OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use
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Gatekeeping absolutely was the intention of copyright, not to provide artists with income.
By gatekeeping I mean the use of digital methods to verify or restrict use of purchased copyright material after a sale such as Digital rights management, encryption such as CSS/AACS/HDCP, or obfuscation.
The whole "you didn't buy a copy, you bought a license" BS undermines what copyright was supposed to be IMO.
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The issue being raised is copyright infringement, not the quality of the results. Writers "borrow" each other's clever figures of speech all the time without payment or attribution. I'm sure I have often copypasted code without permission. AI does nothing on its own, it's always a tool used by human beings. I think the copyright argument against AI is built on a false distinction between using one tool vs another.
My larger argument is that nobody has an inherent right to control what everybody else does with some idea they've created. For many thousands of years people saw stuff and freely imitated it. Oh look, there's an "arch" - I think I'll build a building like that. Oh look, that tribe uses that root to make medicine, let's do the same thing. This process was known as "the spread of civilization" until somebody figured out that an authority structure could give people dibs on their ideas and force other people to pay to copy them. As we evolve more capabilities (like AI) I think it's time to figure out another way to reward creators without getting in the way of improvement, instead of hanging onto a "Hey, that's Mine!" mentality that does more to enrich copy producers than it does to enrich creators.
Yes, whether copyright should exist is a different discussion than how AI is violating it in a very different way than snippets being reused in different contexts as part of a new creative work.
Intentionally using a single line is very different than scooping up all the data and hitting a randomizer until it stumbles into some combination that happens to look usable. Kind of like how a single business jacking up prices is different than a monopoly jacking up all the prices.
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Copyrights should have never been extended longer than 5 years in the first place, either remove draconian copyright laws or outlaw LLM style models using copyrighted material, corpos can't have both.
I agree that copyright is far too long, but at 5 years there's hardly incentive to produce. You could write a novel and have it only starting to get popular after 5 years.
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But I can't pirate copyrighted materials to "train" my own real intelligence.
Now you get why we were all told to hate AI. It's a patriot act for copywrite and IP laws. We should be able too. But that isn't where our discussions were steered was it
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Bro, what? Some books take more than 5 years to write and you want their authors to only have authorship of it for 5 years? Wtf. I have published books that are a dozen years old and I'm in my mid-30s. This is an insane take.
You don't have to stop selling when a book becomes public domain, publishers and authors sell public domain/commons books frequently, it's just you won't have a monopoly on the contents after the copyright expires.
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But I can't pirate copyrighted materials to "train" my own real intelligence.
you can, however, go to your local library and read any book ever written for free
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you can, however, go to your local library and read any book ever written for free
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You don't have to stop selling when a book becomes public domain, publishers and authors sell public domain/commons books frequently, it's just you won't have a monopoly on the contents after the copyright expires.
how about: tiered copy rights?
after 5 years, you lose some copyright but not all?it’s a tricky one but impoverished people should still be able to access culture…
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I don’t think they’re wrong in saying that if they aren’t allowed to train on copyrighted works then they will fall behind. Maybe I missed it in the article, but Japan for example has that exact law (use of copyright to train generative AI is allowed).
Personally I think we need to give them somewhat of an out by letting them do it but then taxing the fuck out of the resulting product. “You can use copyrighted works for training but then 50% of your profits are taxed”. Basically a recognition that the sum of all copyrighted works is a societal good and not just an individual copyright holders.
No, taxes implies a monopoly on the training data. The government profits. The rights holders get nothing back.
If private data is deemed public for AI training then the results of that training (code+weights+source list) should also be deemed public.
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I agree that copyright is far too long, but at 5 years there's hardly incentive to produce. You could write a novel and have it only starting to get popular after 5 years.
You don't have to stop selling when it becomes public domain, people sell books, movies, music, etc that are all in the public domain and people choose it over free versions all the time because of convenience, patroning arts, etc.
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Unless it's deemed a "bad" one by your local klanned karenhood and removed from the library for being tOo WoKe
i almost wrote that caveat, but decided to leave it low hanging….
as far as i know, though, that only applies to children’s books at this point… -
you can, however, go to your local library and read any book ever written for free
So can the AI
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As far as the ai industry has already broken copyright laws. It will not be actually intelligent for a long time. Just like crypto this seems like a global scam that has squandered resources for a dream of a free workforce. Instead of working together to try and create an ai there are lots of technology companies doing the same ineffective bull
Oh yes. Deepseek can quote from copyright sources. So can openAI models, but they are programmed not to.
Facebook trained on the torrent of Annas archive.
The copyright horse has left the stable.
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Unless it's deemed a "bad" one by your local klanned karenhood and removed from the library for being tOo WoKe
klanned karenhood
Yoink
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If your business model only works if you break the Law, that mean's you're just another Organised Crime group.
Organized crime exists to make money; the way OpenAI is burning through it, they're more Disorganized Crime
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I don’t think they’re wrong in saying that if they aren’t allowed to train on copyrighted works then they will fall behind. Maybe I missed it in the article, but Japan for example has that exact law (use of copyright to train generative AI is allowed).
Personally I think we need to give them somewhat of an out by letting them do it but then taxing the fuck out of the resulting product. “You can use copyrighted works for training but then 50% of your profits are taxed”. Basically a recognition that the sum of all copyrighted works is a societal good and not just an individual copyright holders.
50% is too little if you want to allow that
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Cool. Name one. A specific one that we can directly reference, where they themselves can make that claim. Not a secondary source, but a primary one. And specifically, not the production companies either, keeping in mind that the argument that I'm making is that copyright law, was intended to protect those who control the means of production and the production system itself. Not the artists.
The artists I know, and I know several. They make their money the way almost all people make money, by contracting for their time and services, or through selling tickets and merchandise, and through patreon subscriptions: in other words, the way artists and creatives have always made their money. The "product" in the sense of their music or art being a product, is given away practically for free. In fact, actually for free in the case of the most successful artists I know personally. If they didn't give this "product" of their creativity away for free, they would not be able to survive.
There is practically 0 revenue through copyright. Production companies like Universal make money through copyright. Copyright was also built, and historically based intended for, and is currently used for, the protection of production systems: not artists.
I don’t know where you are, but here in Norway, people tend to get paid when their work is used for commercial or entertainment purposes.
Of course, very few can live off of royalties alone, but a lot of artists get a considerable amount income from their previous works.
(Edited in total, I matched the anger I felt from what I was answering to, and decided to moderate)
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you can, however, go to your local library and read any book ever written for free
any book ever written
Damn! Which library are you going to?!
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Thanks that's very insightful and I'll amend my position to 15 years 5 may be just a little zealous. 100 year US copyrights have been choking innovation due to things like Disney led trade group lobbyists, 15 years would be a huge boost to many creators being able to leverage more IPs and advancements being held in limbo unused or poorly used by corpo entities.
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Now you get why we were all told to hate AI. It's a patriot act for copywrite and IP laws. We should be able too. But that isn't where our discussions were steered was it
It's copyright, not copywrite---you know, the right to copy. Copywriting is what ad people do. And what does this have to do with the PATRIOT Act?