

It's always their lawyers.

gnicholas 3y ago
FYI, one of the lawyers representing Sarah Silverman is an HNer of some note, Matthew Butterick. [1] He is the creator of Practical Typography, [2] which is posted about on HN from time to time. [3] 1: https://fortune.com/2023/07/12/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-chatgpt-book-memoir-illegal-scraped-open-secret/ https://fortune.com/2023/07/12/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-chatg... 2: https://practicaltypography.com/ https://practicaltypography.com/ 3: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=practicaltypography.com&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  It's wonderful he's part of the local conversation. But it's irrelevant to my not being wrong (am I?) =D ---- Thanks for the tangental information. Hope Sarah makes her point not too expensively, while the lawyers are fairly compensated. I personally don't see how she can win, just because of the sheer openness / unregulatability of the technologies (cat's already out of the bag). I wish them well.

jongjong 3y ago

I don't see why we need any new laws to deal with it. Existing 'fair use' legislation should suffice. The only issue I see is if the AI quotes the text word-for-word and allows the user to craft prompts in such a way that they can extract a substantial amount of copyrighted text in a predictable, organized manner. If the AI spits out short quotes from the copyrighted text in a way that is relevant to the prompt and it doesn't allow the user to use prompt-engineering to reliably obtain the full text, then I don't see a problem. If the prompt engineering required to extract the full text is highly complicated and difficult to execute in a reliable way, then I think it should not be an issue. If some third party app decides to use AI with clever prompt engineering on the back end to extract copyright text in order to bypass copyright laws (and automatically reconstruct the full text to present to their users), then the third party app should be held responsible, not the AI provider. The AI provider's responsibility should be limited to ensuring that prompts cannot be used in a predictable, repeatable way to extract a substantial, contiguous portion of the copyrighted text. The copyright violation occurs at the moment that the material is presented to the end user (a human). Merely storing the material and not presenting it to any human should not be a copyright violation... Otherwise you might as well sue Seagate and Western Digital for copyrighted material being stored on hard drives manufactured by them. It would not make sense. Your honor, I rest my case.

croes 3y ago
If you stole all your books you learned programming from, is your skill level totally legal? OpenAI isn't just storing the data like Seagate but all its answers are derived from that data.
- jongjong 3y ago
  Some libraries loan out books for free. That's how a lot of people learn. It's fine. It depends on whether or not the book's text was accessed illegally.