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US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired
- andy99 1y agoTwo different issues that while apparently related need separate consideration. Re the copyright finding, does the US copyright office have standing to make such a determination? Presumably not since various claims about AI and copyright are before the courts. Why did they write this finding?
- kklisura 1y ago> The Office is releasing this pre-publication version of Part 3 in response to congressional inquiries and expressions of interest from stakeholders They acknowledge the issue is before courts: > These issues are the subject of intense debate. Dozens of lawsuits are pending in the United States, focusing on the application of copyright’s fair use doctrine. Legislators around the world have proposed or enacted laws regarding the use of copyrighted works in AI training, whether to remove barriers or impose restrictions Why did they write the finding: I assume it's because it's their responsibility: > Pursuant to the Register of Copyrights’ statutory responsibility to “[c]onduct studies” and “[a]dvise Congress on national and international issues relating to copyright,”... All excerpts are from 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...
- _heimdall 1y agoGiven that the issue at hand is related to potential misuse of copyright protected material, it seems totally reasonable for the copyright office to investigate and potentially act to reconcile the issue. Sure the courts may find its out of their jurisdiction, but they should act as they see fit and let the courts settle that later.
- bgwalter 1y agoThe US Supreme court has complained on multiple occasions that it is forced to do the work of the legislative. Why could a copyright office not advise the congress/senate to enact a law that forbids copyrighted material to be used in AI training? This is literally the politicians' job.
- 9283409232 1y agoPart of Congresses power is to defer that agencies it has created. Such as the US Copyright Office.
- megamix 1y ago[flagged]
- HenryBemis 1y agoTyrants & Kings were forced on us and we could only remove with at the cost of blood. Politicians, they try to crack as fewer eggs as possible, telling us they are our friends, and we believe them. Now then.. some do more good than bad, some do more bad than good. But on the other hand something that is _good for me_ is _bad for you_ and vice versa. Politicians are just the means to move the needle juuuuuuust a little bit, so show a change, but never make a drastic one. The cost of drastic changes is re-election. And this is the bread and butter of politicians (yes, I am over-over-simplifying but this is human history and a lot will be left out in a comment).
- seper8 1y ago(this is duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43960518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43960518)
- prvc 1y agoThe released draft report seems merely to be a litany of copyright holder complaints repeated verbatim, with little depth of reasoning to support the conclusions it makes.
- raverbashing 1y agoI don't have much spare sympathy here honestly
- bgwalter 1y agoThe required reasoning is not very deep though: If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism. If a savant has perfect recall, remembers text perfectly and rearranges that text to create a marginally new text, he'd be sued for breach of copyright. Only large corporations get away with it.
- scraptor 1y agoPlagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it. If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.
- ta1243 1y agoOnly when those papers are referenced
- dfxm12 1y agoPlease argue in good faith. A new research paper is obviously materially different from "rearranging that text to create a marginally new text".
- shkkmo 1y agoThe comment is responding to this line: > If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism. That is a specific claim that is being directly addressed and pretty clearly qualifies as "good faith".
- imafish 1y ago[flagged]
- j4kp07 1y ago[dead]
- achrono 1y agoIf anyone was skeptical of the US government being deeply entrenched with these companies in letting this blatant violation of the spirit of the law [1] continue, this should hopefully secure the conclusion. And for the future, here's one heuristic: if there is a profound violation of the law anywhere that (relatively speaking) is ignored or severely downplayed, it is likely that interested parties have arrived at an understanding. Or in other words, a conspiracy. [1] There are tons of legal arguments on both sides, but for me it is enough to ask: if this is not illegal and is totally fair use (maybe even because, oh no look at what China's doing, etc.), why did they have to resort to & foster piracy in order to obtain this?
- whycome 1y agoWhat’s your reading of the spirit of the law?
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> If anyone was skeptical of the US government being deeply entrenched with these companies in letting this blatant violation of the spirit of the law [1] continue, this should hopefully secure the conclusion. European here, but why do you think this is so clear cut? There are other jurisdictions where training on copyrighted data has already been allowed by law/caselaw (Germany and Japan). Why do you need a conspiracy in the US? AFAICT the US copyright law deals with direct reproductions of a copyrighted piece of content (and also carves out some leeway with direct reproduction, like fair use). I think we can all agree by now that LLMs don't fully reproduce "letter perfect" content, right? What then is the "spirit" of the law that you think was broken here? Isn't this the definition of "transformative work"? Of note is also the other big case involving books - the one where google was allowed to process mountains of books, they were sued and allowed to continue. How is scanning & indexing tons of books different than scanning & "training" an LLM?
- AlotOfReading 1y agoGoogle asserted fair use in that case, which is an admission of (allowed) copyright infringement. They didn't turn books into a "new form", they provided limited excerpts that couldn't replace the original usage and directly incentivized purchases through normal sales channels while also providing new functionality. Contrast that with AI companies: They don't necessarily want to assert fair use, the results aren't necessarily publicly accessible, the work used isn't cited, users aren't directed to typical sales channels, and many common usages do meaningfully reduce the market for the original content (e.g. AI summaries for paywalled pages). It's not obvious to me as a non-lawyer that these situations are analogous, even if there's some superficial similarity.
- codr7 1y ago[flagged]
- brador 1y agoLifetime for human copyright, 20 years for corporate copyright. That’s the golden zone.
- Zambyte 1y agoZero (0) years for corporate copyright, zero (0) years for human copyright is the golden zone in my book.
- School-Cotton 1y agoWhy?
- Zambyte 1y agoIt took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-post-copyright.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoThe first article is saying that "Copyright is bad because of corporations", and I can kind of get behind that, especially the very long term copyrights that have lost the intent, but the second article says that artists will be happier without copyright if we just solve capitalism first. I don't know about you, but that reads to me like "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.
- Zambyte 1y ago
- tempeler 1y agoI think, A new chapter is about to begin. It seems that in the future, many IPs will become democratized — in other words, they will become public assets.
- ahmeni 1y agoIf only there was some sort of term for fake democracy where you're actually just there to plunder resources.
- gadders 1y agoCongress? https://www.capitoltrades.com/ https://www.capitoltrades.com/
- tempeler 1y agoThis idea does not belong to me. If lawmakers and regulators allow companies to use these IPs, how can you keep ordinary people away from them? Something created by AI is regarded as if it was created from scratch by human hands. that's reality.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- AlexandrB 1y agoPublic assets as long as you pay your monthly ChatGPT bill.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago"Democratized" as in large corporations are free to ingest the IPs and then reinterpret and censor them before they feed their version back to us, with us never having free access to the original source?
- rurban 1y ago"Democratized" in the meaning of fascistoized, right? Laws do not apply to the cartels, military, executive and secret services.
- throw0101c 1y agoSee "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...
- thomastjeffery 1y ago> The remarks about Musk may refer to the billionaire’s recent endorsement of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s desire to “Delete all IP law"... Yes please. Delete it for everyone, not just these ridiculous autocrats. It's only helping them in the first place!
- mattxxx 1y agoWell, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against. When I look at the litany of derivative fantasy novels, it's obvious they're not all fully independent works. Since AI is and will continue to be so useful and transformative, I think we just need to acknowledge that our laws did not accomodate this use-case, then we should change them.
- madeofpalk 1y ago> Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against Humans get litigated against this all the time. There is such thing as, charitably, being too inspired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagiarism_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagi...
- jrajav 1y agoIf you follow these cases more closely over time you'll find that they're less an example of humans stealing work from others and more an example of typical human greed and pride. Old, well established musicians arguing that younger musicians stole from them for using a chord progression used in dozens of songs before their own original, or a melody on the pentatonic scale that sounds like many melodies on the pentatonic scale do. It gets ridiculous. Plus, all art is derivative in some sense, it's almost always just a matter of degree.
- FireBeyond 1y agoTo the point that Billy Joel "famously" credited the songwriter for one of his songs ("This Night") as "Billy Joel, Ludwig van Beethoven".
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
- evanjrowley 1y agoIf AI companies in the US are penalized for this, then the effect on copyright holders will only be slowed until foriegn AI companies overtake them. In such cases the legal recourse will be much slower and significantly limited.
- mitthrowaway2 1y agoAccess to copyrighted materials might make for slightly better-trained models the way that access to more powerful GPUs does. But I don't think it will accelerate foundational advances in the underlying technology. If anything, maybe having to compete under tight constraints means AI companies will have to innovate more, rather than merely push scale.
- int_19h 1y agoThe problem is that regardless of any innovations, scale still matters. If you figure out the technique to, say, make a model that is significantly better given N parameters - where N is just large enough to be the perfect fit for the amount of training data that you have access to - then someone else with access to more data will use the same technique to make a model with >N parameters, and it will be better than yours.
- mr_toad 1y agoBut AI is mostly scale and only a little bit innovation. It’s undergraduate maths and a whole lot of computing power and data. Not being able to train on data on the internet would be a significant handicap.
- anigbrowl 1y agoGee, perhaps we should not have done this in the first place. 'Foreigners might copy the irresponsible thing we did so we have do more of it' is not the most brilliant argument.
- internet_rand0 1y agocopyright is long overdue for a total rework the internet demands it. the people demand free mega upload for everybody, why? because we can (we seem to NOT want to, but that should be a politically solvable problem)
- renewiltord 1y agoI wonder when general internet sentiment moved from pro-piracy to IP maximalism. Fascinating shift.
- ronsor 1y agoAI has made people lose their minds and principles. It's fascinating to observe. In the meantime, I will continue to dislike copyright regardless of the parties involved.
- LexiMax 1y agoI think most people have lost their minds over the hypocrisy. For decades people have been raked over the coals for piracy, but now suddenly piracy is okay if your name is Facebook and you're building an AI model. Either force AI companies to compensate the artists they're being "inspired" by, or let people torrent a copywashed Toy Story 5.
- throwaway1854 1y agoApples and oranges - and also I don't know if anyone is really supporting IP maximalism. IP maximalism is requiring DRM tech in every computer and media-capable device that won't play anything without checking into a central server and also making it illegal to reverse or break that DRM. IP maximalism is extending the current bonkers time interval of copyright (over 100 years) to forever. If AI concerns manage to get this down to a reasonable, modern timeframe it'll be awesome. Record companies in the 90s tied the noose around their own necks, which is just as well because they're very useless now except for supporting geriatric bands. They should have started selling mp3s for 99 cents in 1997 and maybe they would have made a couple of dollars before their slide into irrelevance. The specific thing people don't want, which a few weirdos keep pushing, is AI-generated stuff passed off as new creative material. It's fine for fun and games, but no one wants a streaming service of AI-generated music, even if you can't tell it's AI generated. And the minute you think you have that cracked - that an AI can create music/art as good as a human and that humans can't tell, the humans will start making bad music/art in rebellion, and it'll be the cool new thing, and the armies of 10Kw GPUs will be wasting their energy on stuff an 1Mhz 8-bit machine could do in the 80s.
- aurizon 1y agoNed Ludd heirs at last win - High Court rules the spinning Jenny IS ILLEGAL!. All machine made cloth and machines must be destroyed. This is the end of the road for all mechanical ways to make cloth. Get naked, boys 'n girls = this will be fun!
- sophrocyne 1y agoThe USCO report was flawed, biased, and hypocritical. A pre-publication of this sort is also extremely unusual. https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/05/12/opinion-why-the-copyright-offices-pre-publication-report-is-flawed-both-procedurally-and-substantively/ https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/05/12/opinion-why-t...
- ceejayoz 1y agoWhat in https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/about/ https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/about/ says "ah, yes, trustworthy unbiased analysis" to you? Why should I trust this source's opinion? Pre-publication reports aren't unusual. https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/current https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/current https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/using-federalregister-gov/understanding-public-inspection https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/using-federalreg... > The Federal Register Act requires that the Office of the Federal Register (we) file documents for public inspection at our office in Washington, DC at least one business day before publication in the Federal Register.
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43960518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43960518
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoEarlier on the report pdf: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43955025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43955025
- Workaccount2 1y agoI have yet to see someone explain in detail how transformer model training works (showing they understand the technical nitty gritty and the overall architecture of transformers) and also layout a case for why it is clearly a violation of copyright. You can find lots of people talking about training, and you can find lots (way more) of people talking about AI training being a violation of copyright, but you can't find anyone talking about both. Edit: Let me just clarify that I am talking about training, not inference (output).
- anhner 1y agobecause people who understand how training works also understand that it's not a violation of copyright...
- autobodie 1y agoI have yet to see someone explain in detail how writing the same words as another person works (showing they understand the technical nitty gritty and the overall architecture of the human mind) and also layout a case for why it is clearly a violation of copyright. You can find lots of people talking about reading, and you can find lots (way more) of people talking about plagarism being a violation of copyright, but you can't find anyone talking about both.
- xhkkffbf 1y agoA big part of copyright law is protecting the market for the original creator. Not guaranteeing them anything. Just preventing someone else from coming along and copying someone else's work in a way that hurts their sales. While AIs don't reproduce things verbatim like pirates, I can see how they really undermine the market, especially for non-fiction books. If people can get the facts without buying the original book, there's much less incentive for the original author to do the hard research and writing.
- jsiepkes 1y agoThis isn't about training AI on a book, but AI companies never paying for the book at all. As in: They "downloaded the e-book from a warez site" and then used it for training.
- stevetron 1y agoIt's amazing the amount of bad deeds coming out of the current administration in support of special interests.
- hatenberg 1y agoBig Tech: We shouldn’t pay, each individual piece of content is worth basically nothing. Also Big Tech: We added 300.000.000 users worth of GTM because we trained in the 10 specific anime movies of Studio Ghibli and are selling their style.
- Aerroon 1y agoThe funny thing is that style is not copyrightable.
- _trampeltier 1y agoExept it's a rectangle with 4 rounded corner.
- mr_toad 1y agoPatents are not the same thing as copyright.
- nickpsecurity 1y ago"Pretraining data us worth basically nothing." (Raises $10 billion based on estimated worth of the resulting models.) "We can't share the GPT4 prettaining data or weights because they're trade secrets that generate over a billion in revenue for us." I'll believe they're worth nothing when (a) nobody is buying AI models or (b) AI companies stop using the copyrighted works to train models they sell. So far, it looks like they're lying about the worth of the training data.
- jagermo 1y agoman, if we just had some napster fanboy in the oval office back then. Lot's of laws would not exist.
- stevetron 1y ago[flagged]
- elif 1y agoIntellectual property law is quickly becoming an institution of hegemonic corporate litigation of the spreading of ideas. If it's illegal to know the entire contents of a book it is arbitrary to what degree you are able to codify that knowing itself into symbols. If judges are permitted to rule here it is not about reproduction of commercial goods but about control of humanity's collective understanding.
- jhaile 1y agoOne aspect that I feel is ignored by the comments here is the geo-political forces at work. If the US takes the position that LLMs can't use copyrighted work or has to compensate all copyright holders – other countries (e.g. China) will not follow suit. This will mean that US LLM companies will either fall behind or be too expensive. Which means China and other countries will probably surge ahead in AI, at least in terms of how useful the AI is. That is not to say that we shouldn't do the right thing regardless, but I do think there is a feeling of "who is going to rule the world in the future?" tha underlies governmental decision-making on how much to regulate AI.
- bgwalter 1y agoThe same president that is putting 145% tariffs on China could put 1000% tariffs on Internet chat bots located in China. Or order the Internet cables to be cut as a last resort (citing a national emergency as is the new practice). I'm not sure at all what China will do. I find it likely that they'll forbid AI at least for minors so that they do not become less intelligent. Military applications are another matter that are not really related to these copyright issues.
- Molitor5901 1y agoRepresentative Joe Morelle (D-NY), wrote the termination was “…surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.” Interesting, but everyone is mining copyrighted works to train AI models.
- wnevets 1y ago> Minnesota woman to pay $220,000 fine for 24 illegally downloaded songs [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota-woman-songs-illegally-downloaded https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/11/minnesota... [1]
- gruez 1y agoHow is this relevant? >The RIAA accused her of downloading and distributing more than 1,700 music files on file-sharing site KaZaA Emphasis mine. I think most people would agree that whatever AI companies are doing with training AI models is different than sending verbatim copies to random people on the internet.
- wnevets 1y ago> I think most people would agree that whatever AI companies are doing with training AI models is different than sending verbatim copies to random people on the internet. I think most artist who had their works "trained by AI" without compensation would disagree with you.
- EMIRELADERO 1y agoThe question is: would that disagreement have the same basis as the news above? I don't think so. Artists that are against GenAI take that stance out of a perceived abstract unfairness of the situation, where the AI companies aren't copy-pasting the works per-se with each generation, but rather "taking" the "sweat of the brow" of those artists. You can agree or not about this being an actual problem, but that's where the main claim is.
- wnevets 1y ago> would that disagreement have the same basis as the news above? Yes. An artist's style can and sometimes is their IP.
- 1y ago
- anigbrowl 1y agoOh boy, right again https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43940763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43940763
- KoolKat23 1y ago"But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries." I honestly can't see how this directly addresses fair use, it's a odd sweeping statement. It implies inventing something that borrows little from many different copyrighted items is somehow not fair use? If it was one for one yes, but it's not it's basically saying creativity is not fair use. If it's not saying this and refers to competition in the existing market they're making a statement about the public good, not fair use. Basically a matter for legislators and what the purpose of copyright is.
- Popeyes 1y agoMaybe we should review copyright and the length of it.