5 ms·

> you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place 1. You're mischaracterizing and exaggerat

> you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place 1. You're mischaracterizing and exaggerating the policies to falsely support your point. Things go into the public domain all the time: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/ https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/. 2. It's not like the model companies had the attitude "oh copyright is too long, we disagree on the term." Their attitude was precisely: "We want it and we don't give a fuck about you. Published yesterday, published 50 years ago? We will take it, we won't pay for it, and we will use it to replace you and make ourselves rich. Don't like it? Suck my data center."

gruez 3mo ago
>We will take it, we won't pay for it, and we will use it to replace you and make ourselves rich The whole point of fair use (which courts have so far ruled AI training is) is that you don't have to ask for permission or pay them for it.
- selectodude 3mo ago
  When you realize that LLMs are “just” extremely efficient lossy data compression, it’s hard for me to see how it’s anything other than taking people’s shit, putting it into a gigantic zip file, and letting people search against it.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    Wait till you hear about Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. (2007) and Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. (2015), both of which ruled that lossy and verbatim copies (respectively) are allowed for for-profit use.
    - selectodude 3mo ago
      Too late. Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. is a good one too because Internet Archive got the exact opposite outcome in court for doing the exact same thing. I recognize the bullshit, I just call it out to keep myself sane.
      - gruez 3mo ago
        >Internet Archive got the exact opposite outcome in court for doing the exact same thing No, it's not the same thing. Contrary to what many people think, "fair use" isn't something you can invoke to do whatever copyright infringement you want. The judge is supposed to consider several factors, one of which is whether the work was "transformative". In google's case it was offering search results. Internet archive was operating a "digital library" (aka. a filesharing site). Whatever you hate about AI companies sucking up electricity and displacing jobs, they're certainly more transformative (and arguably more transformative than even google search) than whatever the internet archive was doing.
        selectodude 3mo ago
        That’s not true. 1. Libraries have used Authors Guild as legal cover to lend out ebooks for paper books that they own. 2. Google provided access to the whole book, that’s why they got sued. If I run a book through AES, that’s pretty transformative too!
        gruez 3mo ago
        >1. Libraries have used Authors Guild as legal cover to lend out ebooks for paper books that they own And has this been tested in court? After all, you see people uploading tv shows on youtube, then pasting a snippet of fair use in the description. That doesn't make it true. If anything, the unfavorable ruling for internet archive suggests libraries were incorrect with their interpretation of the law. >2. Google provided access to the whole book, that’s why they got sued. No it didn't. From wikipedia: "For works still under copyright, Google scanned and entered the whole work into their searchable database, but only provided "snippet views" of the scanned pages in search results to users."
- palmotea 3mo ago
  > The whole point of fair use (which courts have so far ruled AI training is) is that you don't have to ask for permission or pay them for it. Is that settled law? I doubt it. And IMHO, AI training violates the spirit of fair use. It's not really a method of criticism or commentary. It's a system to use people's own work to undermine their ability to economically subsist on that work. Though how about this for a proposed exception: you can AI train on anything as fair use: only if release your model and weights public domain open source.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    >Is that settled law? I doubt it. That just seems like a cope unless you have actual evidence that the lower/appellate courts have misruled. And no, "I don't like the ruling because [all the reasons AI is bad]" doesn't count, you need actual legal justifications, preferably from legal experts. Not to mention that even if the supreme court ruled on it, it's not really "settled", eg. Roe. v. Wade and Humphrey's Executor v. United States being overturned
    - palmotea 3mo ago
      > That just seems like a cope unless you have actual evidence that the lower/appellate courts have misruled. No, it means lower court judges get overruled all the time and it's not like the courts and law always functions as some dispassionate applicators of some fixed framework. It's not settled until the process gets worked much farther than it probably has.
  - dragonwriter 3mo ago
    > Is that settled law? It seems to be the fairly consistent approach of trial courts addressing the question under different soecific fact patterns in different contexts; its not “settled law” in the sense of nationally binding precedent (which would take either a Supreme Court ruling kr separate appellate rulings in every circuit). > And IMHO, AI training violates the spirit of fair use. It's not really a method of criticism or commentary. Plenty of transformative uses that have been held to be fair use are not criticism or commentary, and AI training is a transformative use where, for any individual work used, the end product is both a very different class of work and the used work indiviudally has very small impact on the final work. > It's a system to use people's own work to undermine their ability to economically subsist on that work. Courts seem to disagree that this is generally the case with AI training as such. (And AI training being fair use would not make the use of models to create works that would otherwise be infringing copies with that function through inference any less infringing.) > Though how about this for a proposed exception: you can AI train on anything as fair use: only if release your model and weights public domain open source. You are, of course, free to try to convince Congress to amend copyright law to apply that rule (though since the current statutory form of the fair use rule is itself a legislative adoption that follows pre-existing court rulings on fair use as a Constitutional limit on the copyright power stemming from the First Amendment, Congress may not actually have the power to narrow it that way.)
bloppe 3mo ago
They're attitude is more "this is fair use" which, according to all precedent, is probably true in most cases (unless the models actually start regurgitating huge parts of the Copyrighted material without a license). Of course, distillation is also fair use under Copyright law. Copyright was never meant to be a moral framework. It was always a practical framework designed to incentivize publishing that would ultimately pass into the public domain. Everybody seems to want to attribute some sort of moral weight to it though; the idea that people are naturally entitled to certain rights over things they've published. That idea would be totally alien to the people who designed the Copyright system in the first place.
- Ekaros 3mo ago
  Certainly in Europe there is view that author has moral rights over their work. And the view has affected how international copyright framework operates.
- SimianSci 3mo ago
  What a soulless take. Morality is determined socially and does not exist in a vacuum. Stealing the livlihood of artists and creators so that you can offer competing products is not an act of neutrality. It is a deeply immoral act akin to theft. Stealing does not magically become "distillation" once you've stolen from enough people that it becomes difficult to match provenance. The law may see this as no issue, as the law cares more about protecting power, but that does not mean it isnt immoral.
- dTal 3mo ago
  Was it really "designed to incentivize" anything? Or was it introduced to protect a powerful, influential business model? Looking at how laws are passed now, I know which explanation I find more congruent.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    It's literally in the constitution: > [the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
brookst 3mo ago
I’m always astounded when someone literally argues against nuance. I think that AI companies should, and often don’t, pay for training material. I also think that perpetual copyright has so weakened IP holders’ moral position that especially the larger IP-centric corporations have nobody to blame but themselves. And sure, a tiny dribble of stuff enters public domain, either because estates don’t work to maintain copyright or because the duration is so ridiculous that even megacorps can’t tilt the playing field further (see: Steamboat Willie, released 1928, public domain 2024). Sorry, but 96 year copyright terms are insane. Now, come back with support for returning copyright to its original max of 28 years, or even the extended 42 years, I’ll argue for harsher treatment of violations for recent works. It’s a complex system. And I’m not willing to demonize one side when the other has been so abusive for so long, no matter how many times you say “suck” and “fuck” as if that somehow strenghens an argument (hint: it doesn’t)

gruez 3mo ago

>We will take it, we won't pay for it, and we will use it to replace you and make ourselves rich The whole point of fair use (which courts have so far ruled AI training is) is that you don't have to ask for permission or pay them for it.

selectodude 3mo ago
When you realize that LLMs are “just” extremely efficient lossy data compression, it’s hard for me to see how it’s anything other than taking people’s shit, putting it into a gigantic zip file, and letting people search against it.
- gruez 3mo ago
  Wait till you hear about Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. (2007) and Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. (2015), both of which ruled that lossy and verbatim copies (respectively) are allowed for for-profit use.
  - selectodude 3mo ago
    Too late. Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. is a good one too because Internet Archive got the exact opposite outcome in court for doing the exact same thing. I recognize the bullshit, I just call it out to keep myself sane.
    - gruez 3mo ago
      >Internet Archive got the exact opposite outcome in court for doing the exact same thing No, it's not the same thing. Contrary to what many people think, "fair use" isn't something you can invoke to do whatever copyright infringement you want. The judge is supposed to consider several factors, one of which is whether the work was "transformative". In google's case it was offering search results. Internet archive was operating a "digital library" (aka. a filesharing site). Whatever you hate about AI companies sucking up electricity and displacing jobs, they're certainly more transformative (and arguably more transformative than even google search) than whatever the internet archive was doing.
      - selectodude 3mo ago
        That’s not true. 1. Libraries have used Authors Guild as legal cover to lend out ebooks for paper books that they own. 2. Google provided access to the whole book, that’s why they got sued. If I run a book through AES, that’s pretty transformative too!
        gruez 3mo ago
        >1. Libraries have used Authors Guild as legal cover to lend out ebooks for paper books that they own And has this been tested in court? After all, you see people uploading tv shows on youtube, then pasting a snippet of fair use in the description. That doesn't make it true. If anything, the unfavorable ruling for internet archive suggests libraries were incorrect with their interpretation of the law. >2. Google provided access to the whole book, that’s why they got sued. No it didn't. From wikipedia: "For works still under copyright, Google scanned and entered the whole work into their searchable database, but only provided "snippet views" of the scanned pages in search results to users."
palmotea 3mo ago
> The whole point of fair use (which courts have so far ruled AI training is) is that you don't have to ask for permission or pay them for it. Is that settled law? I doubt it. And IMHO, AI training violates the spirit of fair use. It's not really a method of criticism or commentary. It's a system to use people's own work to undermine their ability to economically subsist on that work. Though how about this for a proposed exception: you can AI train on anything as fair use: only if release your model and weights public domain open source.
- gruez 3mo ago
  >Is that settled law? I doubt it. That just seems like a cope unless you have actual evidence that the lower/appellate courts have misruled. And no, "I don't like the ruling because [all the reasons AI is bad]" doesn't count, you need actual legal justifications, preferably from legal experts. Not to mention that even if the supreme court ruled on it, it's not really "settled", eg. Roe. v. Wade and Humphrey's Executor v. United States being overturned
  - palmotea 3mo ago
    > That just seems like a cope unless you have actual evidence that the lower/appellate courts have misruled. No, it means lower court judges get overruled all the time and it's not like the courts and law always functions as some dispassionate applicators of some fixed framework. It's not settled until the process gets worked much farther than it probably has.
- dragonwriter 3mo ago
  > Is that settled law? It seems to be the fairly consistent approach of trial courts addressing the question under different soecific fact patterns in different contexts; its not “settled law” in the sense of nationally binding precedent (which would take either a Supreme Court ruling kr separate appellate rulings in every circuit). > And IMHO, AI training violates the spirit of fair use. It's not really a method of criticism or commentary. Plenty of transformative uses that have been held to be fair use are not criticism or commentary, and AI training is a transformative use where, for any individual work used, the end product is both a very different class of work and the used work indiviudally has very small impact on the final work. > It's a system to use people's own work to undermine their ability to economically subsist on that work. Courts seem to disagree that this is generally the case with AI training as such. (And AI training being fair use would not make the use of models to create works that would otherwise be infringing copies with that function through inference any less infringing.) > Though how about this for a proposed exception: you can AI train on anything as fair use: only if release your model and weights public domain open source. You are, of course, free to try to convince Congress to amend copyright law to apply that rule (though since the current statutory form of the fair use rule is itself a legislative adoption that follows pre-existing court rulings on fair use as a Constitutional limit on the copyright power stemming from the First Amendment, Congress may not actually have the power to narrow it that way.)

bloppe 3mo ago

They're attitude is more "this is fair use" which, according to all precedent, is probably true in most cases (unless the models actually start regurgitating huge parts of the Copyrighted material without a license). Of course, distillation is also fair use under Copyright law. Copyright was never meant to be a moral framework. It was always a practical framework designed to incentivize publishing that would ultimately pass into the public domain. Everybody seems to want to attribute some sort of moral weight to it though; the idea that people are naturally entitled to certain rights over things they've published. That idea would be totally alien to the people who designed the Copyright system in the first place.

Ekaros 3mo ago
Certainly in Europe there is view that author has moral rights over their work. And the view has affected how international copyright framework operates.
SimianSci 3mo ago
What a soulless take. Morality is determined socially and does not exist in a vacuum. Stealing the livlihood of artists and creators so that you can offer competing products is not an act of neutrality. It is a deeply immoral act akin to theft. Stealing does not magically become "distillation" once you've stolen from enough people that it becomes difficult to match provenance. The law may see this as no issue, as the law cares more about protecting power, but that does not mean it isnt immoral.
dTal 3mo ago
Was it really "designed to incentivize" anything? Or was it introduced to protect a powerful, influential business model? Looking at how laws are passed now, I know which explanation I find more congruent.
- gruez 3mo ago
  It's literally in the constitution: > [the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

brookst 3mo ago

I’m always astounded when someone literally argues against nuance. I think that AI companies should, and often don’t, pay for training material. I also think that perpetual copyright has so weakened IP holders’ moral position that especially the larger IP-centric corporations have nobody to blame but themselves. And sure, a tiny dribble of stuff enters public domain, either because estates don’t work to maintain copyright or because the duration is so ridiculous that even megacorps can’t tilt the playing field further (see: Steamboat Willie, released 1928, public domain 2024). Sorry, but 96 year copyright terms are insane. Now, come back with support for returning copyright to its original max of 28 years, or even the extended 42 years, I’ll argue for harsher treatment of violations for recent works. It’s a complex system. And I’m not willing to demonize one side when the other has been so abusive for so long, no matter how many times you say “suck” and “fuck” as if that somehow strenghens an argument (hint: it doesn’t)