And this is why I don't have ANY moral qualms about pirating shit: they'd do it to us in a heartbeat if there was a buck to be made.
*have done
They would?? They are**
I had some, but not anymore.
Pirating Windows for your own personal, private use, which will never directly make you a single dollar: HIGHLY ILLEGAL
Scraping your creative works so they can make billions by selling automated processes that compete against your work: Perfectly fine and normal!
bunch of fuckin art pirates. crying about software piracy while they have their own bots pirating everyone's art.
It’s not even piracy though. I never saw anyone torrent Windows_XP_Home_Cracked.iso and go “Hey guys, check out this operating system I made!”
Do people still pirate Windows? You can download the iso directly from Microsoft's website and you don't need a registration key anymore.
You do need a registration key, but now it's tied to the hardware so it activates as soon as you connect to the network, no need to actually type the registration key.
They’re saying Windows will lock away some customization, but you don’t need a key to use it nowadays.
Sure bud, pirating some Microsoft Studio video games and windows ISOs right now. What? I found them on the open web!
Honestly just pirate their games since they keep buying every fucking studio they can get their grummy hands on
Starlancer was nice I think
I mean, Xbox one/series recently got proof of concept jailbreak, so... I think many people are on board with your thought
DMCA for them, no DMCA for us.
You're always morally justified to steal from Microsoft
So if I see it on the “open web”, I’m free to use it however I please? Oh, I get thrown in jail and everything I own taken away.
If companies are people per “citizens united”, why doesn’t the same apply to them?
And if a company makes a negligent decision, which kills a million people over time, why is no one being put on death row? They can and do have it both ways, but I can still wish for a just world where if companies are people, they can be put to death for mass casualties caused by their decisions.
so we can steal Microsoft's products?
Yes. Exactly.
Although there isn't much left worth stealing from Microsoft.
(This was a low-key "Microsoft bad, Linux supreme", comment.)
(And now it's no longer low-key.)
(I'm using a touch-screen keyboard for writing this. And yet I can't open my doors using the keyboard. Ever wondered why that is?)
(Correct, because I forgot my keys at home and didn't put them on my keyboard.)
(Now it's just a –board.)
(Oral diarrhea over. Go get some guhd Linux!)
This is the year of the linux desktop!
By our powers combined, we'll exceed 2% market share!
(no actually, please support linux. I just switched like a month ago and while it's so much better than windows there are so many petty annoyances that will never get resolved unless more people bitch about it and that kind of support needs more users)
You guys already hit better than 4% according to some articles I've seen posted here-ish over the last couple months.
Skype is Worth the most, probably.
Let's be real, they let most of it be stolen
In ex-USSR it was pretty intentional.
That explains why my friend's Xbox got stolen. It was an original Xbox, too. Holds eggs perfectly.
i meant stealing like it all not just some random person's version.
Oh.
In other news: we have lawyers to protect our copyrights, you don't. Suck it.
It's okay to plagiarize books if they're in a library.
No you have to run them through an elaborate model first, then it's totally legit to use someone else's literal words as if they were your own
You're describing how human beings learn and create.
I was actually describing a piece of software, which is not considered a human being, and can in fact be treated differently without any legal or philosophical confusion
I mean, that's how I got through high school. So sure.
But paraphrasing is not copyright infringement either. It's no different than Wikipedia having a synopsis for every single episode of a TV series. Telling someone about what a work contains for informational purposes is perfectly fine.
copyright laws are broken. what seems ethical can be illegal and what seems unethical can be legal.
!Arthur Dent has his home demolished while humans simultaneously have Earth demolished by an alien race called Vogons, but him and Ford Prefect escape by hitchhiking onto the Vogon ship. They're discovered and thrown into space, but miraculously saved by Ford's relative (can't remember how they're related) and his ship The Heart of Gold, which is powerful but unpredictable. They wind up on a mythical planet due to that unpredictability, and learn that Earth was a designer planet created to calculate the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. (The famous "42" thing). The whole crew escapes the planet and decides to go to The Restaurant at the End of The Universe to eat and watch the universe end.!<
Have I just stolen The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and given it to you?
You've probably not infringed the copyright, only the court can decide though; if you were to be challenged by the rights holder.
I think there are lots of factors in your defence:
you're not selling it , your use is an example for education
I don't think you're reducing the market value for the original(s) in any way
you've not included substantial verbaitim sections of the original works , but I think you have used more than just facts and ideas (not sure though).
But add in some more quotes, flesh it out, and then try to sell it . . . each step weakens the 'fair use' defence.
This the the problem for the LLM, it can be used for many things, and if it has no filter or limit, then eventually the collective derived works might add up to commercial, substantial reuse, and might include enough to have copied a substantial portion of the original.
Very hard to determine I'd think. Each individual use might be fair, but did the LLM itself go too far at some point?
Copyright holder probably struggles to challenge the LLM on the basis of all the things infinite mokeys might use it for in future.
This the the problem for the LLM, it can be used for many things, and if it has no filter or limit
I agree with pretty much everything before this but that particular comment was just talking about summaries, which imo is a lot more cut and dry. (SparkNotes, for example)
An LLM by itself is unlimited and unfiltered, but it's not impossible to limit one and sell it. For all the shit OpenAI deserves to get, I have to give them one thing, their copyright restriction system seems to be on par with YouTube. I paid for a month of it when GPT4 came out and tried my hardest to bypass it, but it won't even give me copyrighted texts when the words are all replaced with synonyms or jumbled around.
I think if someone's offering their LLM as a service and has a system like that in place, they aren't stealing any more than YouTube is stealing. Otherwise I agree that there's a strong argument for copyright infringement.
copying is not theft
"Copying is theft" is the argument of corporations for ages, but if they want our data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.
They got themselves into quite a contradiction.
You realize that half of Lemmy is tying themselves in inconsistent logical knots trying to escape the reverse conundrum?
Copying isn't stealing and never was. Our IP system that artificially restricts information has never made sense in the digital age, and yet now everyone is on here cheering copyright on.
You wouldn't download a car!
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software
No we don't, copying copyrighted material is copyright infringement. Which is illegal. that does not make it theft though.
Oversimplifying the issue makes for an uninformed debate.
any content you produce is automatically copyrighted
Yeah, I'm not a fan of AI but I'm generally of the view that anything posted on the internet, visible without a login, is fair game for indexing a search engine, snapshotting a backup (like the internet archive's Wayback Machine), or running user extensions on (including ad blockers). Is training an AI model all that different?
You can't be for piracy but against LLMs fair the same reason
And I think most of the people on Lemmy are for piracy,
I'm not in favor of piracy or LLMs. I'm also not a fan of copyright as it exists today (I think we should go back to the 1790 US definition of copyright).
I think a lot of people here on lemmy who are "in favor of piracy" just hate our current copyright system, and that's quite understandable and I totally agree with them. Having a work protected for your entire lifetime sucks.
The problem with copyright has nothing to do with terms limits. Those exacerbate the problem, but the fundamental problem with copyright and IP law is that it is a system of artificial scarcity where there is no need for one.
Rather than reward creators when their information is used, we hamfistedly try and prevent others from using that information so that people have to pay them to use it sometimes.
Capitalism is flat out the wrong system for distributing digital information, because as soon as information is digitized it is effectively infinitely abundant which sends its value to $0.
Copyright is not a capitalist idea, it's collectivist. See copyright in the Soviet Union, the initial bill of which was passed in 1925, right near the start of the USSR.
A pure capitalist system would have no copyright, and works would instead be protected through exclusivity (I.e. paywalls) and DRM. Copyright is intended to promote sharing by providing a period of exclusivity (temporary monopoly on a work). Whether it achieves those goals is certainly up for debate.
Long terms go against any benefit to society that copyright might have. I think it does have a benefit, but that benefit is pretty limited and should probably only last 10-15 years. I think eliminating copyright entirely would leave most people worse off and probably mostly benefit large orgs that can afford expensive DRM schemes in much the same way that our current copyright duration disproportionately benefits large orgs.
Yes, it kind of is. A search engine just looks for keywords and links, and that's all it retains after crawling a site. It's not producing any derivative works, it's merely looking up an index of keywords to find matches.
An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues. Whether a particular generated result violates copyright depends on the license of the works it's based on and how much of those works it uses. So it's complicated, but there's very much a copyright argument there.
My brain also takes information and creates derivative works from it.
Shit, am I also a data thief?
That depends, do you copy verbatim? Or do you process and understand concepts, and then create new works based on that understanding? If you copy verbatim, that's plagiarism and you're a thief. If you create your own answer, it's not.
Current AI doesn't actually "understand" anything, and "learning" is just grabbing input data. If you ask it a question, it's not understanding anything, it just matches search terms to the part of the training data that matches, and regurgitates a mix of it, and usually omits the sources. That's it.
It's a tricky line in journalism since so much of it is borrowed, and it's likewise tricky w/ AI, but the main difference IMO is attribution, good journalists cite sources, AI rarely does.
An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues.
Derivative works are not copyright infringement. If LLMs are spitting out exact copies, or near-enough-to-exact copies, that’s one thing. But as you said, the whole point is to generate derivative works.
Derivative works are not copyright infringement
They absolutely are, unless it's covered by "fair use." A "derivative work" doesn't mean you created something that's inspired by a work, but that you've modified the the work and then distributed the modified version.
None of those things replace that content, though.
Look, I dunno if this is legally a copyrights issue, but as a society, I think a lot of people have decided they're willing to yield to social media and search engine indexers, but not to AI training, you know? The same way I might consent to eating a mango but not a banana.
Issue is power imbalance.
There's a clear difference between a guy in his basement on his personal computer sampling music the original musicians almost never seen a single penny from, and a megacorp trying to drive out creative professionals from the industry in the hopes they can then proceed to hike up the prices to use their generative AI software.
Didnt you hear? We stan draconian IP laws now because AI bad.
Is it that or is it that the laws are selectively applied on little guys and ignored once you make enough money? It certainly looks that way. Once you've achieved a level of "fuck you money" it doesn't matter how unscrupulously you got there. I'm not sure letting the big guys get away with it while little guys still get fucked over is as big of a win as you think it is?
Examples:
The Pirate Bay: Only made enough money to run the site and keep the admins living a middle class lifestyle.
VERDICT: Bad, wrong, and evil. Must be put in jail.
OpenAI: Claims to be non-profit, then spins off for-profit wing. Makes a mint in a deal with Microsoft.
VERDICT: Only the goodest of good people and we must allow them to continue doing so.
The IP laws are stupid but letting fucking rich twats get away with it while regular people will still get fucked by the same rules is kind of a fucking stupid ass hill to die on.
But sure, if we allow the giant companies to do it, SOMEHOW the same rules will "trickle down" to regular people. I think I've heard that story before... No, they only make exceptions for people who can basically print money. They'll still fuck you and me six ways to Sunday for the same.
But yeah, somehow, the same rules will end up being applied to us? My ass. They're literally jailing people for it right now. If that wasn't the case, maybe this argument would have legs.
But AI companies? Totes okay, bro.
The laws are currently the same for everyone when it comes to what you can use to train an AI with. I, as an individual, can use whatever public facing data I wish to build or fine tune AI models, same as Microsoft.
If we make copyright laws even stronger, the only one getting locked out of the game are the little guys. Microsoft, google and company can afford to pay ridiculous prices for datasets. What they don't own mainly comes from aggregators like Reddit, Getty, Instagram and Stack.
Boosting copyright laws essentially kill all legal forms of open source AI. It would force the open source scene to go underground as a pirate network and lead to the scenario you mentioned.
Yes, it is a travesty that people are being hounded for sharing information, but the solution to that isn't to lock up information tighter by restricting access to the open web and saying if you download something we put up to be freely accessed and then use it in a way we don't like you owe us.
The solution to bad laws being applied unevenly isn't to apply the bad laws to everyone equally, its to get rid of the bad laws.
letting fucking rich twats get away with it
That's law in general...
Aight, I'ma steal leaked Windows XP source code :3
He spoke carelessly, but he didn't exactly say what the author said he said. You can in fact do many things with it. Copyright doesn't care what you do if you aren't copying. That's the definition of the word.
So I can pirate as many movies as I want as long as I'm only watching them?
Let these rich guys keep talking for a sec. I can get behind this somewhat.
Yes, it's streamer making a copy. You're fine. Sharing is caring. Copyright is a mental illness.
Copyright is a mental illness
Well, I happen to have a great deal of respect for and routinely offer my support to those who suffer from mental illnesses, so maybe find a better way to say this that doesn't denigrate disabled people.
I'm sorry but that's what illness means. It is not an identity.
Isn't web scraping copying ?
No. It's only illegal if you republish what you scrape. Absolutely nothing prevents any company from scraping the web and using that information internally.
I think that depends how you write your web scraper. Of course the web scraper is going to load the page, just like your web browser does, which by all accounts is not an issue. What happens after the page is loaded depends on how the software is written.
Well see what the results of the music industry vs suno.ai will be
he gets paid a lot to not speak carelessly
There is a thing called usage licenses.
So its no longer intellectual property if its on the internet?
The nerves on this guy...
So you could just copy and use every single helpful support article from Microsoft?
Oh shit, there aren't any
Just yet another proof, that the more 0's you have in your valuation, the less the laws apply to you
Apparently he thinks data is like the ducks you find in the park
Wait, you can steal from those ducks?
No one ever tells you this, but you can just take the ducks. Just like with the city pigeons. Just make sure you don't take a government drone by accident.
In that I can take a picture of them and you wouldn't notice or be impacted by it?
You can take the ducks you know
Clearly ducks you find in the park is just free meat. Why else would they be there?
To ask of you have any grapes
Does Netflix count as the open web? It definitely feels like so, but I'm ready for a wealth hoarder to tell me otherwise!
I agree
Is his personal-information on the dark-web?
Is he saying that if his personal-information is on the dark-web, then it's perfectly-OK for everybody & their robot to be using it??
XOR is he saying that there are 2 kinds of law:
1 for protecting his entitlement,
the other for disallowing rights from the lives he consumes, through his beloved herd/corporation/pseudo-person?
( obviously, he's already answered the latter )
Oh hey, Microsoft support moving away from copyright!
He's right, information wants to be free. Don't support stronger copyright just to spite people it'll benefit
In fact just the other day information wanted a ham sandwhich before I set it free so it could find more people not on an empty stomach :/
Essentially the joke everyone made about nfts.
Copyright infrigment is not theft, training models is not copyright infringement either. We need a law equivalent to when an artist says "he's inpired by someone else" . That it specifically is illegal to do that without permission if you use a machine.
That will force big tech to pay a pittance for it and it will instakill all the small player.
Creating a derivative work without a license to do so would be copyright infringement.
Copyright Infringment strawman argument. When considering AI, we are not talking legal copyright infringement in the relationship between humans vs AI. Humans are mostly concerned with being obsoleted by Big Tech so the real issue is Intellectual Property Theft.
What I see is a system of laws that came about during the Middle Ages and have been manipulated by the powers that be to kill off any good parts of them.
We all knew copyright was broken. It was broken before my grandparents were born. It didn't encourage artists or promise them proper income, it didn't allow creations to gradually move into public domain. It punished all forms of innovation from player pianos to fanfiction on Tumblr.
It's only theft as long as you cling to the failed "copyright" model.
Big tech couldn't steal anything if we don't respect their property rights in the first place.
By reifying copyright under the AI paradigm, we maintain big tech's power over us.
The truth is chatgpt belong to us. ClosedAI is just the compiler of the data.
If we finally end the failed experiment of copyright, we destroy their mote.
I think that with respect to content that’s already on microsoft.com, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding.
Yeah, that's how I've always thought of it.
Its not stolen if it is still there afterwards.
Oh yeah, tell me about Intellectual Property, Patent, Invention, and Ideation thievery, was it still there afterwards? IP theft has been recognized for centuries.
Back to the basement Mustafa Jr..
Yes but you don't have a right to create derivative works which by definition is all that AI can spit out.
I am so glad humans are never derivative with culture. Just look at the movie The Fast and Furious. If we were making derivative works we would live in some crazy world where that would be a franchise with ten movies, six video games, a fashion line, board games, toys, theme park attractions, and an animated series that ran for six seasons.
All of those derivative works are licensed.
Not my point.
Anyone in this thread is creating derivative works and you should not be reading it without the written permission of verge.com's parent company.
You cant steal data. violating copyright (Which ai training does not do) is not theft.
violating copywright (Which ai training does not do)
I would say that's still very much up for debate, legally and morally
At the risk of being pedantic, I should point out that morality doesn't come into the question. Copyright is a matter of law, and nothing else. Personally, I don't consider it a legitimate institution; the immorality is how companies wield it like a cudgel to entrench their control over culture.
copyright is a matter of law, and nothing else
This assertion dismisses the ethical considerations often intertwined with legal principles. Laws (including copyright laws) are influenced by moral and ethical values, and there are often huge books on theories about the validity of certain things which serve as the starting point of collections of laws.
the immorality is how companies wield it like a cudgel to entrench their control over culture
While some companies do exploit copyright laws, not all companies use it in this way and whether it brings more harm than good is a point of discussion. But it can’t be generalized.
This completely overlooks the positive aspects of copyright as well, such as protecting the rights of individual creators and ensuring they can earn something from their own work.
Whether or not copyright law has been violated is not a question of morality.
This assertion dismisses the ethical considerations often intertwined with legal principles.
No, that's stupid. Copyright is a purely legal framework. That's it, end of story. If you still don't understand, reread the entire discussion.
Exactly. Violation of copyright may be an ethical or unethical act, but that doesn't change the fact that copyright law was violated.
So Mustafa steals from the entire world and justifies it by pointing to an abstraction that cannot be proven. It's already complete as they can admit it now and throw Billions at corrupt judges over a decade which will be too late.
These tech-god pyschopaths hate us.
Man this is fucking asinine. No one hates you. Certainly not the actual researchers and engineers building these products.
Capitalism fucks over everyone who's not immediately useful. AI is just modelling algorithms after neurons and discovering that that lets us solve a whole new class of fuzzy pattern matching problems.
The two of them together promises to fuck us over even more because that was one of the main things that we used to be better than computers at, but the solution is not remove the new technology from the equation, it's to remove the old and broken system of resource allocation that has and continues to fuck us no matter what.
Look at this AI paid influencer everybody! Who pays you Mustafa Jr? Most everyone knows that AI is gigging them now. When you steal from the world, that is definite hate but It was meant in the aggregate, stupified sanctimonious simpleton.
P.S. Take your "Capitalism Sucks" Marxist bullshit back to Russia, Vatnik and take Mustafa with you.
Lmao, the dumb capitalist corpo thinks Marxists are motivated by payment.
Learn how to think before you type.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.
When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:
That certainly hasn’t kept many AI companies from claiming that training on copyrighted content is “fair use,” but most haven’t been as brazen as Suleyman when talking about it.
Speaking of brazen, he’s got a choice quote about the purpose of humanity shortly after his “fair use” remark:
Suleyman does seem to think there’s something to the robots.txt idea — that specifying which bots can’t scrape a particular website within a text file might keep people from taking its content.
Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.
The original article contains 351 words, the summary contains 139 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Look, guys! The TLDR bot is stealing!
Yeps. The same way when my coworkers talk about sports ball without the expressed permission of multiple corporations.
Impressive that your coworkers discuss the events exclusively by recalling 60% of the announcer's words and then quoting them verbatim.
I am almost afraid to go down this rabbit hole but I have no idea what you are talking about.
I got the math the wrong way around but read the bottom of the bot's post. The bot's job is to cut the fluff out of articles, and it copy/pastes the remaining text for us to read here.
So my comment should have said 40%, but the point was if we're comparing what the bot did with your coworkers talking about a game, it'd be more akin to them reciting the commentator verbatim.
I thought that even discussing the game without the express permission of the media company you used to watch and the sports league was a violation. Not sure why you are bringing commentary on commentary in it. Again not a sports ball guy but when I do hear people talk about sports they are talking about sports not the person talkimg about sports.
In what country are you not allowed to talk about something you watched
That's funny, so do I.
Hey ChatGPT , download “The Boys” for me.
I can see a lot of comments against copyright here, but has anyone considered the implications of changes to copyright on copyleft?
I argue copyleft is demonstrably socially useful in locking things open. I do wonder if we'll end up the two being different legally....
The web isn't open because we have to pay to access it.
Perfect I will actually just start putting copyrights statements both on my site and in the source code. Ughhhh!!! But fine if you wanna go down this rabbit hole LFG bitch!!!!
And this is why I don't have ANY moral qualms about pirating shit: they'd do it to us in a heartbeat if there was a buck to be made.
*have done
They would?? They are**
I had some, but not anymore.
Pirating Windows for your own personal, private use, which will never directly make you a single dollar: HIGHLY ILLEGAL
Scraping your creative works so they can make billions by selling automated processes that compete against your work: Perfectly fine and normal!
bunch of fuckin art pirates. crying about software piracy while they have their own bots pirating everyone's art.
It’s not even piracy though. I never saw anyone torrent Windows_XP_Home_Cracked.iso and go “Hey guys, check out this operating system I made!”
Do people still pirate Windows? You can download the iso directly from Microsoft's website and you don't need a registration key anymore.
You do need a registration key, but now it's tied to the hardware so it activates as soon as you connect to the network, no need to actually type the registration key.
They’re saying Windows will lock away some customization, but you don’t need a key to use it nowadays.
Sure bud, pirating some Microsoft Studio video games and windows ISOs right now. What? I found them on the open web!
Honestly just pirate their games since they keep buying every fucking studio they can get their grummy hands on
Starlancer was nice I think
I mean, Xbox one/series recently got proof of concept jailbreak, so... I think many people are on board with your thought
DMCA for them, no DMCA for us.
You're always morally justified to steal from Microsoft
So if I see it on the “open web”, I’m free to use it however I please? Oh, I get thrown in jail and everything I own taken away.
If companies are people per “citizens united”, why doesn’t the same apply to them?
And if a company makes a negligent decision, which kills a million people over time, why is no one being put on death row? They can and do have it both ways, but I can still wish for a just world where if companies are people, they can be put to death for mass casualties caused by their decisions.
so we can steal Microsoft's products?
Yes. Exactly. Although there isn't much left worth stealing from Microsoft.
(This was a low-key "Microsoft bad, Linux supreme", comment.)
(And now it's no longer low-key.)
(I'm using a touch-screen keyboard for writing this. And yet I can't open my doors using the keyboard. Ever wondered why that is?)
(Correct, because I forgot my keys at home and didn't put them on my keyboard.)
(Now it's just a –board.)
(Oral diarrhea over. Go get some guhd Linux!)
This is the year of the linux desktop!
By our powers combined, we'll exceed 2% market share!
(no actually, please support linux. I just switched like a month ago and while it's so much better than windows there are so many petty annoyances that will never get resolved unless more people bitch about it and that kind of support needs more users)
You guys already hit better than 4% according to some articles I've seen posted here-ish over the last couple months.
Skype is Worth the most, probably.
Let's be real, they let most of it be stolen
In ex-USSR it was pretty intentional.
That explains why my friend's Xbox got stolen. It was an original Xbox, too. Holds eggs perfectly.
i meant stealing like it all not just some random person's version.
Oh.
In other news: we have lawyers to protect our copyrights, you don't. Suck it.
It's okay to plagiarize books if they're in a library.
No you have to run them through an elaborate model first, then it's totally legit to use someone else's literal words as if they were your own
You're describing how human beings learn and create.
I was actually describing a piece of software, which is not considered a human being, and can in fact be treated differently without any legal or philosophical confusion
I mean, that's how I got through high school. So sure.
copying isn't stealing
If the model isn't overfitted it's also not even copying. By their nature LLMs are transformative which is the whole point of fair use.
So I have a LLM read a book and paraphrase its contents, that's not stealing?
Again, even an exact copy is not stealing. It's copyright infringement. Theft is a different crime.
But paraphrasing is not copyright infringement either. It's no different than Wikipedia having a synopsis for every single episode of a TV series. Telling someone about what a work contains for informational purposes is perfectly fine.
copyright laws are broken. what seems ethical can be illegal and what seems unethical can be legal.
Have I just stolen The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and given it to you?
You've probably not infringed the copyright, only the court can decide though; if you were to be challenged by the rights holder.
I think there are lots of factors in your defence:
But add in some more quotes, flesh it out, and then try to sell it . . . each step weakens the 'fair use' defence.
This the the problem for the LLM, it can be used for many things, and if it has no filter or limit, then eventually the collective derived works might add up to commercial, substantial reuse, and might include enough to have copied a substantial portion of the original. Very hard to determine I'd think. Each individual use might be fair, but did the LLM itself go too far at some point?
Copyright holder probably struggles to challenge the LLM on the basis of all the things infinite mokeys might use it for in future.
I agree with pretty much everything before this but that particular comment was just talking about summaries, which imo is a lot more cut and dry. (SparkNotes, for example)
An LLM by itself is unlimited and unfiltered, but it's not impossible to limit one and sell it. For all the shit OpenAI deserves to get, I have to give them one thing, their copyright restriction system seems to be on par with YouTube. I paid for a month of it when GPT4 came out and tried my hardest to bypass it, but it won't even give me copyrighted texts when the words are all replaced with synonyms or jumbled around.
I think if someone's offering their LLM as a service and has a system like that in place, they aren't stealing any more than YouTube is stealing. Otherwise I agree that there's a strong argument for copyright infringement.
copying is not theft
"Copying is theft" is the argument of corporations for ages, but if they want our data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.
They got themselves into quite a contradiction.
You realize that half of Lemmy is tying themselves in inconsistent logical knots trying to escape the reverse conundrum?
Copying isn't stealing and never was. Our IP system that artificially restricts information has never made sense in the digital age, and yet now everyone is on here cheering copyright on.
You wouldn't download a car!
No we don't, copying copyrighted material is copyright infringement. Which is illegal. that does not make it theft though.
Oversimplifying the issue makes for an uninformed debate.
any content you produce is automatically copyrighted
Yeah, I'm not a fan of AI but I'm generally of the view that anything posted on the internet, visible without a login, is fair game for indexing a search engine, snapshotting a backup (like the internet archive's Wayback Machine), or running user extensions on (including ad blockers). Is training an AI model all that different?
You can't be for piracy but against LLMs fair the same reason
And I think most of the people on Lemmy are for piracy,
I'm not in favor of piracy or LLMs. I'm also not a fan of copyright as it exists today (I think we should go back to the 1790 US definition of copyright).
I think a lot of people here on lemmy who are "in favor of piracy" just hate our current copyright system, and that's quite understandable and I totally agree with them. Having a work protected for your entire lifetime sucks.
The problem with copyright has nothing to do with terms limits. Those exacerbate the problem, but the fundamental problem with copyright and IP law is that it is a system of artificial scarcity where there is no need for one.
Rather than reward creators when their information is used, we hamfistedly try and prevent others from using that information so that people have to pay them to use it sometimes.
Capitalism is flat out the wrong system for distributing digital information, because as soon as information is digitized it is effectively infinitely abundant which sends its value to $0.
Copyright is not a capitalist idea, it's collectivist. See copyright in the Soviet Union, the initial bill of which was passed in 1925, right near the start of the USSR.
A pure capitalist system would have no copyright, and works would instead be protected through exclusivity (I.e. paywalls) and DRM. Copyright is intended to promote sharing by providing a period of exclusivity (temporary monopoly on a work). Whether it achieves those goals is certainly up for debate.
Long terms go against any benefit to society that copyright might have. I think it does have a benefit, but that benefit is pretty limited and should probably only last 10-15 years. I think eliminating copyright entirely would leave most people worse off and probably mostly benefit large orgs that can afford expensive DRM schemes in much the same way that our current copyright duration disproportionately benefits large orgs.
Yes, it kind of is. A search engine just looks for keywords and links, and that's all it retains after crawling a site. It's not producing any derivative works, it's merely looking up an index of keywords to find matches.
An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues. Whether a particular generated result violates copyright depends on the license of the works it's based on and how much of those works it uses. So it's complicated, but there's very much a copyright argument there.
My brain also takes information and creates derivative works from it.
Shit, am I also a data thief?
That depends, do you copy verbatim? Or do you process and understand concepts, and then create new works based on that understanding? If you copy verbatim, that's plagiarism and you're a thief. If you create your own answer, it's not.
Current AI doesn't actually "understand" anything, and "learning" is just grabbing input data. If you ask it a question, it's not understanding anything, it just matches search terms to the part of the training data that matches, and regurgitates a mix of it, and usually omits the sources. That's it.
It's a tricky line in journalism since so much of it is borrowed, and it's likewise tricky w/ AI, but the main difference IMO is attribution, good journalists cite sources, AI rarely does.
Derivative works are not copyright infringement. If LLMs are spitting out exact copies, or near-enough-to-exact copies, that’s one thing. But as you said, the whole point is to generate derivative works.
They absolutely are, unless it's covered by "fair use." A "derivative work" doesn't mean you created something that's inspired by a work, but that you've modified the the work and then distributed the modified version.
None of those things replace that content, though.
Look, I dunno if this is legally a copyrights issue, but as a society, I think a lot of people have decided they're willing to yield to social media and search engine indexers, but not to AI training, you know? The same way I might consent to eating a mango but not a banana.
Issue is power imbalance.
There's a clear difference between a guy in his basement on his personal computer sampling music the original musicians almost never seen a single penny from, and a megacorp trying to drive out creative professionals from the industry in the hopes they can then proceed to hike up the prices to use their generative AI software.
Didnt you hear? We stan draconian IP laws now because AI bad.
Is it that or is it that the laws are selectively applied on little guys and ignored once you make enough money? It certainly looks that way. Once you've achieved a level of "fuck you money" it doesn't matter how unscrupulously you got there. I'm not sure letting the big guys get away with it while little guys still get fucked over is as big of a win as you think it is?
Examples:
The Pirate Bay: Only made enough money to run the site and keep the admins living a middle class lifestyle.
VERDICT: Bad, wrong, and evil. Must be put in jail.
OpenAI: Claims to be non-profit, then spins off for-profit wing. Makes a mint in a deal with Microsoft.
VERDICT: Only the goodest of good people and we must allow them to continue doing so.
The IP laws are stupid but letting fucking rich twats get away with it while regular people will still get fucked by the same rules is kind of a fucking stupid ass hill to die on.
But sure, if we allow the giant companies to do it, SOMEHOW the same rules will "trickle down" to regular people. I think I've heard that story before... No, they only make exceptions for people who can basically print money. They'll still fuck you and me six ways to Sunday for the same.
I mean, the guys who ran Jetflicks, a pirate streaming site, are being hit with potentially 48 year sentences. Longer than a lot of way more serious fucking crimes. I've literally seen murderers get half that.
But yeah, somehow, the same rules will end up being applied to us? My ass. They're literally jailing people for it right now. If that wasn't the case, maybe this argument would have legs.
But AI companies? Totes okay, bro.
The laws are currently the same for everyone when it comes to what you can use to train an AI with. I, as an individual, can use whatever public facing data I wish to build or fine tune AI models, same as Microsoft.
If we make copyright laws even stronger, the only one getting locked out of the game are the little guys. Microsoft, google and company can afford to pay ridiculous prices for datasets. What they don't own mainly comes from aggregators like Reddit, Getty, Instagram and Stack.
Boosting copyright laws essentially kill all legal forms of open source AI. It would force the open source scene to go underground as a pirate network and lead to the scenario you mentioned.
Yes, it is a travesty that people are being hounded for sharing information, but the solution to that isn't to lock up information tighter by restricting access to the open web and saying if you download something we put up to be freely accessed and then use it in a way we don't like you owe us.
The solution to bad laws being applied unevenly isn't to apply the bad laws to everyone equally, its to get rid of the bad laws.
That's law in general...
Aight, I'ma steal leaked Windows XP source code :3
He spoke carelessly, but he didn't exactly say what the author said he said. You can in fact do many things with it. Copyright doesn't care what you do if you aren't copying. That's the definition of the word.
So I can pirate as many movies as I want as long as I'm only watching them?
Let these rich guys keep talking for a sec. I can get behind this somewhat.
Yes, it's streamer making a copy. You're fine. Sharing is caring. Copyright is a mental illness.
Well, I happen to have a great deal of respect for and routinely offer my support to those who suffer from mental illnesses, so maybe find a better way to say this that doesn't denigrate disabled people.
I'm sorry but that's what illness means. It is not an identity.
Isn't web scraping copying ?
No. It's only illegal if you republish what you scrape. Absolutely nothing prevents any company from scraping the web and using that information internally.
I think that depends how you write your web scraper. Of course the web scraper is going to load the page, just like your web browser does, which by all accounts is not an issue. What happens after the page is loaded depends on how the software is written.
Well see what the results of the music industry vs suno.ai will be
he gets paid a lot to not speak carelessly
There is a thing called usage licenses.
So its no longer intellectual property if its on the internet? The nerves on this guy...
So you could just copy and use every single helpful support article from Microsoft?
Oh shit, there aren't any
Just yet another proof, that the more 0's you have in your valuation, the less the laws apply to you
Apparently he thinks data is like the ducks you find in the park
Wait, you can steal from those ducks?
No one ever tells you this, but you can just take the ducks. Just like with the city pigeons. Just make sure you don't take a government drone by accident.
They're the same thing.
!birdsarentreal@lemmy.world
In that I can take a picture of them and you wouldn't notice or be impacted by it?
You can take the ducks you know
Clearly ducks you find in the park is just free meat. Why else would they be there?
To ask of you have any grapes
Does Netflix count as the open web? It definitely feels like so, but I'm ready for a wealth hoarder to tell me otherwise!
I agree
Is his personal-information on the dark-web?
Is he saying that if his personal-information is on the dark-web, then it's perfectly-OK for everybody & their robot to be using it??
XOR is he saying that there are 2 kinds of law:
1 for protecting his entitlement,
the other for disallowing rights from the lives he consumes, through his beloved herd/corporation/pseudo-person?
( obviously, he's already answered the latter )
Oh hey, Microsoft support moving away from copyright!
He's right, information wants to be free. Don't support stronger copyright just to spite people it'll benefit
In fact just the other day information wanted a ham sandwhich before I set it free so it could find more people not on an empty stomach :/
Essentially the joke everyone made about nfts.
Copyright infrigment is not theft, training models is not copyright infringement either. We need a law equivalent to when an artist says "he's inpired by someone else" . That it specifically is illegal to do that without permission if you use a machine. That will force big tech to pay a pittance for it and it will instakill all the small player.
Creating a derivative work without a license to do so would be copyright infringement.
Copyright Infringment strawman argument. When considering AI, we are not talking legal copyright infringement in the relationship between humans vs AI. Humans are mostly concerned with being obsoleted by Big Tech so the real issue is Intellectual Property Theft.
artificial INTELLIGENCE stole our Intellectual Property
Do you see it now?
What I see is a system of laws that came about during the Middle Ages and have been manipulated by the powers that be to kill off any good parts of them.
We all knew copyright was broken. It was broken before my grandparents were born. It didn't encourage artists or promise them proper income, it didn't allow creations to gradually move into public domain. It punished all forms of innovation from player pianos to fanfiction on Tumblr.
It's only theft as long as you cling to the failed "copyright" model.
Big tech couldn't steal anything if we don't respect their property rights in the first place.
By reifying copyright under the AI paradigm, we maintain big tech's power over us.
The truth is chatgpt belong to us. ClosedAI is just the compiler of the data.
If we finally end the failed experiment of copyright, we destroy their mote.
Yeah, that's how I've always thought of it.
Its not stolen if it is still there afterwards.
Oh yeah, tell me about Intellectual Property, Patent, Invention, and Ideation thievery, was it still there afterwards? IP theft has been recognized for centuries.
Back to the basement Mustafa Jr..
Yes but you don't have a right to create derivative works which by definition is all that AI can spit out.
I am so glad humans are never derivative with culture. Just look at the movie The Fast and Furious. If we were making derivative works we would live in some crazy world where that would be a franchise with ten movies, six video games, a fashion line, board games, toys, theme park attractions, and an animated series that ran for six seasons.
All of those derivative works are licensed.
Not my point.
Anyone in this thread is creating derivative works and you should not be reading it without the written permission of verge.com's parent company.
You cant steal data. violating copyright (Which ai training does not do) is not theft.
At the risk of being pedantic, I should point out that morality doesn't come into the question. Copyright is a matter of law, and nothing else. Personally, I don't consider it a legitimate institution; the immorality is how companies wield it like a cudgel to entrench their control over culture.
This assertion dismisses the ethical considerations often intertwined with legal principles. Laws (including copyright laws) are influenced by moral and ethical values, and there are often huge books on theories about the validity of certain things which serve as the starting point of collections of laws.
While some companies do exploit copyright laws, not all companies use it in this way and whether it brings more harm than good is a point of discussion. But it can’t be generalized.
This completely overlooks the positive aspects of copyright as well, such as protecting the rights of individual creators and ensuring they can earn something from their own work.
Whether or not copyright law has been violated is not a question of morality.
No, that's stupid. Copyright is a purely legal framework. That's it, end of story. If you still don't understand, reread the entire discussion.
Exactly. Violation of copyright may be an ethical or unethical act, but that doesn't change the fact that copyright law was violated.
There is no moral issue.
Relevant
https://www.libraryvision.org/digitization/book-scanning-legality/
So Mustafa steals from the entire world and justifies it by pointing to an abstraction that cannot be proven. It's already complete as they can admit it now and throw Billions at corrupt judges over a decade which will be too late.
These tech-god pyschopaths hate us.
Man this is fucking asinine. No one hates you. Certainly not the actual researchers and engineers building these products.
Capitalism fucks over everyone who's not immediately useful. AI is just modelling algorithms after neurons and discovering that that lets us solve a whole new class of fuzzy pattern matching problems.
The two of them together promises to fuck us over even more because that was one of the main things that we used to be better than computers at, but the solution is not remove the new technology from the equation, it's to remove the old and broken system of resource allocation that has and continues to fuck us no matter what.
Look at this AI paid influencer everybody! Who pays you Mustafa Jr? Most everyone knows that AI is gigging them now. When you steal from the world, that is definite hate but It was meant in the aggregate, stupified sanctimonious simpleton.
P.S. Take your "Capitalism Sucks" Marxist bullshit back to Russia, Vatnik and take Mustafa with you.
Lmao, the dumb capitalist corpo thinks Marxists are motivated by payment.
Learn how to think before you type.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.
When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:
That certainly hasn’t kept many AI companies from claiming that training on copyrighted content is “fair use,” but most haven’t been as brazen as Suleyman when talking about it.
Speaking of brazen, he’s got a choice quote about the purpose of humanity shortly after his “fair use” remark:
Suleyman does seem to think there’s something to the robots.txt idea — that specifying which bots can’t scrape a particular website within a text file might keep people from taking its content.
Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.
The original article contains 351 words, the summary contains 139 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Look, guys! The TLDR bot is stealing!
Yeps. The same way when my coworkers talk about sports ball without the expressed permission of multiple corporations.
Impressive that your coworkers discuss the events exclusively by recalling 60% of the announcer's words and then quoting them verbatim.
I am almost afraid to go down this rabbit hole but I have no idea what you are talking about.
I got the math the wrong way around but read the bottom of the bot's post. The bot's job is to cut the fluff out of articles, and it copy/pastes the remaining text for us to read here.
So my comment should have said 40%, but the point was if we're comparing what the bot did with your coworkers talking about a game, it'd be more akin to them reciting the commentator verbatim.
I thought that even discussing the game without the express permission of the media company you used to watch and the sports league was a violation. Not sure why you are bringing commentary on commentary in it. Again not a sports ball guy but when I do hear people talk about sports they are talking about sports not the person talkimg about sports.
In what country are you not allowed to talk about something you watched
That's funny, so do I.
Hey ChatGPT , download “The Boys” for me.
I can see a lot of comments against copyright here, but has anyone considered the implications of changes to copyright on copyleft?
I argue copyleft is demonstrably socially useful in locking things open. I do wonder if we'll end up the two being different legally....
The web isn't open because we have to pay to access it.
Perfect I will actually just start putting copyrights statements both on my site and in the source code. Ughhhh!!! But fine if you wanna go down this rabbit hole LFG bitch!!!!