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OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work
- josefritzishere 2y agoThe product requires crime? I feel like most products do not require crime. This is not a good sales pitch.
- jug 2y agoEither that, or copyright law is bad in its current form and LLM’s are yet an example of what exposes that. Even if copyright owners can’t point to how much damage, if any, they suffer from AI, it’s seen as wrong and bad. I think it’s getting boring to hear that story about copyright repeat itself. In most crimes, you need to be able point to a damage that was done to you. Also, while there are edge cases in some LLM’s where you can make them spew some verbatim training material, often through jailbreaks or whatnot, an LLM is a destructive process involving ”fuzzy logic” where the content is generally not perfectly memorized, and seems no more of a threat to copyright than recording broadcasts onto cassette tapes or VHS were back in the day. You’d be insane to use that stuff as a source of truth on par with the original article etc.
- xyzzy123 2y agoMore like, it's interesting that big tech companies can create extremely elaborate copyright assignment, metering and payout mechanisms when it's in their interest - right down to figuring out who owns 30 seconds of incidental radio music that plays in the background during someone's speedrun video. But for other classes of user generated content, the problem is suddenly "impossible".
- basisword 2y agoExisting law is ruinous to my murder-for-hire business. We need change.
- r00fus 2y agoThe product doesn't require crime, but the massive profitability of their business model requires it. And the red herring that "China will steal it if we don't do it first".
- OhNoNotAgain_99 2y ago[dead]
- basisword 2y agoSome good news for a change!
- neilv 2y agoIt sounds like government continuing to honor the property rights of everyone is getting in the way of a handful of rich people's desire to take all that value for themselves.
- ls612 2y agoBy this logic Google Search couldn't exist. Except that Google won those cases.
- adammarples 2y agoHow is Google search breaking copywrite?
- netruk44 2y agoThe text preview underneath the search result is one thing I remember being contentious (some news websites in France took Google to court and won if I recall correctly) For mostly the same reasons people are against AI. If you read that text, sometimes there’s no reason to visit the website, which ‘deprives’ website owners and the content creators of ad revenue they would have gotten if Google hadn’t copied the text from their website. After all, the news is the same regardless of if it’s written on the Google result preview or on the news website itself.
- xyzzyz 2y agoExact same way OpenAI does: by scraping data, ingesting it, processing it, incorporating it into its proprietary system, and using it to serve responses to queries. This is not to say that I thing that any of this is wrong. I think that if what Google or OpenAI do is illegal, then the law is wrong, not Google or OpenAI.
- paulcole 2y agoIs it the exact same though?
- giancarlostoro 2y agoI think we just need to rethink copyright for language models. I'm okay just licensing 1 copy of a work to any LLM model throughout its various generations. Just don't pirate it if no special license is available, buying the ebook should suffice. It should be no different from a human buying a copy. The rule should only be that it does not leak the entire work.
- JohnFen 2y agoI'm not OK with that, though... and here we have the nut of the problem. There is no agreement as to what's acceptable and what's not. I personally think that the odds of me me being able to both publicly publish my words and code and be able to keep them out of training data is pretty close to zero. Since that's unacceptable to me, my only option is not to publish that stuff at all.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- scudsworth 2y agosomething tells me that this pathetic messaging approach is not going to be the one that squares the circle between "piracy is illegal" and "information wants to be free"
- nadermx 2y agoCopyright infrigement is not stealing[0]. The person still has what they made. Not sure why they propigate it as theft. Seems like a pro copyright propaganda extremisit article which goes significantly against progress of advancements for arts and sciences. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...
- klabb3 2y ago> against progress of advancements for arts and sciences. No it’s always against commercialization. That’s why we have exceptions like political commentary, satire and in particular arts and sciences. The issue is about making money from someone else’s work. You can still disagree with it of course, but let’s have an honest discussion.
- nadermx 2y agoIf that was the case, then cooking recipes would be all copyrighted, and you would have to pay a licensing fee every time you made spaghetti. The complexity of copyright is even referenced in the Wikipedia supreme court ruling I linked too. Yet you ask for an honest discussion? What was not forthright in my reply?
- srhtftw 2y agoA mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf > ... aa recipe that creatively explains or depicts how or why to perform a particular activity may be copyrightable. A registration for a recipe may cover the written description or explanation of a process that appears in the work, as well as any photographs or illustrations that are owned by the applicant. However, the registration will not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself.
- slowtrek 2y agoSo basically, we know China is never going to pay the publishers/content creators (never). If we hold our principles to OpenAI (pay who you took from), they will go bankrupt. So of course they are speaking in end-game language. To suggest the race is lost even before it starts is an incredible thing. How is it that we can theorize that the model would get better with more data, but we can't theorize that the business model would need to get bigger (pay the content creators) to train the model? Shoot first and ask questions later (or rather, BEG later).
- whatthedangit 2y agoYou know, there's a creative third way which the US could approach if it had the cajones. Allow OpenAI and other AI companies to use all data for training, but require that they pay it forward by charging royalties on profits beyond X amount of profit, where X is a number high enough to imply true AGI was reached. The royalties could go into a fund that would be paid out like social security payments for every American starting when they were 18 years old. Companies could likewise request a one time deferred payment or something like that. It's having your cake and eating it. Also helping ease some tensions around job loss. Sadly, what we'll likely get is a bunch of tech leaders stumbling into wild riches, hoarding it, and then having it taken from them by force after they become complacent and drunk on power without the necessary understanding of human nature or history to see why they've brought it on themselves.
- slowtrek 2y agoNot to be funny on purpose, but we are having discussions in America currently on if we should finance aid for poverty and the like. I love your idea though.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoThere are many possibilities. Perhaps they're allowed to use anything publicly accessible but have to release their model every x amount of time, which might be a month or a year. My biggest fear is that as happened with copyright's limited term, this limited term would get chipped away at over the years. Another would be that they couldn't sell access to customers directly but rather must license it out to various entities at rates set by regulators. Those entities then would compete with each other for end customers. This of course might be prone to regulatory capture like happens with utilities.
- JohnFen 2y agoWhat I don't understand is why this is always presented as a "race" that "we" have to win or else. It's just such a strange framing to me and every time I see it, it's presented as some sort of self-evident truth, but I don't think it's self-evident at all.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- thewanderer1983 2y agoNature is a complex system. Many are in competition, it's not just humans. Most of these systems form a balance (see biodiversity). Due to resource scarcity, power tends to form which gives these power structures and advantage. Humans form these power structures arounds groups. This has been happening for as long as humans tribalised. Right now, humans can form these groups at nation-state level complexity and to some extent more global. This is humans current best effort. If you can do better, please do.
- slowtrek 2y agoNo need to even complicate it to that degree. A wrong begets another wrong forever unless someone stops doing the next wrong thing. That's literally what it takes.
- drivingmenuts 2y agoThat doesn't answer the question. It's a race with winners and losers because ego and money. Ego because … well, ego. Money because whoever develops the most powerful AI and gets enough people to buy into it, will probably retain the top spot for quite a while because inertia (sort of like how Google got to be where it is). I'm sure some level of paranoia feeds into it at some level. Whoever gets locked in the public's mindset will rule the world and if it's not a Silicon Valley magnate, then they are losers.
- sifar 2y ago>>Nature is a complex system. There is no winner take all in an ecosystem. If it happens, that ecosystem collapses !! It is strange that you use this as an example yet fail to understand it fully. Nature is a complex system ... with adaptive feedback. Every process is a cycle - has feedbacks that amplifies/regulates it. Yes there are apex predators, but there is no winner take all in an ecosystem. Living beings coexist.
- hagbard_c 2y agoYes, well, in a way they're right and I suspect everyone here knows it no matter how and mighty they might want act when commenting. When foreign (here 'Chinese') competition just ignores copyright laws while 'western' companies have to abide by them for every piece of data they use to train their models the former will have a clear advantage over the latter. This also happens to be how the USA acted in the 1800s [1]: the United States declined an invitation to a pivotal conference in Berne in 1883, and did not sign the 1886 agreement of the Berne Convention which accorded national treatment to copyright holders. Moreover, until 1891 American statutes explicitly denied copyrights to citizens of other countries and the United States was notorious in the international sphere as a significant contributor to the "piracy" of foreign literary products. It has been claimed that American companies for the most part "indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement" (Feather, 1994, 154). The tendency to freely reprint foreign works was encouraged by the existence of tariffs on imported books that ranged as high as 25 percent (see Dozer, 1949). [1] http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0124-59962008000100002 http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_artte...
- raxxorraxor 2y agoPlus in this case I don't even think it a copyright violation to analyze protected works. And even creating derivates of some form isn't, since that is the way any form of art works in the first place. Sure, perhaps they would need a license to get the material, but I don't see how broken copyright laws will be of any help here.
- cbsmith 2y agoThe US has found ways to get China to adhere to IP laws, but they're never going to agree to restrictions the US doesn't impose on itself. Presuming that there is no way China will respect IP laws is BS.
- bpodgursky 2y agoSorry but it is actually a huge problem for the US if the DeepSeek models are able to train on sorta-illegal dumps of scientific papers and US models aren't. The ones that are paywalled by scientific journals. Everyone WILL start using hosted frontier Chinese models if they are demonstrably better at answering scientific questions than ChatGPT, sending essentially all US research questions into a Chinese data dump. This is even worse than the national security catastrophe that is TikTok (even aside from the EVEN BIGGER issue that China will have models that are staggeringly better than those in the US, because they are up to date on the science). I understand the reflexivity against AI companies "stealing content" but we need to stay competitive and figure out the financial compensation later. This is not a case where our unbelievably generous copyright laws should take precedence over US competitiveness.
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoYou have to remember a company is not a social being with balanced obligations. Its obligation is to its owners and not to society. If OpenAI’s leadership weren’t saying precisely this, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs.
- slowtrek 2y agoYeah, we have a wrong conception. It's fine, society often has wrong conceptions. We are just dead wrong about ruthless capitalism. A company is a custodian of a good society, it has responsibilities that far exceed profit.
- basisword 2y ago>> Its obligation is to its owners and not to society. This isn't true at all. It has an obligation to follow the law of the society it operates in, even if that results in lower profits.
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoI agree with you. It has to follow the rules. Unfortunately the society this company operates in is highly Machiavellian and can’t improve because people are too busy hating each other and also the rules it does have aren’t being enforced very well and finally, this type of lobbying is part of the culture in the US, it’s so expected it’d be weird if they didn’t do it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- CuriouslyC 2y agoIt's always interesting to see how the title of a HN post radically changes the people who comment and vote. The AI friendly people are being carpet bombed by haters, but in a model release thread the haters would be flagged to oblivion.
- archagon 2y ago“Haters” is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoDiscussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43352531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43352531
- slowtrek 2y agoWhy is this flagged?
- EdwardKrayer 2y agoIt seems that most people on this site believe that this is a good thing, but all this restriction would mean is that for the next while - the only companies able to afford mass licensing would be in the SPY 500, and that's assuming these companies wouldn't just flock to a nation outside of Americas influence. At some point, it becomes a national security issue. This technology is going to be leveraged in ways we can't even dream up today. Copyright law needs to be re-imagined in a way that won't restrict advancement in AI, and AI-adjacent technology. It's not because we want to - it's because we have to.
- preinheimer 2y agoWhy? Why do we have to? Why do companies get to take the creative output of humanity for free to make a profit? Why is it a national security issue? Because people who could make billions of dollars say so?
- EdwardKrayer 2y agoAt some point, we have to look at this pragmatically. To me, it's not about FAANGs getting over on the every man, it's about making sure we maintain the opportunity of playing on the same field, with the same resources.
- roxolotl 2y agoBut why must it be free? Immense amounts of money are being thrown around and at the first suggestion that maybe the thing that underpins their work should be paid for they say it’s infeasible. If you listen to Altman the future is going to be infinite. Why can’t we pay authors for their books in that case?
- basisword 2y agoYou're assuming this leads...somewhere. Currently, AI is not all that useful. And progress seems to be slowing, not accelerating.
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- slowtrek 2y agoCan someone please vouch for this thread and unflag it? It's kind of the main tech issue of our time ...
- grimblee 2y agoSo, does that mean that openai's models will be opensource then ? I mean, if it's built on our collective intellectual property, its only fair we have free access to it.