4 ms·

> Should I be paying a proportion of my salary to all the copyright holders of the books, song, TV shows and movies I consumed during my life? you already are.

> Should I be paying a proportion of my salary to all the copyright holders of the books, song, TV shows and movies I consumed during my life? you already are. a proportion of what you pay for books, music, tv shows, movies goes to rights holders already. any subscription to spotify/apple music/netflix/hbo; any book/LP/CD/DVD/VHS; any purchased digital download … a portion of that sales is paid back to rights holders. so… i’m not entirely sure what your comment is trying to argue for. are you arguing that you should get paid a rebate for your salary that’s already been spent on copyright payments to rights holders? > If a Hollywood writer says she "learnt a lot about writing by watching the Simpsons" will Fox have an additional claim on her earnings? no. that’s not how copyright functions. the actual episodes of the simpsons are the copyrighted work. broadcasting/allowing purchases of those episode incurs the copyright as it involves COPYING the material itself. COPYright is about the rights of the rights holder when their work is COPIED, where a “work” is the material which the copyright applies to. merely mentioning the existence of a tv show involves zero copying of a registered work. being inspired by another TV show to go off and write your own tv show involves zero copying of the work. a hollywood writer rebroadcasting a simpsons during a TV interview would be a different matter. same with the hollywood writer just taking scenes from a simpsons episode and putting it into their film. that’s COPYing the material. —- when it comes to open AI, obviously this is a legal gray area until courts start ruling. but the accusations are that OpenAi COPIED the intercept’s works by downloading them. openAi transferred the work to openAi servers. they made a copy. and now openAi are profiting from that copy of the work that they took, without any permission or remuneration for the rights holder of the copyrighted work. essentially, openAI did what you’re claiming is the status quo for you… but it’s not the status quo for you. so yeah, your comment confuses me. hopefully you’re being sarcastic and it’s just gone completely over my head.

slyall 2y ago
The problem is the anti-AI people who complain about AI are going for several steps in the chain (and often they are vague about which ones they are talking about at any point). As well as the "copying" of content some are also claiming that the output of a LLM should result in paying royalties back to the owning of the material used in training. So if an AI produces a sitcom script then the copyright holders of those tv shows it ingested should get paid royalties. In additional to the money paid to copy files around. Which leads to the precedent that if a writer creates a sitcom then the copyright holders of sitcoms she watched should get paid for "training" her.
- jashmatthews 2y ago
  When humans learn and copy too closely we call that plagiarism. If an LLM does it how should we deal with that?
  - chii 2y ago
    > If an LLM does it how should we deal with that? why not deal with it the same way as humans have been dealt with in the past? If you copied an art piece using photoshop, you would've violated copyright. Photoshop (and adobe) itself never committed copyright violations. Somehow, if you swap photoshop with openAI and chatGPT, then people claim that the actual application itself is a copyright violation.
    - dijksterhuis 2y ago
      this isn’t the same. > If you copied an art piece using photoshop, you would've violated copyright. Photoshop (and adobe) itself never committed copyright violations. the COPYing is happening on your local machine with non-cloud versions of Photoshop. you are making a copy, using a tool, and then distributing that copy. in music royalty terms, the making a copy is the Mechanical right, while distributing the copy is the Performing right. and you are liable in this case. > Somehow, if you swap photoshop with openAI and chatGPT, then people claim that the actual application itself is a copyright violation OpenAI make a copy of the original works to create training data. when the original works are reproduced verbatim (memorisation in LLMs is a thing), then that is the copyrighted work being distributed. mechanical and performing rights, again. but the twist is that ChatGPT does the copying on their servers and delivers it to your device. they are creating a new copy and distributing that copy. which makes them liable. — you are right that “ChatGPT” is just a tool. however, the interesting legal grey area with this is — are ChatGPT model weights an encoded copy of the copyrighted works? that’s where the conversation about the tool itself being a copyright violation comes in. photoshop provides no mechanism to recite The Art Of War out of the box. an LLM could be trained to do so (like, it’s a hypothetical example but hopefully you get the point).
      - 2y ago
Suppafly 2y ago
>a proportion of what you pay for books, music, tv shows, movies goes to rights holders already. When I borrow a book from a friend, how do the original authors get paid for that?
- dijksterhuis 2y ago
  they don’t. borrowing a book is not creating a COPY of the book. you are not taking the pages, reproducing all of the text on those pages, and then giving that reproduction to your friend. that is what a COPY is. borrowing the book is not a COPY. you’re just giving them the thing you already bought. it is a transfer of ownership, albeit temporarily, not a copy. if you were copying the files from a digitally downloaded album of music and giving those new copies to your friend (music royalties were my specialty) then technically you would be in breach of copyright. you have copied the works. but because it’s such a small scale (an individual with another individual) it’s not going to be financially worth it to take the case to court. so copyright holders just cut their losses with one friend sharing it with another friend, and focus on other infringements instead. which is where the whole torrenting thing comes in. if i can track 7000 people who have all downloaded the same torrented album, now i can just send a letter / court date to those 7000 people. the costs of enforcement are reduced because of scale. 7000 people, all found the same thing, in a way that can be tracked. and the ultimate, one person/company has download the works and making them available to others to download, without paying for the rights to make copies when distributing. that’s the ultimate goldmine for copyright infringement lawsuits. and it sounds suspiciously like openAi’s business model.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >borrowing a book is not creating a COPY of the book. you are not taking the pages, reproducing all of the text on those pages, and then giving that reproduction to your friend. That's not what's happening with training AI models either though.
    - dijksterhuis 2y ago
      check out my other comment in this thread about derivative works. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42282443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42282443 OpenAI are taking copies of people’s data. some of that is copyrighted data. that’s copyright infringement. an LLM is a tool to create derivative works from the data OpenAI has copied without permission (when considering only copyrighted works and nothing public domain). derivative works can also be considered copyright infringement in some cases. how the tool functions is irrelevant for the most part. how copy right infringement occurs doesn’t matter. only that it does.

slyall 2y ago

The problem is the anti-AI people who complain about AI are going for several steps in the chain (and often they are vague about which ones they are talking about at any point). As well as the "copying" of content some are also claiming that the output of a LLM should result in paying royalties back to the owning of the material used in training. So if an AI produces a sitcom script then the copyright holders of those tv shows it ingested should get paid royalties. In additional to the money paid to copy files around. Which leads to the precedent that if a writer creates a sitcom then the copyright holders of sitcoms she watched should get paid for "training" her.

jashmatthews 2y ago
When humans learn and copy too closely we call that plagiarism. If an LLM does it how should we deal with that?
- chii 2y ago
  > If an LLM does it how should we deal with that? why not deal with it the same way as humans have been dealt with in the past? If you copied an art piece using photoshop, you would've violated copyright. Photoshop (and adobe) itself never committed copyright violations. Somehow, if you swap photoshop with openAI and chatGPT, then people claim that the actual application itself is a copyright violation.
  - dijksterhuis 2y ago
    this isn’t the same. > If you copied an art piece using photoshop, you would've violated copyright. Photoshop (and adobe) itself never committed copyright violations. the COPYing is happening on your local machine with non-cloud versions of Photoshop. you are making a copy, using a tool, and then distributing that copy. in music royalty terms, the making a copy is the Mechanical right, while distributing the copy is the Performing right. and you are liable in this case. > Somehow, if you swap photoshop with openAI and chatGPT, then people claim that the actual application itself is a copyright violation OpenAI make a copy of the original works to create training data. when the original works are reproduced verbatim (memorisation in LLMs is a thing), then that is the copyrighted work being distributed. mechanical and performing rights, again. but the twist is that ChatGPT does the copying on their servers and delivers it to your device. they are creating a new copy and distributing that copy. which makes them liable. — you are right that “ChatGPT” is just a tool. however, the interesting legal grey area with this is — are ChatGPT model weights an encoded copy of the copyrighted works? that’s where the conversation about the tool itself being a copyright violation comes in. photoshop provides no mechanism to recite The Art Of War out of the box. an LLM could be trained to do so (like, it’s a hypothetical example but hopefully you get the point).
    - 2y ago

Suppafly 2y ago

>a proportion of what you pay for books, music, tv shows, movies goes to rights holders already. When I borrow a book from a friend, how do the original authors get paid for that?

dijksterhuis 2y ago
they don’t. borrowing a book is not creating a COPY of the book. you are not taking the pages, reproducing all of the text on those pages, and then giving that reproduction to your friend. that is what a COPY is. borrowing the book is not a COPY. you’re just giving them the thing you already bought. it is a transfer of ownership, albeit temporarily, not a copy. if you were copying the files from a digitally downloaded album of music and giving those new copies to your friend (music royalties were my specialty) then technically you would be in breach of copyright. you have copied the works. but because it’s such a small scale (an individual with another individual) it’s not going to be financially worth it to take the case to court. so copyright holders just cut their losses with one friend sharing it with another friend, and focus on other infringements instead. which is where the whole torrenting thing comes in. if i can track 7000 people who have all downloaded the same torrented album, now i can just send a letter / court date to those 7000 people. the costs of enforcement are reduced because of scale. 7000 people, all found the same thing, in a way that can be tracked. and the ultimate, one person/company has download the works and making them available to others to download, without paying for the rights to make copies when distributing. that’s the ultimate goldmine for copyright infringement lawsuits. and it sounds suspiciously like openAi’s business model.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >borrowing a book is not creating a COPY of the book. you are not taking the pages, reproducing all of the text on those pages, and then giving that reproduction to your friend. That's not what's happening with training AI models either though.
  - dijksterhuis 2y ago
    check out my other comment in this thread about derivative works. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42282443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42282443 OpenAI are taking copies of people’s data. some of that is copyrighted data. that’s copyright infringement. an LLM is a tool to create derivative works from the data OpenAI has copied without permission (when considering only copyrighted works and nothing public domain). derivative works can also be considered copyright infringement in some cases. how the tool functions is irrelevant for the most part. how copy right infringement occurs doesn’t matter. only that it does.