3 ms·
> the whole thing being built on copyright infringement I am not a lawyer, but am generally familiar with two "is it fair use" tests. 1. Is it transformative?
by buredoranna 5mo ago
> the whole thing being built on copyright infringement
I am not a lawyer, but am generally familiar with two "is it fair use" tests.
1. Is it transformative?
I take a picture, I own the copyright. You can't sell it. But if you take a copy, and literally chop it to pieces, reforming it into a collage, you can sell that.
2. Does the alleged infringing work devalue the original?
If I have a conversation with ai about "The Lord of the Rings". Even if it reproduces good chunks of the original, it does not devalue the original... in fact, I would argue, it enhances it.
Have I failed to take into account additional arguments and/or scenarios? Probably.
But, in my opinion, AI passes these tests. AI output is transformative, and in general, does not devalue the original.
- jjwiseman 5mo agoAnd in Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that Anthropic training their LLMs on books was "highly transformative."
- taikahessu 5mo agoIn order for LLM to be useful, you need to copy and steal all of the work. Yes, you can argue you don't need the whole work, but that's what they took and feed it in. And they are making money off of other people's work. Sure, you can use mental jiujutsu to make it fair use. But fair use for LLMs means you basically copy the whole thing. All of it. It sounds more like a total use to me. I hope the free market and technology catches up and destroys the VC backed machinery. But only time will tell.
- ragequittah 5mo agoI always wonder if anyone out there thinks they're not making money off of other people's work. If you're coding, writing a fantasy novel, taking a photograph or drawing a picture from first principals you came up with yourself I applaud you though.
- taikahessu 5mo agoYou are absolutely right. Seriously though, I do think that is the case. It would be self-righteous to argue otherwise. It's just the scale and the nature of this, that makes it so repulsive. For my taste, copying something without permission, is stealing. I don't care what a judge somewhere thinks of it. Using someone's good will for profit is disgusting. And I hope we all get to profit from it someday, not just a select few. But that is just my opinion.
- IcyWindows 5mo agoThis kind of thinking seems like a road for people to have to pay a license for the rest of their life after going to school for the knowledge they "stole" from their textbooks.
- taikahessu 5mo agoExcept the school paid royalties for that specific book. Every book. The money was distributed. Writers, publishers and so on. The normal stuff. Or if you had to buy the book yourself, same thing, distributed, royalties paid.
- IcyWindows 5mo agoSo your complaint is that they didn't pay for training data by buying every book found online? That does seem more reasonable, but makes public libraries also evil.
- taikahessu 5mo agoExcept the libraries pay the fees of the books, they only serve a dedicated local region of people and by loaning a book, you will know the author of the book. For LLMs the transformative part is then removing the copyright info and serving it to you as OpenAI whatever. Sure, you can query multiple books at the same time and the technology is godlike. But the underlying issue remains. Without the original content, the LLM is useless. Someone took all the books, feed them in and didn't pay anything back to the authors. I'm not sure whether arguing in good faith here. This information you could easily check for yourself too. The problem is not the information itself. It's the massive machinery that steals all the works and one day we are staring at the paywall. And the artists are still not funded. I'd rather just do something nice offline in the future.
- idiotsecant 5mo agoThis is a tiresome and well trod road. The fact of the matter is that for profit corporations consumed the sum knowledge of mankind with the intent to make money on it by encoding it into a larger and better organized corpus of knowledge. They cited no sources and paid no fees (to any regular humans, at least). They are making enormous sums of money (and burning even more, ironically) doing this. If that doesn't violate copyright, it violates some basic principle of decency.
- michaelmrose 5mo agoYou are assuming intellectual property has intrinsic basis when it's at best functional not foundational. It's only useful if the net value to society is positive which is extremely dubious.
- idiotsecant 5mo agoI'm assuming human creativity has intrinsic value, or what's the point of being human?
- michaelmrose 5mo agoYou are assuming that somehow human creativity was born with intellectual property and will somehow die with it. It's just not so.
- idiotsecant 5mo agoOk captain pedant, instead of making vague handwavey negations exclusively how about you say something.
- michaelmrose 5mo agoIntellectual property is supposed to feed creativity by securing for creators exclusive rights to benefit from their creation. It mostly feeds uncreative leaches whose business it is to own things in exchange for crumbs for the creativity and drags down both the inherent enjoyment of the fruits of creativity and even its creation. It belonged in the bin back when we first thought of it as is only going to be more unfit for purpose as time goes on.
- Madmallard 5mo agoWhat in the mental gymnastics? They just stole everyone's hard work over decades to make this or it wouldn't have been useful at all.
- NewsaHackO 5mo agoThat's a statement. The comment you are replying to had actual reasoning behind his claim. Do you have any actual reasoning behind yours?
- Madmallard 5mo agoLet's not ignore the entirety of reality and what has been going on for the last few years to defend a pestilence on mankind you probably have stock invested in. I'm not going to acknowledge how insane of an argument that is you're making. It's like you heard of zero leaks, zero law suits, zero open source complaints. Zero anything. Just either intentionally or unintentionally astroturfing. Thanks.
- verve_rat 5mo agoThe US is not the only legal jurisdiction these services are being sold in.