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You have a much smaller lobbying budget than the AI industry, and you didn't flagrantly rush to copy billions of copyrighted works as quickly as possible and th

You have a much smaller lobbying budget than the AI industry, and you didn't flagrantly rush to copy billions of copyrighted works as quickly as possible and then push a narrative acting like that's the immutable status quo that must continue to be permitted lest the now-massive industry built atop copyright violation be destroyed. Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions, on the other hand, and you magically become immune to the rules everyone else has to follow.

nadermx 2y ago
What about the copyrights purpose of furthering the arts and sciences?
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  Copyright has utterly failed to serve that purpose for a long time, and has been actively counterproductive. But if you want to argue that copyright is counterproductive, I completely agree. That's an argument for reducing or eliminating it across the board, fairly, for everyone; it's not an argument for giving a free pass to AI training while still enforcing it on everyone else.
  - idle_zealot 2y ago
    Could these "free passes" for AI training serve as a legal wedge to increase the scope of fair use in other cases? Pro-business selective enforcement sucks, but so long as model weights are being released and the public is benefiting then stubbornly insisting that overzealous copyright laws be enforced seems self-defeating.
  - adra 2y ago
    Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Just because their lobbies tend to push the boundary of copyright into the absurd doesn't mean these industries aren't worth saving. There should be actually respectful lawmakers who seek for a balance of public and commercial interests.
    - pdonis 2y ago
      > Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Citation needed. There are many ways to make money from producing content other than restricting how copies of it can be distributed. The owner should be able to choose copyright as a means of control, but that doesn't mean nobody would create any content at all without copyright as a means of control.
      - boplicity 2y ago
        There's nothing preventing people from producing works and releasing them without copyright restriction. If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. As it is now, especially in the creative fields (which I am most knowledgeable about), the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation, which you'd have to be pretty daft to deny.
        TylerE 2y ago
        Given that copyrighting is automatic at the instant of creation, that is, um, debatable. Slapping 3 lines in LICENSE.TXT doesn’t override the Berne convention.
        trogdor 2y ago
        Are you claiming that an author cannot place their work in the public domain?
        pdonis 2y ago
        Yes, they can't, because there is no legally reliable way to do it (briefly, because the law really doesn't like the idea of property that doesn't have an owner, so if you try to place a work of yours in the public domain, what you're actually doing is making it abandoned property so anyone who wants to can claim they own it and restrict everyone else, including you, from using it). The best an author can do is to give a license that basically lets anyone do what they want with the work. Creative Commons has licenses that do that.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - kibwen 2y ago
      This is a specious argument. It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright. Humans have been remixing each others' works for millions of years, and the artificial restriction on derivative work is actively destroying our collective culture. There should be thousands of professional works (books, movies, etc.) based on Lord Of The Rings by now, many of which would surpass the originals in quality given enough time, and we have been robbed of them. And Lord Of The Rings is an outlier in that it still remains culturally relevant despite its age; most works will remain copyrighted for far longer than their original audience was even alive, meaning that those millions of flowers never get their chance to bloom.
      - eropple 2y ago
        This is all true, and in a vacuum I agree with it. There's a pretty core problem with these kinds of assertions, though: people have to make rent. Never have I seen a substantiative, pass-the-sniff-test argument for how to make practical this system when your authors and your artists need to eat in a system of modern capital. So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?
        uhoh-itsmaciek 2y ago
        Copyright is not optimized for making sure artists and authors get enough to eat. It's optimized for people with a lot of money to make even more money by exploiting artists and authors. I doubt there's a simple answer (I certainly don't have one), but the current system is not exactly a creators' utopia.
        Qwertious 2y ago
        Not the person you responded to, but: >So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow? Patreon (or liberapay etc). Take a look at youtube: so many creators are actively saying "youtube doesn't pay the bills, if you like us then please support us on Patreon". Patreon works. Some of the time, at least - just like copyright. Also crowdsourcing (e.g. Kickstarter), which worked out well for games like FTL and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Although, I personally don't believe copyright should be abolished - it just needs some amendments. It needs a duration amendment - not a flat duration (fast-fashion doesn't need even 5 years of copyright, but aerospace software regularly needs several decades just to break profitable), but either some duration-mechanism or a simple discrimination by industry. Also, I think any sort of functional copyright (e.g. software copyright) ought to have an incentive or requirement to publish the functional bits - for instance, router firmware ought to require the source code in escrow (to be published once copyright duration expires) for any legal protections against reverse-engineering to be mounted. Unpublished source code is a trade secret, and should be treated as such. Also, these discussions don't seem to mention fanfiction, which demonstrates plenty of people write good works without being professionally paid and without the protection of copyright.
- kelnos 2y ago
  That ship sailed long ago. While copyright can and is used at times to protect the "little guy", the law is written as it is in order to protect and further corporate interests. The current manifestation of copyright is about rent-seeking, not promoting innovation and creativity. That it may also do so is entirely coincidental.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Also, if it wasn't about rent-seeking and preventing access to works, copyright wouldn't have to last for decades, many multiples of a work's useful commercial life. The fact that it does last this long shows that it's not about promoting innovation and creativity.
  - DoItToMe81 2y ago
    Copyright was invented by a cartel of noblemen, the British Stationer's Company, who, due to liberal reform, were going to lose their publishing monopoly. The implementation of copyright law as they helped pen allowed them to mostly continue their position while portraying it as "protecting the little guy". Funny how both the rhetoric and intentions are the same after three hundred years.
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  You want to look at the Supreme Court case "Eldred v. Ashcroft." Eldred challenged Congress for retroactively extending existing copyrights, for extending the patent protections on existing inventions could not possibly further arts and sciences. They also argued that if Congress had the power to continually extend existing copyrights by N years every N years, the Constitutional power of "for a limited time" had no meaning. The Supreme Court's decision was a bunch of bullshit around "well, y'know, people live longer these days, and some creators are still alive who expected these to last their whole lives, and golly, coincidentally this really helps giant corporations."
- teeray 2y ago
  Copyright’s purpose is a cudgel to be wielded to enrich the holder for, ideally, eternity. If “eternity” is threatened, you use proceeds from copyright to change copyright law to protect future proceeds.
fragmede 2y ago
works the same for banks and owing them money
justinclift 2y ago
> Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions, on the other hand, and you magically become immune to the rules everyone else has to follow. Sounds like the same concept as commonly said of "murderer vs conqueror". Could probably be applied to many other fields for disruption too. Not the murderer bit (!), more the "break one or two laws -> scaled up massively to a potential new paradigm".
- viridian 2y ago
  "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Pretty sure there's a bunch of pre-existing laws around that though, so not really ripe for disrupting by scaling up the problem. ;)
RF_Savage 2y ago
Violate billions or millions is what they used to nail warez folks with. So there is that.
marsten 2y ago
There's a strong geopolitical angle as well. If you force American companies to license all training data for LLMs, that is such a gargantuan undertaking it would effectively set US companies back by years relative to Chinese competitors, who are under no such restrictions. Bottom line, if you're doing something considered relevant to the national interest then that buys you a lot of leeway.
Kim_Bruning 2y ago
You will need to first demonstrate that actual copying took place. And that what copying that did take place was actually illegal or infringing. As we're seeing in court, that's a very interesting question. It turns out that the answers are very counter-intuitive to many.
stale2002 2y ago
> acting like that's the immutable status quo It is immutable. What are you going to do about it? Confiscate everyone's home gamer PCs? Even in the most extreme hypothetical where lawsuits shutdown OpenAI, that doesn't delete the stable diffusion models that I have on my external hard drives. The tech is out there. It's too late.
- account42 2y ago
  Somehow this argument does not seem to hold for copyright enforcement of works that have been shared over BitTorrent and it's predecessors for decades.
  - stale2002 2y ago
    I can start downloading any major/popular piece of media, starting right now, in under 60 seconds through bittorrent. I cannot think of a better example of how futile copyright enforcement has been than the example that you just brought up.

nadermx 2y ago

What about the copyrights purpose of furthering the arts and sciences?

JoshTriplett 2y ago
Copyright has utterly failed to serve that purpose for a long time, and has been actively counterproductive. But if you want to argue that copyright is counterproductive, I completely agree. That's an argument for reducing or eliminating it across the board, fairly, for everyone; it's not an argument for giving a free pass to AI training while still enforcing it on everyone else.
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  Could these "free passes" for AI training serve as a legal wedge to increase the scope of fair use in other cases? Pro-business selective enforcement sucks, but so long as model weights are being released and the public is benefiting then stubbornly insisting that overzealous copyright laws be enforced seems self-defeating.
- adra 2y ago
  Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Just because their lobbies tend to push the boundary of copyright into the absurd doesn't mean these industries aren't worth saving. There should be actually respectful lawmakers who seek for a balance of public and commercial interests.
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Citation needed. There are many ways to make money from producing content other than restricting how copies of it can be distributed. The owner should be able to choose copyright as a means of control, but that doesn't mean nobody would create any content at all without copyright as a means of control.
    - boplicity 2y ago
      There's nothing preventing people from producing works and releasing them without copyright restriction. If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. As it is now, especially in the creative fields (which I am most knowledgeable about), the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation, which you'd have to be pretty daft to deny.
      - TylerE 2y ago
        Given that copyrighting is automatic at the instant of creation, that is, um, debatable. Slapping 3 lines in LICENSE.TXT doesn’t override the Berne convention.
        trogdor 2y ago
        Are you claiming that an author cannot place their work in the public domain?
        pdonis 2y ago
        Yes, they can't, because there is no legally reliable way to do it (briefly, because the law really doesn't like the idea of property that doesn't have an owner, so if you try to place a work of yours in the public domain, what you're actually doing is making it abandoned property so anyone who wants to can claim they own it and restrict everyone else, including you, from using it). The best an author can do is to give a license that basically lets anyone do what they want with the work. Creative Commons has licenses that do that.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - kibwen 2y ago
    This is a specious argument. It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright. Humans have been remixing each others' works for millions of years, and the artificial restriction on derivative work is actively destroying our collective culture. There should be thousands of professional works (books, movies, etc.) based on Lord Of The Rings by now, many of which would surpass the originals in quality given enough time, and we have been robbed of them. And Lord Of The Rings is an outlier in that it still remains culturally relevant despite its age; most works will remain copyrighted for far longer than their original audience was even alive, meaning that those millions of flowers never get their chance to bloom.
    - eropple 2y ago
      This is all true, and in a vacuum I agree with it. There's a pretty core problem with these kinds of assertions, though: people have to make rent. Never have I seen a substantiative, pass-the-sniff-test argument for how to make practical this system when your authors and your artists need to eat in a system of modern capital. So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?
      - uhoh-itsmaciek 2y ago
        Copyright is not optimized for making sure artists and authors get enough to eat. It's optimized for people with a lot of money to make even more money by exploiting artists and authors. I doubt there's a simple answer (I certainly don't have one), but the current system is not exactly a creators' utopia.
      - Qwertious 2y ago
        Not the person you responded to, but: >So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow? Patreon (or liberapay etc). Take a look at youtube: so many creators are actively saying "youtube doesn't pay the bills, if you like us then please support us on Patreon". Patreon works. Some of the time, at least - just like copyright. Also crowdsourcing (e.g. Kickstarter), which worked out well for games like FTL and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Although, I personally don't believe copyright should be abolished - it just needs some amendments. It needs a duration amendment - not a flat duration (fast-fashion doesn't need even 5 years of copyright, but aerospace software regularly needs several decades just to break profitable), but either some duration-mechanism or a simple discrimination by industry. Also, I think any sort of functional copyright (e.g. software copyright) ought to have an incentive or requirement to publish the functional bits - for instance, router firmware ought to require the source code in escrow (to be published once copyright duration expires) for any legal protections against reverse-engineering to be mounted. Unpublished source code is a trade secret, and should be treated as such. Also, these discussions don't seem to mention fanfiction, which demonstrates plenty of people write good works without being professionally paid and without the protection of copyright.
kelnos 2y ago
That ship sailed long ago. While copyright can and is used at times to protect the "little guy", the law is written as it is in order to protect and further corporate interests. The current manifestation of copyright is about rent-seeking, not promoting innovation and creativity. That it may also do so is entirely coincidental.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Also, if it wasn't about rent-seeking and preventing access to works, copyright wouldn't have to last for decades, many multiples of a work's useful commercial life. The fact that it does last this long shows that it's not about promoting innovation and creativity.
- DoItToMe81 2y ago
  Copyright was invented by a cartel of noblemen, the British Stationer's Company, who, due to liberal reform, were going to lose their publishing monopoly. The implementation of copyright law as they helped pen allowed them to mostly continue their position while portraying it as "protecting the little guy". Funny how both the rhetoric and intentions are the same after three hundred years.
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
You want to look at the Supreme Court case "Eldred v. Ashcroft." Eldred challenged Congress for retroactively extending existing copyrights, for extending the patent protections on existing inventions could not possibly further arts and sciences. They also argued that if Congress had the power to continually extend existing copyrights by N years every N years, the Constitutional power of "for a limited time" had no meaning. The Supreme Court's decision was a bunch of bullshit around "well, y'know, people live longer these days, and some creators are still alive who expected these to last their whole lives, and golly, coincidentally this really helps giant corporations."
teeray 2y ago
Copyright’s purpose is a cudgel to be wielded to enrich the holder for, ideally, eternity. If “eternity” is threatened, you use proceeds from copyright to change copyright law to protect future proceeds.

fragmede 2y ago

works the same for banks and owing them money

justinclift 2y ago

> Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions, on the other hand, and you magically become immune to the rules everyone else has to follow. Sounds like the same concept as commonly said of "murderer vs conqueror". Could probably be applied to many other fields for disruption too. Not the murderer bit (!), more the "break one or two laws -> scaled up massively to a potential new paradigm".

viridian 2y ago
"If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
- justinclift 2y ago
  Pretty sure there's a bunch of pre-existing laws around that though, so not really ripe for disrupting by scaling up the problem. ;)

RF_Savage 2y ago

Violate billions or millions is what they used to nail warez folks with. So there is that.

marsten 2y ago

There's a strong geopolitical angle as well. If you force American companies to license all training data for LLMs, that is such a gargantuan undertaking it would effectively set US companies back by years relative to Chinese competitors, who are under no such restrictions. Bottom line, if you're doing something considered relevant to the national interest then that buys you a lot of leeway.

Kim_Bruning 2y ago

You will need to first demonstrate that actual copying took place. And that what copying that did take place was actually illegal or infringing. As we're seeing in court, that's a very interesting question. It turns out that the answers are very counter-intuitive to many.

stale2002 2y ago

> acting like that's the immutable status quo It is immutable. What are you going to do about it? Confiscate everyone's home gamer PCs? Even in the most extreme hypothetical where lawsuits shutdown OpenAI, that doesn't delete the stable diffusion models that I have on my external hard drives. The tech is out there. It's too late.

account42 2y ago
Somehow this argument does not seem to hold for copyright enforcement of works that have been shared over BitTorrent and it's predecessors for decades.
- stale2002 2y ago
  I can start downloading any major/popular piece of media, starting right now, in under 60 seconds through bittorrent. I cannot think of a better example of how futile copyright enforcement has been than the example that you just brought up.