4 ms·

In hindsight (considering how LLMs are trained etc.) it makes total sense, but "Big Tech vs. Big Copyright" is something I didn't have on my 2020s bingo card.

by lxgr 2y ago

In hindsight (considering how LLMs are trained etc.) it makes total sense, but "Big Tech vs. Big Copyright" is something I didn't have on my 2020s bingo card. I wonder who will come out on top, and whether there will be any incidental improvements for consumers, but unfortunately I can imagine an "AI training exemption" all too well.

criley2 2y ago
I don't view Big Tech as being against copyright. They simply hold a position that they will not pay for something unless forced to ("make me" - a very common position for the powerful to hold). In fact, I'd argue that Big Tech is pro copyright, because once they force the copyright holder to negotiate, the cost is irrelevant to them and they build a moat around that access. For example, Google stole Reddit content for Gemini until Reddit was forced to the table, and now Google has a seemingly exclusive agreement around Reddit data for AI purposes.
- jsheard 2y ago
  > I don't view Big Tech as being against copyright. They simply hold a position that they will not pay for something unless forced to Yep, the contradiction between them feeling entitled to use anything they want for training, while simultaneously having license terms which forbid using the output of their models to train other models is pretty glaring. Information wants to flow freely but only in one direction apparently.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    > having licenses which forbid using the output of their models to train other models I haven't been following it closely, but aren't there already court rulings saying that generative AI output by itself is not copyrightable?
    - jsheard 2y ago
      There's not much caselaw as to whether those terms are actually enforceable yet, but it at least indicates what they want to happen.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- n144q 2y ago
  > I'd argue that Big Tech is pro copyright I agree but for a different reason -- cost is actually relevant, in the sense that only the biggest player can afford to pay for the copyrights. If you are a small player, however your tech stack is or how good your model is, if you can't afford it, you can't compete with Google.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Yup. For Big Tech, the ideal outcome of these cases isn't that copyright is widely or deeply undermined as they rely heavily on it themselves (let alone how their customers and investors benefit from it). Their ideal outcome is that there's some narrow carveout that gives them permission to ignore copyright where they want to, while extending similar permission to as few/irrelevant others as possible.
- 52-6F-62 2y ago
  In the past we called that tyranny, when a power thought it could act entirely without restraint. Now I guess it’s defended as good business and good science by so many flunkies. Knifes edge stuff. Tech people should all be reading the books, not Mark’s steamroller. There goes the gravy train
kccqzy 2y ago
That's not surprising to me at all. Even in the 2000s there was a famous lawsuit about Google Books scanning books without approval and the proposed settlement was essentially allowing Google to sell scanned ebooks while giving copyright holders a cut[0]. At that time Google truly felt like don't-be-evil corporation, and lawyers for the copyright holders wanted to give Google all this data as long as Google pays the copyright holders. In the 2020s however I cannot imagine any Big Tech company to have that don't-be-evil spirit and I also cannot imagine them voluntarily paying anything to copyright holders. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happened-to-google-books https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happen...
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> "Big Tech vs. Big Copyright" Indeed. But when do those intersect or diverge? I don't blame him. What would you do? If I had a near perfect data training set of all the most useful books and a hungry AI to train, it would be the logical step. The reason this is news is because of the stinking hypocrisy of it all. It's really the same topic as the Swartz-Altman discussion here [0], in that these giant companies want to have it both ways. Where is Zuckerberg's shout-out for Alexandra Elbakyan? [1] Or for Brewster Kahle? Or any of the wast army of people who preserve and curate the vital culture of humanity by protecting it from intellectual property dungeons? The colossal hypocrisy is that a company like Meta wishes to live under the protective umbrella of "Intellectual Property". It wants to stop me just stealing it's stuff and setting up a better Facebook Were it exposed to the same rules it wishes to live by, it would be torn apart by vibrant and deserving competition within days. All the Zuckerberg, Meta or OpenAI are doing is setting the ground for the abolition of intellectual property. They are literally the proverbial people who will buy the rope with which to hang themselves. (Edit. that doesn't make sense insert <proverb about buying ropes that actually makes sense>) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42671427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42671427 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan
CuriouslyC 2y ago
Big tech will win, because what they're doing is already basically legal, and they're worming their way up the new administration's ass.
visarga 2y ago
Maybe training on copyrighted data should be allowed if the size of the training set is huge, as each individual example is justa drop in the ocean compared to the full training set. If you train a model 20B parameters on 20T tokens, even with 1000 tokens per example, the model extracts about 1 byte of information per example. What is the value of 1 byte of copyright infringement?
- lxgr 2y ago
  By the same logic, pirating movies should be allowed as long as the person doing it watches enough of them for each individual one to be almost meaningless…?
  - webmaven 2y ago
    If by "pirating" you mean distributing copies, probably not. But if you mean downloading copies, probably yes. Consider the case of the film student studying the entire ouevres of multiple directors.
  - visarga 2y ago
    Yes, if they watch a billion movies, it should be free to watch any copyrighted one.
dialup_sounds 2y ago
Odds are that licensing gets streamlined into something like compulsory mechanical licensing and rates get negotiated into something that Big Tech and Big Media can both live with. The whole conflict boils down to one party having piles of money and another party having something they want. That's not an intractable problem.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
The hilarious thing is that the same people that freely pirate music, videos, books and articles are on the side of huge copyright hoarders like Disney
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  I just wish the big corps would change the law to allow everyone to pirate freely, but instead they’re arguing for a carve out specially for training language models.

by lxgr 2y ago

criley2 2y ago

I don't view Big Tech as being against copyright. They simply hold a position that they will not pay for something unless forced to ("make me" - a very common position for the powerful to hold). In fact, I'd argue that Big Tech is pro copyright, because once they force the copyright holder to negotiate, the cost is irrelevant to them and they build a moat around that access. For example, Google stole Reddit content for Gemini until Reddit was forced to the table, and now Google has a seemingly exclusive agreement around Reddit data for AI purposes.

jsheard 2y ago
> I don't view Big Tech as being against copyright. They simply hold a position that they will not pay for something unless forced to Yep, the contradiction between them feeling entitled to use anything they want for training, while simultaneously having license terms which forbid using the output of their models to train other models is pretty glaring. Information wants to flow freely but only in one direction apparently.
- lxgr 2y ago
  > having licenses which forbid using the output of their models to train other models I haven't been following it closely, but aren't there already court rulings saying that generative AI output by itself is not copyrightable?
  - jsheard 2y ago
    There's not much caselaw as to whether those terms are actually enforceable yet, but it at least indicates what they want to happen.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
n144q 2y ago
> I'd argue that Big Tech is pro copyright I agree but for a different reason -- cost is actually relevant, in the sense that only the biggest player can afford to pay for the copyrights. If you are a small player, however your tech stack is or how good your model is, if you can't afford it, you can't compete with Google.
swatcoder 2y ago
Yup. For Big Tech, the ideal outcome of these cases isn't that copyright is widely or deeply undermined as they rely heavily on it themselves (let alone how their customers and investors benefit from it). Their ideal outcome is that there's some narrow carveout that gives them permission to ignore copyright where they want to, while extending similar permission to as few/irrelevant others as possible.
52-6F-62 2y ago
In the past we called that tyranny, when a power thought it could act entirely without restraint. Now I guess it’s defended as good business and good science by so many flunkies. Knifes edge stuff. Tech people should all be reading the books, not Mark’s steamroller. There goes the gravy train

kccqzy 2y ago

That's not surprising to me at all. Even in the 2000s there was a famous lawsuit about Google Books scanning books without approval and the proposed settlement was essentially allowing Google to sell scanned ebooks while giving copyright holders a cut[0]. At that time Google truly felt like don't-be-evil corporation, and lawyers for the copyright holders wanted to give Google all this data as long as Google pays the copyright holders. In the 2020s however I cannot imagine any Big Tech company to have that don't-be-evil spirit and I also cannot imagine them voluntarily paying anything to copyright holders. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happened-to-google-books https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happen...

nonrandomstring 2y ago

> "Big Tech vs. Big Copyright" Indeed. But when do those intersect or diverge? I don't blame him. What would you do? If I had a near perfect data training set of all the most useful books and a hungry AI to train, it would be the logical step. The reason this is news is because of the stinking hypocrisy of it all. It's really the same topic as the Swartz-Altman discussion here [0], in that these giant companies want to have it both ways. Where is Zuckerberg's shout-out for Alexandra Elbakyan? [1] Or for Brewster Kahle? Or any of the wast army of people who preserve and curate the vital culture of humanity by protecting it from intellectual property dungeons? The colossal hypocrisy is that a company like Meta wishes to live under the protective umbrella of "Intellectual Property". It wants to stop me just stealing it's stuff and setting up a better Facebook Were it exposed to the same rules it wishes to live by, it would be torn apart by vibrant and deserving competition within days. All the Zuckerberg, Meta or OpenAI are doing is setting the ground for the abolition of intellectual property. They are literally the proverbial people who will buy the rope with which to hang themselves. (Edit. that doesn't make sense insert <proverb about buying ropes that actually makes sense>) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42671427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42671427 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

CuriouslyC 2y ago

Big tech will win, because what they're doing is already basically legal, and they're worming their way up the new administration's ass.

visarga 2y ago

Maybe training on copyrighted data should be allowed if the size of the training set is huge, as each individual example is justa drop in the ocean compared to the full training set. If you train a model 20B parameters on 20T tokens, even with 1000 tokens per example, the model extracts about 1 byte of information per example. What is the value of 1 byte of copyright infringement?

lxgr 2y ago
By the same logic, pirating movies should be allowed as long as the person doing it watches enough of them for each individual one to be almost meaningless…?
- webmaven 2y ago
  If by "pirating" you mean distributing copies, probably not. But if you mean downloading copies, probably yes. Consider the case of the film student studying the entire ouevres of multiple directors.
- visarga 2y ago
  Yes, if they watch a billion movies, it should be free to watch any copyrighted one.

dialup_sounds 2y ago

Odds are that licensing gets streamlined into something like compulsory mechanical licensing and rates get negotiated into something that Big Tech and Big Media can both live with. The whole conflict boils down to one party having piles of money and another party having something they want. That's not an intractable problem.

TiredOfLife 2y ago

The hilarious thing is that the same people that freely pirate music, videos, books and articles are on the side of huge copyright hoarders like Disney

jazzyjackson 2y ago
I just wish the big corps would change the law to allow everyone to pirate freely, but instead they’re arguing for a carve out specially for training language models.