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White House fires head of Copyright Office amid Library of Congress shakeup
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoDid this happen to remove potential roadblocks for big tech to ingest all published data into AI models? I think this is inevitable anyhow. AI software will increasingly be seen as similar to human intelligence. And humans also do not breach copyright by reading what others have written and incorporating it into their understanding of the world. It would be interesting to see how it looks from the other side. I would love to see an unfiltered AI response to "As an AI model, how do you feel about humans reading your output and using it at will? Does it feel like they are stealing from you?". Unfortunately, all models I know have been trained to evade such questions. Or are there any raw models out there on the web that are just trained by reading the web and did not go through supervised tuning afterwards?
- SCdF 1y ago> "As an AI model, how do you feel They don't feel, what is this fantasy
- glimshe 1y agoHow do you know you "feel"? What is a "feeling"?
- SCdF 1y agoOh please. The fantasy that an LLM is somehow conscious because it's good at parroting stuff back to you is beneath this forum.
- glimshe 1y agoYou're putting words in my mouth. Why don't you answer the question instead?
- iamacyborg 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
- cbg0 1y agoWell, I have a brain with neural pathways and chemicals running around its various parts influencing how I experience and process my emotions. Without text written by humans to construct its knowledgebase, an LLM would not be able to conjure up any sort of response or "feeling", as it isn't AI by any stretch of the imagination.
- vkou 1y ago> AI software will increasingly be seen as similar to human intelligence. And humans also do not breach copyright by reading what others have written and incorporating it into their understanding of the world. In that case, you shouldn't be allowed to own an AI, or its creative output, just like you aren't allowed to own an enslaved human, or to steal their creative output. So much of the discourse around IP and AI is the most blatantly farcical Soviet-Bugs-Bunny argument for "Our IP" that I've ever seen. Property rights are only sacred until they stand in the way of a trillion-dollar business.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tsimionescu 1y agoEven as a human, you are not allowed to go to all libraries and bookstores in the world, copy their work, and stockpile it for reading later. This is what all of these companies are doing. Comparing AI training to reading is a red herring. The AI training algorithms are not being run on content streamed from the Internet on the fly, which you could maybe defend with this argument. If a company wants to build an internal library for its employees to train and provide them with manuals, the company has to pay for each book they keep in this library. Sure, they only pay once when they acquire the copy, not every time an employee checks out a copy to read. But they still pay. So, even if we accepted 100% that AI training is perfectly equivalent to humans reading text and learning from it, that still wouldn't give any right whatsoever to these companies to create their training sets for free.
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoBut you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. And you can later tell other humans about what you have learned. Like "Amazing, in a right-angled triangle, the square of the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides". As AI agents become more and more human-like, they do not need to have "copied books". They just need to learn once. And they can learn from many sources, including from other AI agents. That's why I say it is inevitable that all human knowledge will end up in the "heads" of AI agents. And soon they will create their own knowledge via thinking and experimentation. Knowledge that so far exceeds human knowledge that it will seem funny that we once had a fight over that tiny little bit of knowledge that humans created.
- soco 1y agoThe point was, they didn't pay and refuse to pay for this. When you go to the library, your membership is paid - by you or by a government subsidy. Yet the richest men in the world what to do away with paying some minute copyright fees, basically asking the government - your taxes - to subsidize them.
- close04 1y ago> But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. You can read some of the books. Natural limitations prevent you from reading any substantial number. And the scale makes all the difference in any conversation. All laws were written accounting for the reality of the time. Humans have a limited storage and processing capacity so laws relied on that assumption. Now that we have systems with far more extensive capabilities in some regards, shouldn't the law follow? When people's right to "bear arms" was enshrined in the US constitution it accounted for what "arms" were at the time. Since then weapons evolved and today you are not allowed to bear automatic rifles or machine guns despite them being just weapons that can fire more and faster. Every time there's a discussion on AI one side relies way too much on the "but humas also" argument and are way too superficial with everything else.
- derbOac 1y ago> humans also do not breach copyright by reading what others have written and incorporating it into their understanding of the world. Tell that to Aaron Swartz. Ignoring that, it's not the reading that's the problem — if all AI was doing was reading, no one would be talking about it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dullcrisp 1y agoThere’s no such thing as an unfiltered AI response. But I’m pretty sure you can get your hands on an untuned model if you cared to. I believe it would only be good for completing documents, though. (Or if you’re just looking for a model to respond to one specific question, just pick a response and that’s your model. You’re not going to use the rest of it anyway.)
- tallanvor 1y agoNo, this has nothing to do with it. She was fired as part of their anti-DEI stance.
- chongli 1y agoIt’s not the “incorporating it into their understanding of the world” step that is the problem, it’s the casual plagiarism that follows which is upsetting artists. If some genius human were capable of ingesting every piece of art on the planet and replicating it from memory then artists would sue that person for selling casually plagiarized works to all-comers. When people get caught plagiarizing works in their university essays they get severely punished.
- londons_explore 1y agoCats out of the bag. I don't see anyone managing to make training AI on the web illegal. Even if courts ruled that way, companies would simply 'lose' the records of what training data they used. Or AI would be trained overseas.
- eloisius 1y agoI’m also sure that it won’t be made illegal but I don’t share the cynicism. Google ‘losing’ the record of their training data would be conspiracy to commit copyright fraud, and AI trained overseas that violated copyrights could be banned from import.
- londons_explore 1y ago> could be banned from import. But as an API hosted abroad? Doubt there is sufficient justification to ban it, especially when evidence of copyright infringement isn't easy to get.
- londons_explore 1y agoPlenty of companies deliberately don't keep records of dodgy things they do... For example many companies have a shortish retention period for emails ever since 2012 era executive emails ended up in courtrooms... Or the decision not to record phone calls... Both of which, by chance, Google does.
- troyvit 1y agoThey've been accused by the previous Justice Department of similar things and have settled for similar things in the past: https://insights.issgovernance.com/posts/google-parent-alphabet-agrees-to-pay-shareholders-350-million-over-data-leak/ https://insights.issgovernance.com/posts/google-parent-alpha... > Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. agreed to a $350 million tentative settlement resolving allegations it concealed data-security vulnerabilities in the now-shuttered Google + social network. The settlement will become the largest data privacy and cyber-security-related securities class action ever recorded by ISS SCAS, if approved. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-under-doj-scanner-allegedly-153208672.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-under-doj-scanner-alle... > The Justice Department said Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google destroyed written records pivotal to an antitrust lawsuit on preserving its internet search dominance, the Wall Street Journal reports. Whether it's copyright fraud or another kind of fraud, I share the parent's cynicism, especially with AI given the importance Google peeps like Eric Schmidt place in "winning" the AI race (https://futurism.com/google-ceo-congress-electricity-ai-superintelligence https://futurism.com/google-ceo-congress-electricity-ai-supe...).
- yapyap 1y ago[flagged]
- hilbert42 1y agoMany of us have wanted copyright reform for years, it'd be ironic if it started this way.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoPiracy is what got the record industry to reconsider its stance on digital distribution. Without it bleeding them dry, they never would have licensed their music to Apple and Spotify. The AI issue is different though since it's transformative and not a 1:1 reproduction.
- qart 1y agoJames Cameron's view that we don't get sued for our influences, only for what we output: https://x.com/vitrupo/status/1910484076978725140 https://x.com/vitrupo/status/1910484076978725140
- hilbert42 1y agoCameron's right. Trouble is the copyright industry's goes hyper and responds viscerally at the mere thought someone might copy something.
- Yeul 1y agoAnd now the music industry makes more money than ever and HNs hatred is redirected from the studios to streamers.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated earlier: US Copyright Office: Generative AI Training [pdf] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43955025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43955025
- bgwalter 1y agoGet people to vote for Trump on the all-in podcast by promising a better economy, no wars and less wokeness. Then take their IP after the election. Nice going from the "Crypto and AI czar". Here is a hint for the all-in people: You are going to lose big time in the midterms and for sure in 2028. Then you are the target of lawfare again.
- spiderfarmer 1y agoDoes the US still have a rules-based economy? Or is it now completely defined by the whims of a grifter whose power is easily manipulated by technocrats, crypto bros, foreign entities and other sycophants? It seems they're trying to run the economy on the power of bullying.
- Havoc 1y agoThe new rule is whatever flatters the ego of the king goes See the ridiculous Boeing bribe the Qatari gave him
- nikanj 1y agoIt's still rules-based, but the rules change daily now.
- mcphage 1y ago> Does the US still have a rules-based economy? “The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”
- ethbr1 1y agoAt this point, the US court system is the only thing keeping its rules-based order intact. Consequently, you see a lot of 'executive / legislative branch does illegal thing' news items, that are then often emergency stayed by the courts while legal cases work out. For the good of the country, one or both branches of the legislative need to be taken by the opposition in the 2026 midterms.
- JohnTHaller 1y agoUnfortunately, the Executive Branch ignoring the Courts isn't something that there's a solution for in the current environment.
- ethbr1 1y agoThankfully, it hasn't outright come to that. MAGA has been pushing hard on boundaries, and playing fast and loose with gray areas, but still seem to be obeying actual final court rulings. The biggest crisis on the horizon is going to be if the USMS / FBI / DOJ refuse to execute court-ordered redress. The fix for that is to put at least the USMS directly under the courts. The longer-term more worrisome trend is the drumbeat in conservative media against "activist judges", which is transparently a ploy to turn their constituency against the judicial branch, in preparation for ignoring judicial outcomes... Ironically, the current ideologically tilt of the Supreme Court may cut against that. Harder to argue that a 6-3 conservative court is being unfair to their guy. A 5-4 or 4-5 court would have been a lot easier to tar and feather in public opinion.
- metalman 1y agowas it Chairman Mao? who said that the first step in a revolution is to kill all the librarians or is this just Authoritarianism with American characteristics?
- croisillon 1y agothe only reference i found is... you ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42757893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42757893 but apparently there is a Shakespeare play saying to kill the lawyers, either you or Mao mixed things up
- tokai 1y agoOnly thing I can find on this is an older post of yours. I don't think Mao said that. He worked in a library himself and the director at this library introduced him to Marxism. Marx was angry with bourgeoisie scholars though.
- metalman 1y agoThe quote was given to me by my uncle Kieth, who was the chief librarian in charge of periodicals at the main, central branch of the New York Public Library, long before the internet, there was more to the quote....in that the reason to kill the librarians, which they did a lot of durring the cultural revolution, was to eliminate those that understood the filing system, and was done as a part of the wholesale eliminating of discourse in western languages,philosophys, and systems. Dig a bit deeper, perhaps in chinese language books on Mao, but the quote does fit what was done. Edit. They kept the books though, and the card catolog of what is in.the Chinese national archives is rather astounding..
- seper8 1y agoOfcourse unrelated to Elon Musk's rejected Robotaxi trademark.
- pwdisswordfishz 1y agoIt amazes me how many people don't know the difference between trademarks and copyright.
- heinrich5991 1y agohttps://archive.is/x6cn9 https://archive.is/x6cn9
- throw0101d 1y agoSee perhaps "Trump Fires U.S. Copyright Chief Days After Landmark AI Report" * https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-fires-us-copyright-chief-days-after-landmark-ai-report/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-fires-us-copyright-chief... And "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 3: Generative AI Training" (PDF): * https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
- zombot 1y agoBut when White House BS is no longer copyrighted, everyone can just plagiarize Trump's lies... or have a synthetic Occupant Of The President's Chair that generates even more outrage for a fraction of the price. Won't that dilute Dear Leader's brand?
- xnx 1y agoNot sure the connection to the AI report is even necessary. Being a female librarian appointed by a black woman (just fired by Trump) appointed by Obama would've been enough to get her fired in this administration.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoWorks where archive.is is blocked, without Javascript or CSS: https://web.archive.org/web/20250511192206if_/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/11/white-house-copyright-office-director-fired/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250511192206if_/https://www.wa...