3 ms·

So the end does justify the means? So it is okay to rip off thousands of authors?

withinboredom 2y ago
Authors (not necessarily the ones alive today or even independent authors, but the big ones ... *cough* Disney) got greedy and made it so copyright is so atrociously long that it is utterly pointless and actively harmful to society. That's my 2 cents anyway.
- ahofmann 2y ago
  But having the problem that big corporations steal the work from authors isn't a solution for the problem that big corporations fought (or bribed) for bad copyright laws.
barnabee 2y ago
If we want authors and other artists/creators to be paid in the long term we need to find a method that is not copyright. Copyright helps Spotify more than musicians and bands. It helps Meta and Google more than authors and journalists. And it’s ignored by anyone who feels like it. We need to tax and restrict corporatism (more so than capitalism) to pay and make way for things we care about, including the arts.
- ahofmann 2y ago
  That sounds constructive, I like the idea!
- freen 2y ago
  Indeed. The only trick that consistently improves the lot of all participants in a civilization is to take a portion of the private surplus and apply it to the public good. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
anonym29 2y ago
The mere notion that you can copyright or trademark combinations of words to procure legal ownership of those specific combinations, ownership that grants you the ability to forcefully take the property of other people who repeat those same words via a formally codified and enforced system of wage theft (court-awarded "damages" to the author) is patently absurd, and should be an affront to the sensibilities of any person who's ever had to work for a wage.
- ahofmann 2y ago
  People have written books. Those books were copied into something, called "Books3 section of ThePile". Now those people trying to sell their books, but nobody needs to buy them, because one can download thePile. This alone is awful and wrong, and we all know this. Now comes Facebook, and builds an LLM. The LLM can now write somewhat nicely sounding books in no time. People who wrote those books and put all the work, time etc. into it, are angry. And they are right. It is very telling how many words and arguments are used here to make Facebook's behavior sound like a good thing, or a necessity.
  - lsaferite 2y ago
    There are at least 3 distinct things in your post. 1. Authors' works were (are?) illegally distributed in 'Books3': This seems to clearly be a copyright infringement. That being said, I'd be shocked if someone could prove this copyright infringement made an appreciable impact on an author's income. Something tangible, not a hand-wavey "but they would have bought my book". I know that I don't go out downloading books from places like ThePile if I want to read something. I'd wager most people don't. 2. Facebook (et al.) acquired illegal collections of books vs legally acquiring the books: If that is true (seems likely) then they should suffer punishment for the acquisition. That being said, it's the same cudgel that'd be used to sue individuals into oblivion, so the end outcomes might be less constructive for the rest of humanity. I do feel like corporations involved in mass copyright infringement should be held accountable though. 3. Facebook (et al.) trained foundational models on collections of books they acquired (disconnect #2 from #3 here): I'd argue strongly that the foundational model training is not a copyright violation. It's not storing copyrighted works and distributing them. It is using them to model language patterns and token frequencies that could be used to create an approximation of a copyrighted work if the training was poor and you prompt it properly. There are plenty of experts in this matter that could discuss this in depth, but the essence of the fight boils down to if you believe that the copyrighted works are being distributed via these trained models or not. Now, if people want to change copyright law such that there are specific laws around how ML models are trained on copyrighted works, then perhaps this problem gets resolved in one direction or the other. Until then, all parties are just talking past each other and hoping the courts eventually agree with their arguments.
K0balt 2y ago
I am an author who derives his principal income from my published works. Millions of people have illegally downloaded my work, and I would love it if they had maybe sent me a dollar or two if they read it, but so far the bitcoin address published in the book for piracy donations has yet to receive even a single sat. I see this as just a fact of life for publishing in the digital age, so I try to make my work more valuable to have in paper form that in digital form…. To make it an indispensable tool that merits its own physicality based on its utility. I cannot imagine claiming that I have a right to the -ideas- or concepts in my work , though. That is what patents are for, and a patent also doesn’t give me the right to exclusive use of my ideas, just limited exclusivity of implementation. The relatively free sharing of ideas is a fundamental pillar of society, and without the free sharing of ideas, modern civilization would be impossible. Copyright doesn’t grant you exclusivity to the ideas in your work. It doesn’t grant immunity to having a few sentences repeated even verbatim. Fan fiction is fair use, as are most derivative works. The only legitimate use of intellectual work is the extraction of knowledge from it, basically the equivalent of reading or teaching it. Training is teaching. It could have been done (much more slowly) by going to the library and using the books in the library to train from. It is not the redistribution of these works. It is the use of these works. If a book cannot be used to transfer knowledge or ideas, then is it legal to read it at all? There may have been flaws in the process of “reading” this work that involved technical violations of copyright law. But the use of information that is published and not covered by an NDA is part and parcel of the fundamental benefits of living in a society as we understand it. The use interpretation, application,and processing of knowledge is what we are really discussing here. If we say that copyright prevents this, then we need to abolish libraries, schools, newspapers, the internet, any mechanism by which copyrighted material may be exposed to persons who might wish to use, interpret, or apply that information. What tools they use to do this is irrelevant. For those that would say that training creates a copy, I defy you to have any llm reproduce a significant body of copyrighted work. You’ll have about as much luck as asking someone to do the same from memory. And if they can, what does that mean? Is the savant reader guilty of copyright infringement if they write down their recollection? Perhaps. Or is it the actor that causes them to do so? Or is it the act of distributing that perfect memory that then is the violation of copyright ? (I’d argue this is the line in the sand).

Authors (not necessarily the ones alive today or even independent authors, but the big ones ... *cough* Disney) got greedy and made it so copyright is so atrociously long that it is utterly pointless and actively harmful to society. That's my 2 cents anyway.

ahofmann 2y ago
But having the problem that big corporations steal the work from authors isn't a solution for the problem that big corporations fought (or bribed) for bad copyright laws.

barnabee 2y ago

If we want authors and other artists/creators to be paid in the long term we need to find a method that is not copyright. Copyright helps Spotify more than musicians and bands. It helps Meta and Google more than authors and journalists. And it’s ignored by anyone who feels like it. We need to tax and restrict corporatism (more so than capitalism) to pay and make way for things we care about, including the arts.

ahofmann 2y ago
That sounds constructive, I like the idea!
freen 2y ago
Indeed. The only trick that consistently improves the lot of all participants in a civilization is to take a portion of the private surplus and apply it to the public good. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

anonym29 2y ago

The mere notion that you can copyright or trademark combinations of words to procure legal ownership of those specific combinations, ownership that grants you the ability to forcefully take the property of other people who repeat those same words via a formally codified and enforced system of wage theft (court-awarded "damages" to the author) is patently absurd, and should be an affront to the sensibilities of any person who's ever had to work for a wage.

ahofmann 2y ago
People have written books. Those books were copied into something, called "Books3 section of ThePile". Now those people trying to sell their books, but nobody needs to buy them, because one can download thePile. This alone is awful and wrong, and we all know this. Now comes Facebook, and builds an LLM. The LLM can now write somewhat nicely sounding books in no time. People who wrote those books and put all the work, time etc. into it, are angry. And they are right. It is very telling how many words and arguments are used here to make Facebook's behavior sound like a good thing, or a necessity.
- lsaferite 2y ago
  There are at least 3 distinct things in your post. 1. Authors' works were (are?) illegally distributed in 'Books3': This seems to clearly be a copyright infringement. That being said, I'd be shocked if someone could prove this copyright infringement made an appreciable impact on an author's income. Something tangible, not a hand-wavey "but they would have bought my book". I know that I don't go out downloading books from places like ThePile if I want to read something. I'd wager most people don't. 2. Facebook (et al.) acquired illegal collections of books vs legally acquiring the books: If that is true (seems likely) then they should suffer punishment for the acquisition. That being said, it's the same cudgel that'd be used to sue individuals into oblivion, so the end outcomes might be less constructive for the rest of humanity. I do feel like corporations involved in mass copyright infringement should be held accountable though. 3. Facebook (et al.) trained foundational models on collections of books they acquired (disconnect #2 from #3 here): I'd argue strongly that the foundational model training is not a copyright violation. It's not storing copyrighted works and distributing them. It is using them to model language patterns and token frequencies that could be used to create an approximation of a copyrighted work if the training was poor and you prompt it properly. There are plenty of experts in this matter that could discuss this in depth, but the essence of the fight boils down to if you believe that the copyrighted works are being distributed via these trained models or not. Now, if people want to change copyright law such that there are specific laws around how ML models are trained on copyrighted works, then perhaps this problem gets resolved in one direction or the other. Until then, all parties are just talking past each other and hoping the courts eventually agree with their arguments.

K0balt 2y ago

I am an author who derives his principal income from my published works. Millions of people have illegally downloaded my work, and I would love it if they had maybe sent me a dollar or two if they read it, but so far the bitcoin address published in the book for piracy donations has yet to receive even a single sat. I see this as just a fact of life for publishing in the digital age, so I try to make my work more valuable to have in paper form that in digital form…. To make it an indispensable tool that merits its own physicality based on its utility. I cannot imagine claiming that I have a right to the -ideas- or concepts in my work , though. That is what patents are for, and a patent also doesn’t give me the right to exclusive use of my ideas, just limited exclusivity of implementation. The relatively free sharing of ideas is a fundamental pillar of society, and without the free sharing of ideas, modern civilization would be impossible. Copyright doesn’t grant you exclusivity to the ideas in your work. It doesn’t grant immunity to having a few sentences repeated even verbatim. Fan fiction is fair use, as are most derivative works. The only legitimate use of intellectual work is the extraction of knowledge from it, basically the equivalent of reading or teaching it. Training is teaching. It could have been done (much more slowly) by going to the library and using the books in the library to train from. It is not the redistribution of these works. It is the use of these works. If a book cannot be used to transfer knowledge or ideas, then is it legal to read it at all? There may have been flaws in the process of “reading” this work that involved technical violations of copyright law. But the use of information that is published and not covered by an NDA is part and parcel of the fundamental benefits of living in a society as we understand it. The use interpretation, application,and processing of knowledge is what we are really discussing here. If we say that copyright prevents this, then we need to abolish libraries, schools, newspapers, the internet, any mechanism by which copyrighted material may be exposed to persons who might wish to use, interpret, or apply that information. What tools they use to do this is irrelevant. For those that would say that training creates a copy, I defy you to have any llm reproduce a significant body of copyrighted work. You’ll have about as much luck as asking someone to do the same from memory. And if they can, what does that mean? Is the savant reader guilty of copyright infringement if they write down their recollection? Perhaps. Or is it the actor that causes them to do so? Or is it the act of distributing that perfect memory that then is the violation of copyright ? (I’d argue this is the line in the sand).