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Japan's largest paper, Yomiuri Shimbun, sues Perplexity for copyright violations
- aspenmayer 1y agoOriginal title edited for length: > Japan’s largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, sues AI startup Perplexity for copyright violations
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y agoBefore someone mentions Japan effectively making all data fair use for AI training, Japan specifically forbids direct recreation which is what this lawsuit is about.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoIf they are copying and pasting news articles on their site, that's a pretty straightforward copyright case I would think. In the US at least this should be pretty well covered by the case law on news aggregators.
- AraceliHarker 1y agoIt was the Yomiuri Shimbun, which boasts the world's largest circulation, that established the mass reproduction of not just article bodies, but even headlines, as a violation of copyright.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoThanks, I was aware of the distinction between article bodies and headlines for news aggregators, but I was not aware of Yomiuri Shimbun's role
- ronsor 1y agoI don't know why Perplexity in particular gets everyone in a nit. It's not even particularly special: a user inputs a query, an AI model does a web search and fetches some pages on the user's behalf, and then it serves the result to the user. Putting aside that other products, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and modern Google Search have the same "AI-powered web search" functionality, I can't see how this is meaningfully different from a user doing a web search and pasting a bunch of webpages into an LLM chat box. > But what about ad revenue? The user could be using an ad blocker. If they're using Perplexity at all, they probably already are. There's no requirement for a user agent to render ads. > But robots.txt!!!11 `robots.txt` is for recursive, fully automated requests. If a request is made on behalf of a user, through direct user interaction, then it may not be followed and IMO shouldn't be followed. If you really want to block a user agent, it's up to you to figure out how to serve a 403. > It's breaking copyright by reproducing my content! Yes, so does the user's browser. The purpose of a user agent is to fetch and display content how the user wants. The manner in which that is done is irrelevant.
- petesergeant 1y ago> I don't know why Perplexity in particular gets everyone in a nit I suspect they seem easier to sue than OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and literally anything coming out of china.
- jaredwiener 1y agoThere's a difference between what is technically feasible and what is allowed, legally or even morally. Just because it is possible -- or even easy -- to essentially steal from newspapers/other media outlets, doesn't make it right, or legal. The people behind it put in labor, financial resources, and time to create a product that, like almost every other service, has terms attached -- and those usually come with some form of monetization. Maybe it is a paywall, maybe it is advertisements -- but it is there. Using an adblocker, or finding some loophole around a paywall, etc, are all very easy to do technically, as any reader of this site knows. That said, the media outlet doesn't have to allow it. And when it is violated on an industrial scale, like Perplexity, then they can be understandably upset and take legal action. And that includes any AI (or other technology, for that matter) that is a wrapper around plagiarism. Sites opted in to Google originally because it fed them traffic. They most likely did not opt in to an AI rewriter that takes their work and republishes it without any compensation.
- Alex4386 1y agoWell, some bots even spoof User-Agents, requesting tons of requests without proper rate-limiting (looking at you, ByteSpider) No fair plays done by people, even before the LLMs, so we get the PoW challenge on everywhere. And what is that conclusion? since Adblockers are used by anywhere, it is OK to corporates not to license them directly and just yank them and put it into curation service? especially without ads? that's a licensing issue. the author allowed you to view the article if you provide them monetary support (i.e. ads), they didn't allow you to reproduce and republish the work by default. also calling browser itself as reproducing? Yes, the data might be copied in memory (but I wouldn't call it as reproducing material, more like transfer from the server to another), but redistribution is the main point here. It's like saying well, "the part of the variable is replicated to register from the L2 cache, so whole file on DRAM can be authorized to reproduce", Your point of calling "it's reproducing and should not be reproduced in first place" can't be prevented unless you bring non-turing computers that doesn't use active memory.
- daedrdev 1y agoJapan has extremely favorable copyright laws to the holders. My understanding is that without explicit permission, there is no fair use and so any reproduction or modified work is only allowed as long as they don't request a takedown.
- anticensor 1y agoJapanese copyright law still has a few statutory exceptions.
- beepbooptheory 1y agoFrom tfa: > Japan’s copyright law allows AI developers to train models on copyrighted material without permission. This leeway is a direct result of a 2018 amendment to Japan’s Copyright Act, meant to encourage AI development in the country’s tech sector. The law does not, however, allow for wholesale reproduction of those works, or for AI developers to distribute copies in a way that will “unreasonably prejudice the interests of the copyright owner.”
- Alex4386 1y agotl;dr: If you are not directly affecting the "sales" of the product, you are good to go. But It seems perplexity did, and (as they might call it) directly trying to compete as a news source Personally, About their news service, Their news summarization is kinda misleading with AI hallucination in some places.
- kazinator 1y agoTraining a model isn't redistribution; only when you give someone a copy of the model can we think about there being a problem. At that point, you are not training, but redistributing a derived work.
- stubish 1y agoI wonder if you can download the copyrighted material without permission though? The article specifically states 'the scraping has been used by Perplexity to reproduce the newspaper’s copyrighted articles in responses to user queries without authorization'. They don't seem to be complaining about the training (legal), but the scraping.
- totetsu 1y agoThe Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association is very active lobbying about this area https://www.pressnet.or.jp/english/ https://www.pressnet.or.jp/english/
- charcircuit 1y agoIt's best not to crawl Japanese newspapers. Japan does not have the same kind of fair use. Even reproducing facts from a newspaper can be infringing.
- Hamuko 1y agoMost of the world doesn't have fair use.
- pyrale 1y agoI suspect we'll see AI's claim to fair use be challenged even in the US. The claim to be transformative is mostly based on the "shape" of the information being delivered (i.e. the AI rephrases the information). However, the transformative nature of derivative work is not only about its apparence. It also factors in whether the transformation changes the nature of the message, and whether the derivative work is in direct competition with the original work [1]. I suspect for e.g. news articles, there's a good case that people get information that way instead of going to the newspaper, which means the derivative work competes with the original. Also when it comes to reporting news, there's not many ways to make the message different that doesn't make the AI service bad. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_the_Visual_Arts,_Inc._v._Goldsmith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_the...
- charcircuit 1y agoJapan does have fair use. https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html#chapter2sect3sub5 https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html#chapter2sect3sub...
- Hamuko 1y agoThat's not fair use.
- SilverElfin 1y agoI don’t understand why corporations can violate copyright laws at hyper scale but individuals are banned from small scale piracy through authoritarian internet governance.
- mlinhares 1y agoThe law only exists for those without enough money and influence to control the enforcers.
- wat10000 1y agoThey don’t even need control. It’s a version of the old saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars then you have a problem, but if you owe a billion dollars then the bank has a problem. If your company is important enough then it’s not possible (at least not politically) to punish it significantly. See also: 2008 and “too big to fail.”
- nradov 1y agoPerplexity is still a small startup. If Enron and Theranos could be published then Perplexity can be punished. So far it's unclear whether they've done anything illegal.
- wat10000 1y agoIt’s very difficult to punish Perplexity without also hitting OpenAI, Grok, Google, Facebook, etc. It’s plenty clear to me that they’ve broken copyright law a lot. They’ve downloaded copyrighted material without permission for their own use, which we’ve been assured is Not Good for us individual people. Some of them even redistributed it by seeding torrents, which is even more Not Good.
- nradov 1y agoIt only seems "plenty clear" to you because you're ignorant about the basics of copyright law in the USA and Japan. Fortunately we have actual courts to decide these issues. The applicable laws (including centuries of case law in the USA) are complex and whether particular actions are legal often depends on nuances that aren't covered in news articles.
- mattigames 1y agoI wish there was a open fund anyone could donate with the exclusive aim of suing Perplexity, OpenAI and others for copyright violations, where a team of lawyers would help the cases with the most likelihood to win, that would try to highlight that the way such systems are "learning" have little similitude to the intent of the law when it was written to give layaway for other artists/authors to create similar creations.
- miohtama 1y agoI wish there would be an open fund that allows me to do opposite and the fund would countersue copyright holders for holding development back and demanding excessive mafia payments
- bluefirebrand 1y agoPeople getting paid for the work they do is offensive to you?
- wand3r 1y agoI personally find this argument really lazy. In a very reductionist reframing, independent artists who uploaded some art to the internet for fun believe that AI shouldn't be allowed to exist without them being paid, essential alleging their contribution to AI is fundamental to it's existence. I would be a lot more receptive to the fact that all humans generally contributed to the information this system consumed and we enact some democratic law that 15% of all profits flow into some public tax fund, rather than litigate every single instance of potential copywrite on the per person or organizational level. There are obviously laws that differ in every region but at a philosophical level I believe in the ideal of fair use. An AI is a distinctly different "work" than these originals and much like a human's own output is informed by all the information they have taken in over their lifetime, so is the output of a model.
- sensanaty 1y agoIf these AIs can't exist without also gobbling up those artist's work, then yes? You can't have it both ways, either their artwork is worthless for the purposes of training an AI (in which case there should be no problem not hoovering up their art, right?) or it's worth something and they should be compensated for it.
- jongjong 1y agoIMO the legal system is in disarray due to extreme asymmetries in how the law is selectively applied. First of all, the way certain platforms get sued for certain activities while others are left alone is unfair and creates significant market distortions. Then there is the fact that wealthy individuals have much better legal representation than non-wealthy individuals. Then there are tax loopholes which create market asymmetries above that. The word 'fair' doesn't even make sense anymore. We've got to start asking; fair for who?
- freetime2 1y agoSo it sounds like they definitely scraped the content and used it for training, which is legal: > Japan’s copyright law allows AI developers to train models on copyrighted material without permission. This leeway is a direct result of a 2018 amendment to Japan’s Copyright Act, meant to encourage AI development in the country’s tech sector. The law does not, however, allow for wholesale reproduction of those works, or for AI developers to distribute copies in a way that will “unreasonably prejudice the interests of the copyright owner.” The article is almost completely lacking in details though about how the information was reproduced/distributed to the public. It could be a very cut-and-dry case where the model would serve up the entire article verbatim. Or it could be a much more nuanced case where the model will summarize portions of an article in its own words. I would need to read up on Japanese copyright law, as well as see specific examples of infringement, to be able to make any sort of conclusion. It seems like a lot of people are very quick to jump to conclusions in the absence of any details, though, which I find frustating.
- stubish 1y ago> So it sounds like they definitely scraped the content and used it for training, which is legal It certainly seems legal to train. But the case is about scraping without permission. Does downloading an article from a website, probably violating some small print user agreement in the process, count as distribution or reproduction? I guess the court will decide.
- incompatible 1y agoAccording to the article, they are complaining that the downloaded content had "been used by Perplexity to reproduce the newspaper’s copyrighted articles in responses to user queries." Derived works.
- staticautomatic 1y ago“Reproduce” in this context reads like “copy/republish”, which would not be a derivative work.
- Shaddox 1y agoThe fundamental problem is that everyone is expected to pitch in to help train these AIs, but only a handful of people benefit from it.
- lvl155 1y agoThis is what I call the Zuckerberg business model.
- ekianjo 1y ago> If quality news content, which underpins democracy, decreases, the public’s right to know may be hampered. quality news content has not been a thing for a long time now, so the public will not notice any change
- tjpnz 1y agoOff-topic: Yomiuri Shimbun operates its own theme park and it's an absolute delight, especially during winter months when there's a spectacular light show during the evenings. I prefer it to Tokyo Disneyland because there's plenty there to occupy young children but with reasonable waiting times. Give it a try on your next visit to Tokyo. I recommend arriving on the cablecar - almost feels like you're descending into Jurassic Park by helicopter (wife gets quite annoyed when I predictably start humming John Williams). https://www.yomiuriland.com/en/ https://www.yomiuriland.com/en/