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Google fined €250M in France for breaching intellectual property deal
- Rinzler89 3y ago[flagged]
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- tyingq 3y agoThis is on top of an earlier €500m fine in 2021. And I'm guessing the total bill of €750m does at least far exceed what it would have cost to comply in the first place. Regardless of percentages, I'm guessing this does change Google's approach, at least in France.
- LoganDark 3y agoYou're right. AFAIK Google has never once cared about a fine, they only comply for PR reasons.
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- guappa 3y ago[flagged]
- mdrzn 3y agoGreat! More fines, sooner or later they'll have to start complying.
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- FrozenTransform 3y agoIf they want to access that market they have to play by their rules. Along the same tangent, the EU appears to be concerned with the intent/spirit of their laws and will amend them when anyone tries to side step them. It seems Apple and Google are not used to that.
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- dahdum 3y ago> intent/spirit of their laws As inconsistently interpreted by the member states, each with their own political biases and concerns. It’s a complicated, increasingly risky, and unpredictable market for tech firms. Ultimately that’s fine, it’s not a necessity the EU be a leader in AI (except perhaps in defense).
- willcipriano 3y ago[flagged]
- stairlane 3y ago[flagged]
- archerx 3y agoIt’s Sundar’s personal account and he’s feeling salty and taking it out on the comments* *this is a joke, just in case
- spacebanana7 3y agoPeople can favour corporate accountability, and even dislike Google, whilst still being annoyed at these laws & rulings. The concept of having to pay somebody for linking out to their content is hostile to the open internet. Imagine if you had to pay Pearson every time you cited ‘their’ research?
- nprateem 3y agoIsn't the issue they embed content specifically so people don't leave the search page?
- spacebanana7 3y agoJust looked it up and it’s actually difficult to tell exactly. The official EU page says mere hyperlinks aren’t covered[1] but this legal source says headlines & images are [2] (making links de facto covered) [1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/copyright-reform-questions-and-answers https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/copyright-refo... [2] https://www.companydebt.com/articles/will-the-eus-link-tax-change-the-web-forever/ https://www.companydebt.com/articles/will-the-eus-link-tax-c...
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- shubhamjain 3y ago> The competition authority said Google’s AI-powered chatbot Bard – since rebranded as Gemini – was trained on content from publishers and news agencies without notifying them. An important reason—amongst others—why projects like ChatGPT cannot be conceived inside Google anymore. Yeah, it's sad how legal, privacy, and compliance teams have expanded to obstruct any significant engineering project, but there are genuine reasons why.
- josefx 3y agoSo why does Google seem to have such significant issues trying to catch up despite violating these laws and agreements at every chance it can? Apparently using all this data does not help them all that much.
- numbchuckskills 3y agoI think the point is that others are using this data as well, but not a target given there's no gigantic piggy bank to extract $ from.
- wongarsu 3y agoOr rather, the others don't have preexisting agreements due to previous grievances. For OpenAI this would be the first violation of regulations about news content reproduction. That would be lengthy court case with an uncertain outcome. But Google already went through such a court case (before Gemini was a thing), settled, and now with Gemini violated the settlement agreement. Showing that they violated the settlement agreement is much easier and quicker, so that's the news you get today.
- ben_w 3y agoIndeed. I was about to link to the news from December that the New York Times is suing OpenAI for using their news articles. https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrkxbmgpe/OPENAI%20MICROSOFT%20NEW%20YORK%20TIMES%20mtd.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrkxbmgpe/... I have no legal training, so my guess is as good as coin flip for how this is going to turn out.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoI was going to get caught up watching 2 of my foes battle (copyright & Google) but then this grew in my head until it was all I could think of: This fine was issued now and not after 15 years of [process].
- piokoch 3y agoI see more and more AI solutions to be simply not available in European Union. EU is a big market, true, but apparently not big enough to justify all the hassle, risks of handling random bureaucrats who want to become famous because they managed to fine some rich company. EU managed to enforce GDPR to some extent (still many parties are practically ignoring it by making refusal for tracking really annoying), question how it will play out with AI.
- bjornsing 3y agoI tried to sign up for Claude 3 the other day but was met with a message that it’s not available in Sweden (which is a EU member state). It was available in Suriname though, so it’s not just a “US only for now” policy. Really irritating. But yes, we deserve it.
- gear54rus 3y agothe list specifically excludes EU countries as always, it helps to maintain an identity in several geopolitical 'blocks', this time Montenegro worked :)
- SiempreViernes 3y agoSo you could still use it, you just had to lie about where you where?
- m00x 3y agoNot commercially
- estebarb 3y agoThe saddest part is that many legislations in other parts of the world try to blindly copy the european legislation, without any effort in thinking if it makes sense or not.
- Moldoteck 3y ago
- artninja1988 3y agoI wonder through what mechanism they were able to fine them for bard/ Gemini, since it's not really clear that training an LLM is a copyright violation. Is it through those prior commitments made in 2019 or whatever?
- franczesko 3y agoImo the definition of piracy is rather clear - illegally copying of protected content that infringes the owner's copyright. If not training, then possession perhaps?
- trueismywork 3y agoHow do you define a copy? Is the data sent over HDMI to your monitors memory a copy?
- franczesko 3y agoWere LLMs trained on a data processed via HDMI? Are you sure you're not confusing copy with processing?
- voxic11 3y agoIts because the EU has something called "neighbouring rights" which are an additional right to the usual form of copyrights. > To tackle this, the EU created a form of copyright called “neighbouring rights” that allows print media to demand compensation for using their content.
- Rinzler89 3y agoIn some EU countries, like Austria for example, there are royalties to pay on non-volatile storage memory[1], who's funds go to the local mafia...errr I mean music/movie rights holders association, because get this, storage can be used for storing reproductions of copyrighted content, so if you buy anything from external HDDs to phones with flash memory, then you're automatically a potential pirate and you owe them money upfront to compensate them for the piracy induced losses. It's a tax that started from the 1980's first on audio and VHS cassettes, and kept getting updated over the years to include MP3 players, flash memory, smart phones and smart watches. I expect the exact same thing will happen to LLM bots. The juggernauts like Ringier or Axel Springer will lobby in their respective countries or at EU level to get their pound of flesh whenever people use something like ChatGPT, because they'll claim it was trained on their copyrighted data and so they deserve to get their cut, otherwise the service will have to be banned in the EU. [1] https://www-wko-at.translate.goog/oe/handel/maschinen-technologie/urheberrecht-festplattenabgabe-speichermedienverguetung?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-wko-at.translate.goog/oe/handel/maschinen-techno... | Integrated memory in mobile phones: EUR 2.50 | | Integrated storage in tablets: EUR 3.75 | | Integrated memory in PC, desktop computer, notebook, subnotebook, ultrabook, netbook, laptop: EUR 5.00 | | Hard drives as individual storage media: EUR 4.50 | | External memory cards: EUR 0.35 | | Digital picture frames: EUR 2.00 | | Smartwatches: EUR 1.00 |
- albertfredrick 3y ago[flagged]
- andy99 3y agoThis does nothing for real people, it's just big companies fighting to get money while doing as little as possible. It would be much better to see a crackdown on all the harmful stuff big tech does to individuals rather than use public resources to shift around who benefits from rent seeking.
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- richwater 3y ago[flagged]
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- ApolloFortyNine 3y agoInteresting, the title should probably be changed to something more related to them being fined for training on copyrighted data. That's the more interesting part here, they've essentially banned developing ai in France with this (though maybe they just won't go after their own ai companies).
- wongarsu 3y agoDeveloping AI with news articles. It doesn't stop you from e.g. licensing reddit data and training on that. And it's unclear if other companies would actually run afoul of this at all, or whether this is just applicable because of the terms Google agreed to in the 2022 settlement about using news articles in their search engine. For a settlement agreement to make sense at all they obviously had to agree to stricter terms than what the regulation itself demands.
- ApolloFortyNine 3y ago>Developing AI with news articles. It doesn't stop you from e.g. licensing reddit data and training on that. Good luck competing with AI that were able to train on all data instead of just a small subset. Japan has already codified it into law, I expect if other countries pile in on calling it a violation of copyright, many will set up an entity there.
- nradov 3y agoA few large media companies own the copyright on the majority of news articles. AI companies can just pay to license the content (or give an equity stake in exchange).
- isodev 3y agoAnyone is welcome to pay a publication or an author (for books/magazines etc) in order to use their data for training. Companies are also welcome to request consent from individuals to use their online posts for this purpose. Otherwise, what OpenAI/Gemini are doing is, simply put, "theft".
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- bionhoward 3y ago“Which way the wind will blow” — as if it ever blew in the direction of ripping people off. Google still says you can’t use their ML stuff for anything related to ML, which smells like a noncompete foisted on customers.
- crowcroft 3y agoI'm in two minds with these kinds of fines (maybe not super relevant for this specific fine). 1. Do these big megacorps just not care about rules, and they look at fines as a cost of doing business while the steam roll through industries. 2. Have lawmakers completely failed for the past decades to effectively referee tech, and so instead of having sane regulation and clear rules everything has to get decided in courts with fines. Probably both are true, and the real losers are small businesses trying to get started.
- m00x 3y agoThe laws around training an LLM on publicly accessible IP have never been developed and haven't been developed, so the judge has to decide from common law. It's the same issue as crypto <> SEC. Companies ask lawmakers to set the rules, but they drag their feet, they release their products, and end up getting sued. It has been decided already in more technically knowledgeable countries that training on data is not the same as copying the data. It's obvious if you understand the concept of data compression, but judges don't always see it that way.
- anon84873628 3y agoOr that we already train humans on copyrighted data and then employ that human intelligence for commercial use. You can argue that AI is a categorically different scale that requires special regulation to protect our societal values (and I think I do) but that is a different claim and implementation than copyright enforcement.
- petre 3y agoIt should be viewed as derivarive work. It equally applies to humans. It shouldn't be classified as fair use because the works have been used in whole to train the model. 'A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.' (US Copyright Act of 1976)
- olivierduval 3y ago[flagged]
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- louison11 3y agoI'm French. It's important to understand that France has been very bitter about missing the tech train with its failed "Minitel." And since, instead of making necessary changes to become more business-friendly and technologically relevant, they've just remained bitter and try to tax/punish US giants any way they can. Thus, instead of becoming the type of places where the next Google or OpenAI could be incorporated, they're promoting the brand of a country that loves playing the Robinhood for its corporate friends in the newspaper business. I get the logic of the fine, and it's also sad to see them be proud of fining these foreign companies, instead of actually doing anything to change the fact that the country is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the modern technological age.
- callalex 3y agoHow does this statement square with the existence of Mistrel AI?
- realusername 3y agoI doubt they'll be able to survive in the long term to be honest. They'll either be forced to cooperate with the slow IT movers megacorps like Orange or Capgemini or buried in the legal framework by the copyright mafias. (Or a mix of both) I'd love to be proven wrong of course but I know too much how it works there to be optimistic.
- Moldoteck 3y agopunishing tech giants for breaking the laws can be done regardless of creating a better less bureaucratic tech environment in france. Why you are trying to correlate both? Tbh I think the fine for google for this case is too small.
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- karolist 3y agoWhat does this really accomplish, will the newspapers get any of that money or will it just be thrown into country's budget pot, as a side effect alienating France further from possible tech investments? The French Google office is tiny for such a big country, at some point it's just not worth to navigate these political waters I assume.
- thefounder 3y ago>> The French Google office is tiny for such a big country, And that may be part of the issue. Milking billions and having a postal box as office doesn’t look good for the government.
- tempodox 3y ago€250M is a rounding error for Google. It won't change how they are doing business.
- rldjbpin 3y agoit is interesting to see for which parties these actions are taken on. they appear more like the protectionist actions that governments take in other business domains.
- musicale 3y agoI can't help but wonder if AI companies are another example of "regulatory entrepreneurship" where things go great until the law catches up.