4 ms·

>There's no meaningful contributions from a human. Humans provided the training data. Humans wrote the source. Humans compiled and ran the program.

bitJericho 11y ago
Humans provided the input photograph
- olefoo 11y ago
  humans caused the photograph to be created... authority is becoming confused. The notion of Intellectual Property is becoming obviously self-contradictory. Who owns the copyright to your soul? Is it Facebook? Is it Google? Did you accidentally assign all of your Intellectual Property to WR Hambrecht? Can you be required to perform on command like a dancing bear? Are the excrescences of your soul merely the feedstock of an industrial process that requires human fleshbrains for supervised learning processes the output of which will be the property of the state since they are formed without human agency? Bullshit. Intellectual Property is Ideal Theft. There are no original ideas. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. There is nothing to be afraid of; resume shopping and avoid panic buying.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Overstuffed wording aside, copyright is just a set of laws that can be interpreted with more or less ambiguity; it's not some sort of ineffable concept. And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory. Also, "original" in the law doesn't mean the same as in regular conversation; it merely means it's not an outright copy. That's why a work can be deemed to be derived from other(s), yet still have copyright protection for its own contribution.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      >And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory. No, they just become meaningless (and potentially dangerous). The problem is that people are trying to apply the law to actual mathematical concepts (like bits). Since the law does not model mathematical reality, the law necessarily fails. Many appear to be stuck in the fallacious belief that the law reflects reality, or at least that reality should reflect laws. Of course, this belief is incorrect, doomed to failure, and we see that failure play out all the time, including in this case.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        A bit is no different than a letter/grapheme of a text, which was what copyright originally was designed to protect. They are both digital (discrete) encodings of information - a computer file is just a text in a language that only has two letters. The law doesn't concern itself with the specifics of the components of the work, it concerns itself with higher-level concepts like "copy" and "derivative", which still make perfect sense for information encoded as bits. As for the failure, I disagree. This case merely represents ambiguity, which is inherent to law (it's why we have courts and judges and juries).
Houshalter 11y ago
So the copyright belongs to google, even if you run it on your own photographs on your own machine? That doesn't seem right.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sparkie 11y ago
  Consider if you took two copyrighted pictures and combined them in some way in photoshop. We can lay claim to the combined work, but we may not have consent of the original authors works to distribute thier work. Now consider if you trained the NNet with the same two images, such that it was highly overtrained and basically produced a combined replica of the inputs. This is essentially the same as doing it manually in photoshop. That a computer done it does not take ownership away from the creators of the two images. A NNet isn't trained with two images though, but millions. Do we abandon copyright because of scale? Should the NNet operator not be required to keep the entire training set such that copyright can be traced? Do we invent an entire new industry on determining the probability that a particular image was used to train a NNet (and by how much it affected it), such that it's owner can claim royalties on anything the NNet produces? The question isn't about google versus operator, it's about whether or not we're going to continue investing in the madness of copyright for machines designed to mimic human brains, and if so when will it apply to ourselves - for we can't archive our own training set.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    >The NNet was trained with millions of images not on your machine, whose ownership we cannot trace (unless we store the entire training set). It doesn't matter whose images they were trained on. As long as you are not reproducing the images exactly it's not violating copyright. But if it does, then I believe it was Flickr that provided the images.
  - swhipple 11y ago
    > Do we abandon copyright because of scale? This is an interesting question. I wonder if, due the number of items in the training set and the minimal impact of each individual creative work, it would be considered fair use. If your training set significantly consists of images from someone else's training set in the same domain, you might have a conflict. But for arbitrary images, it may be analogous to search engines indexing (and learning from) copyrighted material, which is generally protected.

bitJericho 11y ago

Humans provided the input photograph

olefoo 11y ago
humans caused the photograph to be created... authority is becoming confused. The notion of Intellectual Property is becoming obviously self-contradictory. Who owns the copyright to your soul? Is it Facebook? Is it Google? Did you accidentally assign all of your Intellectual Property to WR Hambrecht? Can you be required to perform on command like a dancing bear? Are the excrescences of your soul merely the feedstock of an industrial process that requires human fleshbrains for supervised learning processes the output of which will be the property of the state since they are formed without human agency? Bullshit. Intellectual Property is Ideal Theft. There are no original ideas. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. There is nothing to be afraid of; resume shopping and avoid panic buying.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Overstuffed wording aside, copyright is just a set of laws that can be interpreted with more or less ambiguity; it's not some sort of ineffable concept. And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory. Also, "original" in the law doesn't mean the same as in regular conversation; it merely means it's not an outright copy. That's why a work can be deemed to be derived from other(s), yet still have copyright protection for its own contribution.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    >And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory. No, they just become meaningless (and potentially dangerous). The problem is that people are trying to apply the law to actual mathematical concepts (like bits). Since the law does not model mathematical reality, the law necessarily fails. Many appear to be stuck in the fallacious belief that the law reflects reality, or at least that reality should reflect laws. Of course, this belief is incorrect, doomed to failure, and we see that failure play out all the time, including in this case.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      A bit is no different than a letter/grapheme of a text, which was what copyright originally was designed to protect. They are both digital (discrete) encodings of information - a computer file is just a text in a language that only has two letters. The law doesn't concern itself with the specifics of the components of the work, it concerns itself with higher-level concepts like "copy" and "derivative", which still make perfect sense for information encoded as bits. As for the failure, I disagree. This case merely represents ambiguity, which is inherent to law (it's why we have courts and judges and juries).

Houshalter 11y ago

So the copyright belongs to google, even if you run it on your own photographs on your own machine? That doesn't seem right.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sparkie 11y ago
Consider if you took two copyrighted pictures and combined them in some way in photoshop. We can lay claim to the combined work, but we may not have consent of the original authors works to distribute thier work. Now consider if you trained the NNet with the same two images, such that it was highly overtrained and basically produced a combined replica of the inputs. This is essentially the same as doing it manually in photoshop. That a computer done it does not take ownership away from the creators of the two images. A NNet isn't trained with two images though, but millions. Do we abandon copyright because of scale? Should the NNet operator not be required to keep the entire training set such that copyright can be traced? Do we invent an entire new industry on determining the probability that a particular image was used to train a NNet (and by how much it affected it), such that it's owner can claim royalties on anything the NNet produces? The question isn't about google versus operator, it's about whether or not we're going to continue investing in the madness of copyright for machines designed to mimic human brains, and if so when will it apply to ourselves - for we can't archive our own training set.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  >The NNet was trained with millions of images not on your machine, whose ownership we cannot trace (unless we store the entire training set). It doesn't matter whose images they were trained on. As long as you are not reproducing the images exactly it's not violating copyright. But if it does, then I believe it was Flickr that provided the images.
- swhipple 11y ago
  > Do we abandon copyright because of scale? This is an interesting question. I wonder if, due the number of items in the training set and the minimal impact of each individual creative work, it would be considered fair use. If your training set significantly consists of images from someone else's training set in the same domain, you might have a conflict. But for arbitrary images, it may be analogous to search engines indexing (and learning from) copyrighted material, which is generally protected.