This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Copyright became a problem for wealthy interests where it wasn't before. So now they want exemptions for themselves only.
No. You train your LLM on the public domain that's available for everyone to use. If you don't want your chatbot sounding like the 1920s, you should have thought of that before robbing humanity of a robust public domain.
So torrents don't violate copyright law, now?
The content produced by humans was scraped en-masse for the explicit purpose of training models which were then monetized into business products.
I struggle to reconcile that with Fair Use.
I can see if the source was EULA'd to remove all rights to what you post to things like Reddit, Stack Overflow, and if somehow those entities were contacted ahead of time and negotiated usage. You, I and the web server logs know that this was almost never the case.
I think the core of the fair use argument is that the AI models that are being trained are transformative products of the original works.
Might be a hot take here but I basically agree. I still believe it was theft and that the realities of the legal framework we had don't really stand up to the evolving problems, but under the current laws there is really no justification for saying that, taking the input of a bunch of images and giving the output of a set of statistical correlations of pixels based on descriptions, isn't transformation.
I agree. I think that all AI companies need to crash and burn. But it'd be disingenuous to claim that what these models are doing is completely different than what humans are doing. Humans don't pull stuff out of thin air. We are products of our upbringing and schooling. I say that, because I hate our current copyright laws with a burning passion and have done so long before LLMs showed up. It's possible to hate copyright and AI companies.
AI very much did break Copyright law by taking stuff without having a license for it.
I haven't read the article, but if the headline already starts out this wrong I don't think it'll get better.
The idea of copyright is to protect the financial rights of creatives, thus incentivising people to make more stuff, right?
Well even before AI, it wasn't doing its job very well on that front. The only ones with the power and money to be able to leverage copyright to protect their rights are those who are already so powerful that they don't need those protections — big music labels and the like. Individual creatives were already being fucked over by the system long before AI.
If you haven't read the article, I'd encourage you to give it a try. Or perhaps this one, which goes into depth on the intrinsic tensions within copyright law.
You probably should've because yeah, the way AI companies are treating creative works is disgusting and downright wrong, but copyright law has very much been broken ever since the Internet became a thing. It's just silly to treat works published on the internet the same way you treat books, paintings and DVDs, not to talk about the issue of jurisdiction on an entity that transcends borders . Aside from that, the laws have been "evolving" to the advantage of big "IP holders" and against the public for a century. A copyright being valid for 70/120 years after the death of the author makes no fucking sense. It should be public domain the day after.
Why tie it to death, why not a plain and simple 5 years?
If it was the day after they died, mightn't that have an unintended consequence of making it more likely that copyright holders would start "falling out of windows" just when it's convenient for producers and AI crooks to snaffle up their content, royalty-free?
Isn't that how inheritance works? Everything including the long copyright get inherited immediately.
Well yeah, it is currently. But not if the work becomes PD when you die, as OP is suggesting.
... murder is also illegal?
So you're an author and the only thing between a billion dollar studio and a royalty-free production of your work (that you have no creative input into) is your own death. And you'd feel fine and safe with that because "murder is illegal"?
It's hard to get away unnoticed with producing a work that infringes copyright, since they tend to have to be released to the public, and from a known source. Getting away with murder is a cinch in comparison.
Not for certain people.
The people that create and run them break copyright law still.
GIving LLMs access to human created data that people can't access is also the problem. The billionaire can afford to pay for it.
The worker can't. It is fucking backwards.
If they do it's not by the actual training of AI.
It doesn't break copyright laws because training something on any kind of data, as long as the data was legally obtained, is legal (this includes scrapping publicly available data).
You can't generate a sonic picture and sell it for the same reason you can't draw sonic in Photoshop and sell it. These are tools and it's up to the user to use them in a legal way.
Fan art is actually illegal, companies let it be because they get instantly thrashed by fans if they complain.
Copyright laws are broken but in the opposite way. Can we rename this sub to "How to bootlick the copyright machine"
It's weird how AI has turned so much of the internet from its generally anti-copyright stance. I've seen threads in piracy and datahoarding communities that were riddled with "won't someone please think of the copyright!" Posts raging about how awful AI was.
I maintain the same view I always have. Copyright is indeed broken, because of how overly restrictive and expansive it has become. Most people long ago lost sight of what it's actually for.
The AI topic is botted massively, almost as much as political topics.
I don't know who would benefit from a large portion of the Western youth being made to be disinterested in this emerging technology, but it isn't the Western economies.
Copyright companies and big AI. Google stands to profit massively if they are the only ones with the budget for a "legal" LLM. In any other context, strengthening copyright laws would be met with riots but they have managed to convince a good portion of the population that it's somehow in their best interest in the space of a year.
That or China (probably both)
Yeah, whatever it is, it isn't just a bunch of suddenly concerned citizens who discovered their love of copyright laws.
"Copyright" is an overloaded word that can both mean "IP/copyright law, it's terms and enforcement" as well as "the rights of an author to decide how their work should be used"
In the vein that LLM are just a tool? Wouldn't it be legally a problem, if a photoshop filter had rules specifically to generate Sonic art?
Btw, why is that blue hedgehog still a thing?
Fan art is not illegal. As long as you're not selling it, it would generally fall under fair use.
Fan art is not illegal.
Off the top of my head, I know both Disney and Nintendo have sued people for making fan art. Fair use doesn’t explicitly allow you to make fan art, regardless of its transformative nature, and whether or not you owe Disney hundreds of thousands of dollars for drawing Mickey depends on court review on a case-by-case basis because it’s not technically legal in the US. It may also not be technically illegal, but that doesn’t mean a corporation can’t sue you and be awarded millions in civil damages if they think you profited off the art in some way.
A quick google search will source you lawyers saying such.
Just to clarify, somebody suing another party doesn't automatically mean that party broke any laws. Big companies especially will sooner sue the little guy even if they did nothing legally wrong because the know the little guy most likely won't have the resources to fight it, even if they would have won.
Just to clarify, somebody suing another party doesn't automatically mean that party broke any laws.
Yes, that’s literally what I said. Fan art may not be illegal, but it’s not legal either. The point is moot, however. If a corporation with billions or trillions of dollars can sue you with impunity, while even a meager defense can financially ruin you for life, then there is no practical difference between a legal and illegal act. The fact remains that fighting someone like Disney over something like fanart is beyond the ability of nearly everyone on earth.
Yeah, I was adding onto it. Cool your jets. We're in agreement.
You're right, that was my bad
No worries mate ✌ have a good one
It's copyright infringements but like I said, most won't bother fans not making a dime. There's economic advantages to having fans create and distribute your content for free. A company can choose to copyright strike anything with their characters in it at anytime.
Skimming the article seems to affirm that the danger is profiting off of fan works, not the works themselves. Just because a company can sue you over it (even in situations where you made no profit off of it), that doesn't mean you broke any laws. You can be sued for anything, its up to the court to determine if a law was broken.
Fan fiction and fan art, without appropriate permissions or licenses, are usually an infringement of the right of the copyright holder to prepare and license derivative works based on the original. Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product.
Seems pretty clear. It's at the discretion of the owner. The profit aspect doesn't matter in terms of the law, it just makes it likely that companies will go to court over it.
Additionally, usually as long as the fan content is non-commercial, it is not a problem with copyright holders.
Notice how it says with copyright holders and not with copyright laws.
Ships already sailed but shouldn't AI generated things just be considered derivative of their training set?
I don't know how that works for images/video, but for code that means if it's trained on GPL code the resulting code would have to be GPL and the liability is on the people distiributing AI generated code.
This also makes commerical use of AI generated anything complicated while allowing personal use under the current state of non-enforceablity.
Just like Aaron Swartz
I wouldn't compare Swartz with the AI scrapers. Aaron pulled mostly public domain documents from JSTOR and caused minor issues with the servers which is "a bit" different than pulling everything from the internet to a database over a practically global DDOS-attack. But when companies do it it's apparently somehow different and Swartz was pretty much publicly lynched and eventually bullied to suicide.
