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Yeah, I don't think downloading my paid-for books, from an illegal sharing site, to scrape and make use of, is in any way fair use. From the decision in 1841,
by shakna 1y ago
Yeah, I don't think downloading my paid-for books, from an illegal sharing site, to scrape and make use of, is in any way fair use.
From the decision in 1841, in the US (Folsom vs Marsh):
> reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticize, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy
Further, to be "transformative", it is required that the new work is for a new purpose. It has to be done in such a way that it basically is not competing with the original at all.
Using my creative works, to create creative works, is rather clearly an act of piracy. And the methods engaged, to enable to do so, are also clearly piracy.
Where would training a model here, possibly be fair use?
- soulofmischief 1y agoArt is highly derivative for the most part, and artists are constantly learning from each other. The jury's out whether this applies to machines. Training an LLM on data is not the same as copying it. As such, the case right now against Meta is wholly focused on the acquisition part and not the training itself.
- shakna 1y agoMeta's AI will quote some of my books in whole. So, yeah. That's copying.
- soulofmischief 1y agoWe must separate the act of training from the act of distribution (which could include filtering). Training and personal use seems well within the scope of fair use. I do however understand why you would be upset if Meta or OpenAI hosts/distributes a model that could fully reproduce your books (assuming that is really the case) and make money providing that information. That said, and I'm not trying to move goalposts here, I just don't personally find Meta in particular to be morally at fault, as I already have particular views on the freedom for myself and others to share information with each other that may be incompatible with your views (and to be clear, as an artist and open source engineer I do have an informed personal opinion on this matter, I have deeply considered and continue to reconsider the balance of freedoms required for artists to make a living off their craft without infringing upon what I see as inalienable personal freedoms). Meta released their models publicly and freely after investing a lot of time and money into them, and I see it as a net good for humanity to have access to these incredible neural networks that were relegated to science fiction just a few years ago. I also think LLMs are going to force us to rethink our entire approach to copyright. Whether that means abandoning our current notions of copyright entirely, or creating residuals for hosted commercial LLMs, or something else, I don't know.