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“ Keep in mind that AI models, like most things, are considered intellectual property. Before using or modifying any extracted models, you need the explicit per

“ Keep in mind that AI models, like most things, are considered intellectual property. Before using or modifying any extracted models, you need the explicit permission of their owner.” That’s not true, is it? It would be a copyright violation to distribute an extracted model, but you can do what you want with it yourself.

wslh 2y ago
It's also worth noting that there is still no legal clarity on these issues, even if a license claims to provide specific permissions. Additionally, the debate around the sources companies use to train their models remains unresolved, raising ethical and legal questions about data ownership and consent.
jdietrich 2y ago
Circumventing a copy-prevention system without a valid exemption is a crime, even if you don't make unlawful copies. Copyright covers the right to make copies, not the right to distribute; "doing what you want with it yourself" may or may not be covered by fair use. Whether or not model weights are copyrightable remains an open question. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
- mcny 2y ago
  >Circumventing a copy-prevention system without a valid exemption is a crime, even if you don't make unlawful copies. Copyright covers the right to make copies, not the right to distribute; "doing what you want with it yourself" may or may not be covered by fair use. Whether or not model weights are copyrightable remains an open question. If that is the law, it is a defect that we need to fix. Laws do not come down from heaven in the form of commandments. We, humans, write laws. If there is a defect in the laws, we should fix it. If this is the law, time shifting and format shifting is unlawful as well which to me is unacceptable. Disclaimer: As usual, I anal.
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago
    Time shifting is protected by 40 years of judicial precedent establishing it as fair use.
    - nadermx 2y ago
      This is being tested in the courts currently, https://torrentfreak.com/appeals-court-hears-riaa-and-yout-in-high-stakes-streamripper-case-240209/ https://torrentfreak.com/appeals-court-hears-riaa-and-yout-i...
      - kmeisthax 2y ago
        DMCA 1201 is written so broadly that any feature of a product or service can be construed to prevent copying, and thus gain 1201 protection. I don't think YouTube intended regular uploads to have DRM, if only because they support Creative Commons metadata on uploads, and Creative Commons specifically forbids the use of technical protection measures on CC-licensed content[0]. On a less moralistic note, applying encryption to all YouTube videos would be prohibitively expensive because DRM vendors charge $$$ for the tech. But the RIAA wants DRM because, well, they don't want people taking what they have rightfully stolen. So YouTube engineered a weak form of URL obfuscation that would only stop very basic scrapers[1]. DMCA 1201 doesn't care about encryption or obfuscation, though. What it does care about is if something was intended to stop copying, and if so, if the defendant's product was designed to defeat that thing. There's an interesting wrinkle in DMCA 1201 in that merely being able to defeat DRM does not make something illegal. Defeating DRM has to be the tool's only function[2], or you have to advertise the tool as being able to defeat DRM[3], in order to actually violate DMCA 1201. DRM vendors usually resort to encryption, because it makes the circumvention tools specialized enough that they have no other purpose and thus fall afoul of DMCA 1201. But there's nothing stopping you from using really basic schemes (ROT-13 your DVDs!) and still getting to sue for 1201. Going back to the AI ripping question, this blog post is probably not in and of itself a circumvention tool[4], but anyone implementing it is very much making circumvention tools, which are illegal to distribute. Circumvention itself is also illegal, but only when there's an underlying copyright infringement. i.e. you can't just encrypt something that's public domain or uncopyrightable and sue anyone who decrypts it. So the next question is: is AI copyrightable? And can you sue for 1201 circumvention for something that is fundamentally composed of someone else's copyrighted work that you don't own and haven't licensed? [0] Additionally, there is a very large repository of CC-BY music from Kevin MacLeod that is used all over YouTube that would have to be removed or relicensed if the RIAA were to prevail on this case. I have no idea if Kevin actually intends to enforce the no-DRM clause in this way, though. Kevin actually has a fairly loose interpretation of CC-BY. For example, nobody attributes his music correctly, either the way the license requires, or with Kevin's (legally insufficient) recommended attribution strings. He does sell commercial (non-attribution) licenses but I've yet to hear of any enforcement actions from him. [1] To be clear, without DRM encryption, any video can be ripped by hooking standard HTML5 video APIs using an extension. [2] Things with "limited commercial purposes" beyond breaking DRM may also be construed as circumvention tools under DMCA 1201. [3] My favorite example: someone tried selling a VGA-to-composite adapter as a way to copy movies off Netflix. That is illegal under DMCA 1201. [4] To be clear, this is NOT settled law, this is "get sued and find out if the Supreme Court likes you that day" law.
- rpdillon 2y ago
  Your comment confused me, but I'm very interested in what you're getting at. > Circumventing a copy-prevention system without a valid exemption is a crime, even if you don't make unlawful copies. Yep, this is the DMCA section 1201. Late '90s law in the US. > Copyright covers the right to make copies, not the right to distribute This is where I got confused. Copyright covers four rights: copying, distribution, creation of derivative works, and public performance. So I'm not sure what you were getting at with the copy/distribute dichotomy. But here's a question I'm curious about: Can DMCA apply to a copy-protection mechanism that's being applied to non-copyrightable work? Based on my reading of https://www.copyright.gov/dmca/ https://www.copyright.gov/dmca/: > First, it prohibits circumventing technological protection measures (or TPMs) used by copyright owners to control access to their works. That's not the letter of the law, but an overview, but it does seem to suggest you can't bring a DMCA 1201 claim against someone circumventing copy-protection for uncopyrightable works. > Whether or not model weights are copyrightable remains an open question. And this is where the interaction with the wording of 1201 gets interesting, in my (non-professional) opinion!
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
    Here is the relevant text in the law: > No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The inclusion of “work protected under this title” makes it clear in the law, though I doubt a judge would rule otherwise without that line. (Otherwise, I’d wonder if I could claim damages that Google et al. are violating the technological measures I’ve put in place to protect the specificity of my interests, because it wouldn’t matter that such is not protected by copyright law.) Also not an attorney, for what it’s worth.
    - roywiggins 2y ago
      It seems clear from this definition especially: > (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner In this case there is no copyright owner.
- nadermx 2y ago
  Actually, in terms of copyright control "The Federal Circuit went on to clarify the nature of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. The DMCA established causes of action for liability and did not establish a property right. Therefore, circumvention is not infringement in itself."[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlain_Group,_Inc._v._Skylink_Technologies,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlain_Group,_Inc._v._S...
  - bitwize 2y ago
    Circumvention is not infringement, but the DMCA makes it a separate crime punishable by up to 5 years in prison.
- BadHumans 2y ago
  Is using millions of copyrighted works to train your AI a valid exemption? Asking for a few billionaire friends.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- larodi 2y ago
  just imagine, like just for a second how it becomes illegal to train anything that does not then afterwards produce, if publicly used or distributed, a copyright token which is both in the training set - to mark it - and in the produce - to recognize it. so this is where it all goes in several years, if i were the gov.
Lerc 2y ago
I'm not even sure if event the first part is true. Has it been determined if AI models are intellectual property? Machine generated content may not be copyrightable. It isn't just the output of generative AI that falls under this, the models themselves are. Can you copyright a set of coefficients for a formula? In the sense of a JPEG it would be considered that the image being reproduced is the thing that has the copyright. Being the first to run the calculations that produces a compressed version of that data should not grant you any special rights to that compressed form. An AI model is just a form of that writ large. When the models generalize and create new content, it seems hard to see how that either the output or the model that generated it could be considered someone's property. People possess models, I'm not sure if they own them. There are however billions of dollars at play here and enough money can buy you whichever legal opinion you want.
- echelon 2y ago
  > AI models are intellectual property If companies train on data they don't own and expect to own their model weights, that's hypocritical. Model weights shouldn't be copyrightable if the training data was pilfered. But this hasn't been tested because models are locked away in data centers as trade secrets. There's no opportunity to observe or copy them outside of using their outputs as synthetic data. On that subject, training on model outputs should be fair use, and an area we should use legislation to defend access to (similar to web scraping provisions).
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    Now that you mention it, I'm quite surprised that none of the typical fanatical IP lawsuiters had sued arguing (reasonably I think) that the output of the LLMs is strongly suggestive that they have been trained on copyrighted materials. Get the lawsuit to discovery, and those data centers become fair game. Perhaps 'strongly suggestive' isn't enough.
    - Onawa 2y ago
      Wasn't that the goal of both the New York Times lawsuit and other class action lawsuits from authors? https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2024/04/nyt-v-openai-the-timess-about-face/ https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2024/04/nyt-v-openai-the-t... https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/95768-authors-sue-ai-firm-anthropic-for-copyright-infringement.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
rileymat2 2y ago
I doubt the models are copyrighted, arn’t works created by machine not eligible? Or you get into cases autogenerating and claiming ownership of all possible musical note combinations.
hnlmorg 2y ago
It’s hard to say because as far as I know this stuff hasn’t been definitively tested on any courts that I know of. Europe not America. AI models are generally regarded as a company’s asset (like a customer database would also be), and rightly so given the cost required to generate one. But that’s a different matter entirely to copyright.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
dragonwriter 2y ago
No, copyright violation occurs at the first unauthorized copying or creation of a derivative work or exercise of any of the other exclusive rights of the copyright holder (that does not fall into an exception like that for fair use.) That distribution is required for a copyright violation is a persistent myth. Distribution is a means by which a violation becomes more likely to be detected and also more likely to involve significant liability for damages. (OTOH, whether models, as the output of a mechanical process, are subject to copyright is a matter of some debate. The firms training models tend to treat the models as if they were protected by copyright but also tend to treat the source works as if copying for the purpose of training AI were within a copyright exception; why each of those positions is in their interest is obvious, but neither is well-established.)
larodi 2y ago
its insane to state it tbh

wslh 2y ago

It's also worth noting that there is still no legal clarity on these issues, even if a license claims to provide specific permissions. Additionally, the debate around the sources companies use to train their models remains unresolved, raising ethical and legal questions about data ownership and consent.

jdietrich 2y ago

Circumventing a copy-prevention system without a valid exemption is a crime, even if you don't make unlawful copies. Copyright covers the right to make copies, not the right to distribute; "doing what you want with it yourself" may or may not be covered by fair use. Whether or not model weights are copyrightable remains an open question. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

mcny 2y ago
>Circumventing a copy-prevention system without a valid exemption is a crime, even if you don't make unlawful copies. Copyright covers the right to make copies, not the right to distribute; "doing what you want with it yourself" may or may not be covered by fair use. Whether or not model weights are copyrightable remains an open question. If that is the law, it is a defect that we need to fix. Laws do not come down from heaven in the form of commandments. We, humans, write laws. If there is a defect in the laws, we should fix it. If this is the law, time shifting and format shifting is unlawful as well which to me is unacceptable. Disclaimer: As usual, I anal.
- dialup_sounds 2y ago
  Time shifting is protected by 40 years of judicial precedent establishing it as fair use.
  - nadermx 2y ago
    This is being tested in the courts currently, https://torrentfreak.com/appeals-court-hears-riaa-and-yout-in-high-stakes-streamripper-case-240209/ https://torrentfreak.com/appeals-court-hears-riaa-and-yout-i...
    - kmeisthax 2y ago
      DMCA 1201 is written so broadly that any feature of a product or service can be construed to prevent copying, and thus gain 1201 protection. I don't think YouTube intended regular uploads to have DRM, if only because they support Creative Commons metadata on uploads, and Creative Commons specifically forbids the use of technical protection measures on CC-licensed content[0]. On a less moralistic note, applying encryption to all YouTube videos would be prohibitively expensive because DRM vendors charge $$$ for the tech. But the RIAA wants DRM because, well, they don't want people taking what they have rightfully stolen. So YouTube engineered a weak form of URL obfuscation that would only stop very basic scrapers[1]. DMCA 1201 doesn't care about encryption or obfuscation, though. What it does care about is if something was intended to stop copying, and if so, if the defendant's product was designed to defeat that thing. There's an interesting wrinkle in DMCA 1201 in that merely being able to defeat DRM does not make something illegal. Defeating DRM has to be the tool's only function[2], or you have to advertise the tool as being able to defeat DRM[3], in order to actually violate DMCA 1201. DRM vendors usually resort to encryption, because it makes the circumvention tools specialized enough that they have no other purpose and thus fall afoul of DMCA 1201. But there's nothing stopping you from using really basic schemes (ROT-13 your DVDs!) and still getting to sue for 1201. Going back to the AI ripping question, this blog post is probably not in and of itself a circumvention tool[4], but anyone implementing it is very much making circumvention tools, which are illegal to distribute. Circumvention itself is also illegal, but only when there's an underlying copyright infringement. i.e. you can't just encrypt something that's public domain or uncopyrightable and sue anyone who decrypts it. So the next question is: is AI copyrightable? And can you sue for 1201 circumvention for something that is fundamentally composed of someone else's copyrighted work that you don't own and haven't licensed? [0] Additionally, there is a very large repository of CC-BY music from Kevin MacLeod that is used all over YouTube that would have to be removed or relicensed if the RIAA were to prevail on this case. I have no idea if Kevin actually intends to enforce the no-DRM clause in this way, though. Kevin actually has a fairly loose interpretation of CC-BY. For example, nobody attributes his music correctly, either the way the license requires, or with Kevin's (legally insufficient) recommended attribution strings. He does sell commercial (non-attribution) licenses but I've yet to hear of any enforcement actions from him. [1] To be clear, without DRM encryption, any video can be ripped by hooking standard HTML5 video APIs using an extension. [2] Things with "limited commercial purposes" beyond breaking DRM may also be construed as circumvention tools under DMCA 1201. [3] My favorite example: someone tried selling a VGA-to-composite adapter as a way to copy movies off Netflix. That is illegal under DMCA 1201. [4] To be clear, this is NOT settled law, this is "get sued and find out if the Supreme Court likes you that day" law.
rpdillon 2y ago
Your comment confused me, but I'm very interested in what you're getting at. > Circumventing a copy-prevention system without a valid exemption is a crime, even if you don't make unlawful copies. Yep, this is the DMCA section 1201. Late '90s law in the US. > Copyright covers the right to make copies, not the right to distribute This is where I got confused. Copyright covers four rights: copying, distribution, creation of derivative works, and public performance. So I'm not sure what you were getting at with the copy/distribute dichotomy. But here's a question I'm curious about: Can DMCA apply to a copy-protection mechanism that's being applied to non-copyrightable work? Based on my reading of https://www.copyright.gov/dmca/ https://www.copyright.gov/dmca/: > First, it prohibits circumventing technological protection measures (or TPMs) used by copyright owners to control access to their works. That's not the letter of the law, but an overview, but it does seem to suggest you can't bring a DMCA 1201 claim against someone circumventing copy-protection for uncopyrightable works. > Whether or not model weights are copyrightable remains an open question. And this is where the interaction with the wording of 1201 gets interesting, in my (non-professional) opinion!
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  Here is the relevant text in the law: > No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The inclusion of “work protected under this title” makes it clear in the law, though I doubt a judge would rule otherwise without that line. (Otherwise, I’d wonder if I could claim damages that Google et al. are violating the technological measures I’ve put in place to protect the specificity of my interests, because it wouldn’t matter that such is not protected by copyright law.) Also not an attorney, for what it’s worth.
  - roywiggins 2y ago
    It seems clear from this definition especially: > (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner In this case there is no copyright owner.
nadermx 2y ago
Actually, in terms of copyright control "The Federal Circuit went on to clarify the nature of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. The DMCA established causes of action for liability and did not establish a property right. Therefore, circumvention is not infringement in itself."[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlain_Group,_Inc._v._Skylink_Technologies,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlain_Group,_Inc._v._S...
- bitwize 2y ago
  Circumvention is not infringement, but the DMCA makes it a separate crime punishable by up to 5 years in prison.
BadHumans 2y ago
Is using millions of copyrighted works to train your AI a valid exemption? Asking for a few billionaire friends.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
larodi 2y ago
just imagine, like just for a second how it becomes illegal to train anything that does not then afterwards produce, if publicly used or distributed, a copyright token which is both in the training set - to mark it - and in the produce - to recognize it. so this is where it all goes in several years, if i were the gov.

Lerc 2y ago

I'm not even sure if event the first part is true. Has it been determined if AI models are intellectual property? Machine generated content may not be copyrightable. It isn't just the output of generative AI that falls under this, the models themselves are. Can you copyright a set of coefficients for a formula? In the sense of a JPEG it would be considered that the image being reproduced is the thing that has the copyright. Being the first to run the calculations that produces a compressed version of that data should not grant you any special rights to that compressed form. An AI model is just a form of that writ large. When the models generalize and create new content, it seems hard to see how that either the output or the model that generated it could be considered someone's property. People possess models, I'm not sure if they own them. There are however billions of dollars at play here and enough money can buy you whichever legal opinion you want.

echelon 2y ago
> AI models are intellectual property If companies train on data they don't own and expect to own their model weights, that's hypocritical. Model weights shouldn't be copyrightable if the training data was pilfered. But this hasn't been tested because models are locked away in data centers as trade secrets. There's no opportunity to observe or copy them outside of using their outputs as synthetic data. On that subject, training on model outputs should be fair use, and an area we should use legislation to defend access to (similar to web scraping provisions).
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  Now that you mention it, I'm quite surprised that none of the typical fanatical IP lawsuiters had sued arguing (reasonably I think) that the output of the LLMs is strongly suggestive that they have been trained on copyrighted materials. Get the lawsuit to discovery, and those data centers become fair game. Perhaps 'strongly suggestive' isn't enough.
  - Onawa 2y ago
    Wasn't that the goal of both the New York Times lawsuit and other class action lawsuits from authors? https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2024/04/nyt-v-openai-the-timess-about-face/ https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2024/04/nyt-v-openai-the-t... https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/95768-authors-sue-ai-firm-anthropic-for-copyright-infringement.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...

rileymat2 2y ago

I doubt the models are copyrighted, arn’t works created by machine not eligible? Or you get into cases autogenerating and claiming ownership of all possible musical note combinations.

hnlmorg 2y ago

It’s hard to say because as far as I know this stuff hasn’t been definitively tested on any courts that I know of. Europe not America. AI models are generally regarded as a company’s asset (like a customer database would also be), and rightly so given the cost required to generate one. But that’s a different matter entirely to copyright.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

dragonwriter 2y ago

No, copyright violation occurs at the first unauthorized copying or creation of a derivative work or exercise of any of the other exclusive rights of the copyright holder (that does not fall into an exception like that for fair use.) That distribution is required for a copyright violation is a persistent myth. Distribution is a means by which a violation becomes more likely to be detected and also more likely to involve significant liability for damages. (OTOH, whether models, as the output of a mechanical process, are subject to copyright is a matter of some debate. The firms training models tend to treat the models as if they were protected by copyright but also tend to treat the source works as if copying for the purpose of training AI were within a copyright exception; why each of those positions is in their interest is obvious, but neither is well-established.)

larodi 2y ago

its insane to state it tbh