7 ms·

Funny how the copyright industry was able to spin copyright infringment into the pejorative "stealing". If you still have the item, what was stolen? Dowling v

by nadermx 6mo ago

Funny how the copyright industry was able to spin copyright infringment into the pejorative "stealing". If you still have the item, what was stolen? Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act

themafia 6mo ago
[dead]
Neywiny 6mo ago
I don't think it's unreasonable to consider it stolen potential profit, but agreed that's not how they spin it
tensor 6mo ago
I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.
- estimator7292 6mo ago
  Learning, probably not. Copy/pasting at scale, yes
  - vorticalbox 6mo ago
    It is learning though. It’s not just copying the code. Code gets turned into tokens and then it learns the next most likely token. The issue that I see most people talk about it the scale at which is learnt. A human will learn from other people’s code but not from every persons code.
    - cogman10 6mo ago
      The issue is that of copyright law WRT to derivative works. Machine transformations on original works does not create a new copyright for the person that directed the machine transformation. That's why you can't pirate a bunch of media by simply adding a red pixel to the righthand corner or by color shifting the video. Copyright law is very clear that if a machine does it, the original copyright on the input is kept. This is why your distributed binaries are still copyrighted, because the machine transformed, very significantly, the source code into binary which maintains the copyright throughout. It would be inconsistent for the courts to suddenly decide that "actually, this specific type of machine transformation is actually innovative." I know this is generally really bad for the AI industry, so they just ignore it until a court tells them they can't anymore. And they might get away with it as I don't have faith that the courts will be consistent.
      - red75prime 6mo ago
        Shredding is a machine transformation. Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored and the provenance can't be traced? Just an example that treating all machine transformations equally with no regard to the specifics doesn't make much sense. And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights.
        cogman10 6mo ago
        > Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored? Yup, it absolutely does. In fact, that's why you are still violating copyright law by using bittorrent even though each of the users is only giving out a small slice or shred of the original content. The US has a granted defense in the case of something like shredding called "Fair Use" but that doesn't mean or imply that a copyright is void simply because of a fair use claim. > And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. That doesn't matter. Why would it? If I take a FLAC recording and change it to an MP3. The fact that it was a lossy transform doesn't suddenly give me the legal right to distribute the MP3. > Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights. That's what the NYT v. OpenAI lawsuit is all about. And for earlier models they could, in fact, pull out full NYT articles which proved they made it into the final weights. Further, the NYT is currently in discovery which means OpenAI must open up to the NYT what goes into their weights. A move that, if OpenAI loses, other litigants can also use because there's a real good shot that OpenAI also included their works in the dataset.
    - blks 6mo ago
      A human is not a commercial product. Here we have commercial product that was created by using a lot of various copyrighted and protected IP, without licensing agreements, without paying, without even citing it.
    - ell1e 5mo ago
      LLMs seem to be so devoid of intelligence, I think it's arguable if that's learning: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think... Typically, you would imply a level of understanding when you say learning. LLMs apparently can't do that, by design.
  - margalabargala 6mo ago
    Copy/pasting at scale is how tons of software has been written for a long time, or have we all forgotten the jokes people used to make about StackOverflow?
- pydry 6mo ago
  If you can set a copyright trap and an LLM reproduces it I think it's pretty clear cut that it's more than just "learning". I have seen LLMs do all sorts of crap which was clearly reproduction of training material. This is also why people are most impressed with how much better it is at reproducing boilerplate rather than, say, imaginative new ideas.
  - jakeydus 6mo ago
    Remember last year (?) when one of the major AIs produced a bit of code that included Jeff Geerling's name in a comment?
- lo_zamoyski 6mo ago
  If there were the case, then imagine having to give it back!
- boh 6mo ago
  Yes I guess there's also no such thing as stealing in torrents since the computer "learns" the data and returns it in a transcoded fashion so it's technically not a reproduction. Yes LLMs can reproduce passages from copyrighted works verbatim but that's only because it "learned" it and it's just telling you what it "knows". The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.
  - idle_zealot 6mo ago
    > The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting. It's only exhausting if you think copyright ever reasonably settled the matter of ownership of knowledge and want to morally justify an incoherent set of outcomes that they personally favor. In practice it's primarily been a tool for the powerful party in any dispute to hammer others for disrupting their business model. I think that's pretty much the only way attempting to apply ownership semantics to knowledge or information can end up.
    - balamatom 5mo ago
      Correct. Knowledge consists of, roughly speaking, thoughts. (a "justified true belief" - per https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/ - is a kind of thought) The "thinking" part of a "thinking being" - that also consists of thoughts. If your knowledges are someone's property, you are someone's property. A society where all knowledge is proprietary, is a society of ubiquitous slavery. Maybe multi-layered, maybe fractional, maybe with a smiley-face drawn on top. Doesn't matter.
  - spankalee 5mo ago
    Humans have been known to recite entire parts from plays from memory, live in front of audiences even.
    - leni536 5mo ago
      And they are legally required to license the play to do that, if it's still in copyright.
- nkrisc 6mo ago
  I find it more ridiculous to equate the act of a human learning with for-profit AI training without recompense to the authors of the training material.
- MagicMoonlight 6mo ago
  If I “learned” your essay and handed it in, would you be happy with that?
- array_key_first 6mo ago
  The "learning" isn't learning really. I mean it might be, but if you define learning to be a human endeavor than AI can't learn. It's perfectly reasonable to say it's okay for humans to do something but not okay for a computer program to do the same thing. We don't have to equate AI to humans, that's a choice and usually a bad one.
  - aeon_ai 5mo ago
    If one defines 'flying' to be a bird's endeavor, then humans can't fly. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to catch a metal shuttle that chucks itself through the air on wings.
    - greendestiny 5mo ago
      Sure as a word it can be broad, as a concept in our legal system that should be much more nuanced. The relevant extension of your analogy is should birds be required to obey FAA rules? Or should plane factories be protected as nesting sites?
      - nadermx 5mo ago
        Relevant: https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/swiss-company-builds-airport-in-bird-sanctuary-2790388.html https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/swiss-company-builds-airport-...
      - Dylan16807 5mo ago
        It's a relevant extension if you think the ability to learn from a work is a right people have that exempts them from the more general lockdown copyright would impose. If you come at it from the view of copyright being a limited set of control over some areas but not others, then if copyright doesn't block human learning it shouldn't affect anything similar either, unless a specific rule is added to make those situations be handled differently.
  - tensor 5mo ago
    It's also perfectly reasonable to say it's ok for a program or machine to do the same thing as a human. This has been the basis for the technological revolution since the dawn of technology.
- greendestiny 5mo ago
  I think that it's absurd that we've jumped to the conclusion backpropagation in neural networks should be legally treated the same as human learning. I mean I don't think think I could find a better description for following the derivatives of error in reproducing a set of works as creating a "derivative work".
  - alok-g 5mo ago
    >> ... we've jumped to the conclusion backpropagation in neural networks should be legally treated the same as human learning. I agree. However, the reverse is also likely true, i.e., it cannot currently be denied that learning in humans is different from learning in artificial neural networks from the point of view of production of works that mix ideas/memes from several works processed/read. Surely, as the article says, copyright law talks exclusively about humans, not machines, not animals.
    - greendestiny 5mo ago
      I understand the article - the point about 'learning' is that if the model and its outputs are a derivative works then the copyright belongs to the human creators of the works it was trained on. Edit*: Or perhaps put more pseudo legally that the created works infringe on the copyrights of the original human creators.
      - alok-g 5mo ago
        The part I agree to is that copyright law calls out humans specifically as the potential owners of copyright. So what you suggest seems to be the only possibility out. Calling out humans could imply that when a human reads a thousand books and then writes something basis the same but which is not a substantial copy of anything explicitly read, that human owns the copyright to the text written. Whereas, if an artificial neural network does the same (hypothetically writing the same text), it would not. The above does not follow from, imply or conclude anything about learning in artificial neural networks and humans being similar or dissimilar.
- charonn0 5mo ago
  Is "learning" the correct term? Or is it "plagiarism"?
- pessimizer 5mo ago
  "Learning" for LLMs is just as goofy and propagandistic a metaphor as "stealing" for copyright. I find it predictive of your position that you'll accept one dumb metaphor for something that we didn't need a metaphor for, but not the other. Are you for stealing and against learning? We know exactly what is happening in both cases. We can talk about that, or we can use obfuscating euphemisms that make our preferred position seem obviously true.
thesmtsolver2 6mo ago
[dead]
blks 6mo ago
“Stolen” as in “profited on IP against terms and conditions of the license”.
NewsaHackO 5mo ago
Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.
- jeppester 5mo ago
  A more logical explanation would be that there are different opinions and those who complain are usually louder.
  - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
    Yes, that's my point. They are different and contradictory opinions, which show hypocrisy.
    - inexcf 5mo ago
      No it is not your point. You're just arguing about a strawman that holds both of those contradictory positions.
      - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
        You are attempting to invoke strawman. So is your point that there is not a significant overlap between posters who think that AI companies should not be allowed to pirated use copyrighted material in their training corpus and posters who themselves pirated copyrighted material such as movies, music, games, etc.?
        Dylan16807 5mo ago
        Yes, that is their point. Do you have evidence against it? I'm sure you can find some overlap, but I bet the vast majority is caused by people making a distinction between commercial and noncommercial piracy. I don't think there's a big cohort of piracy hypocrites.

by nadermx 6mo ago

themafia 6mo ago

[dead]

Neywiny 6mo ago

I don't think it's unreasonable to consider it stolen potential profit, but agreed that's not how they spin it

tensor 6mo ago

I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.

estimator7292 6mo ago
Learning, probably not. Copy/pasting at scale, yes
- vorticalbox 6mo ago
  It is learning though. It’s not just copying the code. Code gets turned into tokens and then it learns the next most likely token. The issue that I see most people talk about it the scale at which is learnt. A human will learn from other people’s code but not from every persons code.
  - cogman10 6mo ago
    The issue is that of copyright law WRT to derivative works. Machine transformations on original works does not create a new copyright for the person that directed the machine transformation. That's why you can't pirate a bunch of media by simply adding a red pixel to the righthand corner or by color shifting the video. Copyright law is very clear that if a machine does it, the original copyright on the input is kept. This is why your distributed binaries are still copyrighted, because the machine transformed, very significantly, the source code into binary which maintains the copyright throughout. It would be inconsistent for the courts to suddenly decide that "actually, this specific type of machine transformation is actually innovative." I know this is generally really bad for the AI industry, so they just ignore it until a court tells them they can't anymore. And they might get away with it as I don't have faith that the courts will be consistent.
    - red75prime 6mo ago
      Shredding is a machine transformation. Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored and the provenance can't be traced? Just an example that treating all machine transformations equally with no regard to the specifics doesn't make much sense. And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights.
      - cogman10 6mo ago
        > Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored? Yup, it absolutely does. In fact, that's why you are still violating copyright law by using bittorrent even though each of the users is only giving out a small slice or shred of the original content. The US has a granted defense in the case of something like shredding called "Fair Use" but that doesn't mean or imply that a copyright is void simply because of a fair use claim. > And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. That doesn't matter. Why would it? If I take a FLAC recording and change it to an MP3. The fact that it was a lossy transform doesn't suddenly give me the legal right to distribute the MP3. > Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights. That's what the NYT v. OpenAI lawsuit is all about. And for earlier models they could, in fact, pull out full NYT articles which proved they made it into the final weights. Further, the NYT is currently in discovery which means OpenAI must open up to the NYT what goes into their weights. A move that, if OpenAI loses, other litigants can also use because there's a real good shot that OpenAI also included their works in the dataset.
  - blks 6mo ago
    A human is not a commercial product. Here we have commercial product that was created by using a lot of various copyrighted and protected IP, without licensing agreements, without paying, without even citing it.
  - ell1e 5mo ago
    LLMs seem to be so devoid of intelligence, I think it's arguable if that's learning: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think... Typically, you would imply a level of understanding when you say learning. LLMs apparently can't do that, by design.
- margalabargala 6mo ago
  Copy/pasting at scale is how tons of software has been written for a long time, or have we all forgotten the jokes people used to make about StackOverflow?
pydry 6mo ago
If you can set a copyright trap and an LLM reproduces it I think it's pretty clear cut that it's more than just "learning". I have seen LLMs do all sorts of crap which was clearly reproduction of training material. This is also why people are most impressed with how much better it is at reproducing boilerplate rather than, say, imaginative new ideas.
- jakeydus 6mo ago
  Remember last year (?) when one of the major AIs produced a bit of code that included Jeff Geerling's name in a comment?
lo_zamoyski 6mo ago
If there were the case, then imagine having to give it back!
boh 6mo ago
Yes I guess there's also no such thing as stealing in torrents since the computer "learns" the data and returns it in a transcoded fashion so it's technically not a reproduction. Yes LLMs can reproduce passages from copyrighted works verbatim but that's only because it "learned" it and it's just telling you what it "knows". The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.
- idle_zealot 6mo ago
  > The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting. It's only exhausting if you think copyright ever reasonably settled the matter of ownership of knowledge and want to morally justify an incoherent set of outcomes that they personally favor. In practice it's primarily been a tool for the powerful party in any dispute to hammer others for disrupting their business model. I think that's pretty much the only way attempting to apply ownership semantics to knowledge or information can end up.
  - balamatom 5mo ago
    Correct. Knowledge consists of, roughly speaking, thoughts. (a "justified true belief" - per https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/ - is a kind of thought) The "thinking" part of a "thinking being" - that also consists of thoughts. If your knowledges are someone's property, you are someone's property. A society where all knowledge is proprietary, is a society of ubiquitous slavery. Maybe multi-layered, maybe fractional, maybe with a smiley-face drawn on top. Doesn't matter.
- spankalee 5mo ago
  Humans have been known to recite entire parts from plays from memory, live in front of audiences even.
  - leni536 5mo ago
    And they are legally required to license the play to do that, if it's still in copyright.
nkrisc 6mo ago
I find it more ridiculous to equate the act of a human learning with for-profit AI training without recompense to the authors of the training material.
MagicMoonlight 6mo ago
If I “learned” your essay and handed it in, would you be happy with that?
array_key_first 6mo ago
The "learning" isn't learning really. I mean it might be, but if you define learning to be a human endeavor than AI can't learn. It's perfectly reasonable to say it's okay for humans to do something but not okay for a computer program to do the same thing. We don't have to equate AI to humans, that's a choice and usually a bad one.
- aeon_ai 5mo ago
  If one defines 'flying' to be a bird's endeavor, then humans can't fly. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to catch a metal shuttle that chucks itself through the air on wings.
  - greendestiny 5mo ago
    Sure as a word it can be broad, as a concept in our legal system that should be much more nuanced. The relevant extension of your analogy is should birds be required to obey FAA rules? Or should plane factories be protected as nesting sites?
    - nadermx 5mo ago
      Relevant: https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/swiss-company-builds-airport-in-bird-sanctuary-2790388.html https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/swiss-company-builds-airport-...
    - Dylan16807 5mo ago
      It's a relevant extension if you think the ability to learn from a work is a right people have that exempts them from the more general lockdown copyright would impose. If you come at it from the view of copyright being a limited set of control over some areas but not others, then if copyright doesn't block human learning it shouldn't affect anything similar either, unless a specific rule is added to make those situations be handled differently.
- tensor 5mo ago
  It's also perfectly reasonable to say it's ok for a program or machine to do the same thing as a human. This has been the basis for the technological revolution since the dawn of technology.
greendestiny 5mo ago
I think that it's absurd that we've jumped to the conclusion backpropagation in neural networks should be legally treated the same as human learning. I mean I don't think think I could find a better description for following the derivatives of error in reproducing a set of works as creating a "derivative work".
- alok-g 5mo ago
  >> ... we've jumped to the conclusion backpropagation in neural networks should be legally treated the same as human learning. I agree. However, the reverse is also likely true, i.e., it cannot currently be denied that learning in humans is different from learning in artificial neural networks from the point of view of production of works that mix ideas/memes from several works processed/read. Surely, as the article says, copyright law talks exclusively about humans, not machines, not animals.
  - greendestiny 5mo ago
    I understand the article - the point about 'learning' is that if the model and its outputs are a derivative works then the copyright belongs to the human creators of the works it was trained on. Edit*: Or perhaps put more pseudo legally that the created works infringe on the copyrights of the original human creators.
    - alok-g 5mo ago
      The part I agree to is that copyright law calls out humans specifically as the potential owners of copyright. So what you suggest seems to be the only possibility out. Calling out humans could imply that when a human reads a thousand books and then writes something basis the same but which is not a substantial copy of anything explicitly read, that human owns the copyright to the text written. Whereas, if an artificial neural network does the same (hypothetically writing the same text), it would not. The above does not follow from, imply or conclude anything about learning in artificial neural networks and humans being similar or dissimilar.
charonn0 5mo ago
Is "learning" the correct term? Or is it "plagiarism"?
pessimizer 5mo ago
"Learning" for LLMs is just as goofy and propagandistic a metaphor as "stealing" for copyright. I find it predictive of your position that you'll accept one dumb metaphor for something that we didn't need a metaphor for, but not the other. Are you for stealing and against learning? We know exactly what is happening in both cases. We can talk about that, or we can use obfuscating euphemisms that make our preferred position seem obviously true.

thesmtsolver2 6mo ago

[dead]

blks 6mo ago

“Stolen” as in “profited on IP against terms and conditions of the license”.

NewsaHackO 5mo ago

Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.

jeppester 5mo ago
A more logical explanation would be that there are different opinions and those who complain are usually louder.
- NewsaHackO 5mo ago
  Yes, that's my point. They are different and contradictory opinions, which show hypocrisy.
  - inexcf 5mo ago
    No it is not your point. You're just arguing about a strawman that holds both of those contradictory positions.
    - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
      You are attempting to invoke strawman. So is your point that there is not a significant overlap between posters who think that AI companies should not be allowed to pirated use copyrighted material in their training corpus and posters who themselves pirated copyrighted material such as movies, music, games, etc.?
      - Dylan16807 5mo ago
        Yes, that is their point. Do you have evidence against it? I'm sure you can find some overlap, but I bet the vast majority is caused by people making a distinction between commercial and noncommercial piracy. I don't think there's a big cohort of piracy hypocrites.