Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI::The AI community needs to take copyright lawsuits seriously.
Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI::The AI community needs to take copyright lawsuits seriously.
Some of the prior cases described in this article, as precedents that could spell trouble for OpenAI, frankly sound like miscarriages of justice. Using copyright to prevent organizations from photocopying articles for internal use? What the heck?
If anything, my take home message is that the reach of copyright law is too long and needs to be taken down a peg.
You are not wrong that monopolies granted by copyright are regularly and unfairly abused.
That being said, AI trainers are getting away with plagiarism right now. More importantly, it’s not just violation of a single copy, it’s potentially the creation of tools that enable mass derivative copies. Authors that create training data need to be compensated.
There should not be a problem with that. The people who work on training datasets are already being paid.
The reason you are getting downvoted is that these lawsuits are not about that. These are about giving money to corporations like the NYT - or Reddit, or Facebook, etc - for the “intellectual property” that they already have lying around. It’s pure grift.
Because the creation of all that is already paid for, that leaves all the more money for lawyers and PR campaigns to extract money for nothing from society.
How are the people whose articles and comments are being scraped compensated?
“This perfectly good movie has already been made and paid for, that means I can watch it without compensating the studio.”
I do not agree with Reddit selling the comments of their users. Even so that’s a ridiculous statement to make.
By people who work on training datasets I mean, EG, the people on Amazon Mechanical Turk. I am not working on a dataset by writing this comment. I’m putting some things straight and getting exactly the payment I was promised - IE none.
Let’s take the NYT as an example. To publish their newspapers, they need to pay reporters, but also editors and assistants. They also need offices, and for those they need to pay maintenance and janitorial staff. To get it out there, they need printers, server admins and such.
In order for this to work, the NYT needs to make back the money that they have paid these people, plus some profit for the owners. This has already been achieved for any issue that’s older than a few days. Before the internet, either an issue sold enough or it didn’t. No one cares about yesterday’s news. I doubt the internet changes that very much. That’s what I mean by “it’s already paid for”.
For a movie, the time horizon is probably a year or so. IDK to be honest. AFAIK, it used to be that if a blockbuster did not make a profit in cinemas, it was over. Maybe the time horizon was longer for direct-to-DVD productions. I guarantee you that no corporations plans ahead more than a few years. Patents last only 20 years and that’s more than enough to finance all the expense for R&D that has created modern tech.
I think it is absolutely ridiculous that corporations can still extract money for something that was made in the 1940ies and even earlier. That does not pay for movies, because it’s not money that was ever calculated with. It only pays for the creation of paywalls. As long as enforcing a copyright pays for that enforcement, it will be done.
So the moment a property breaks even, + makes “some profit”, you should no longer need to pay for it? Only when people still “care”, in that case they should pay?
Just because it’s a news article or a comment doesn’t mean it’s fair game all of a sudden.
And movies can make back their budget in the opening week(end) when they’re popular. The timeframe is irrelevant for your argument. At least if we’re talking about anything less than a decade or two old, because…
… with this I do agree.
That’s not what I wrote, is it?
The problem with your idea here is that some movies/games/etc never make back the investment. That would mean that they would never run out of copyright if we did it that way. That some movies are duds also means that, on average, the rate of return on such investments is dragged down.
In a functioning market, the average ROI should be the same across the board. If something has a lower return, then people simply don’t invest in it. That’s clear, I hope. This means, that putting a cap on the profit that may be expected will reduce investments.
Obviously, the only returns that matter for this reasoning, are expected returns. Only the expected returns fund movies, etc., and that’s why the timeframe matters.
At this point, ideology (or philosophy) becomes important. One has to ask: What is property about?
There are different philosophical views around this subject, but I am really only concerned with the practical outcome. The political right tends to hold an expansive, absolute view of property rights, to the point of rejecting taxation as illegitimate. The original definition of the political right was as supporters of the monarchy. It makes sense that the right would morph into something that supports all kinds of heritable privilege or right. The anti-capitalistic right seems to have largely disappeared. They often don’t agree that intellectual property is property.
The left tends to hold more nuanced and pragmatic views. Property rights are balanced against other rights; the interests of other people and society at large. The US Constitution takes this view of copyrights and patents. [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.
This latter view is, more or less, one to which I subscribe. Without copyright, there would be only public domain. Copyright integrates creative works into a capitalistic system by turning them into capital. Intellectual property enables people to make a profit with intellectual products. However, there is a clear limit to how much profit one may extract. One may only expect that profit, which actually incentivizes intellectual production. I actually hold the general view that all (commercial) property is only legitimate as long as it works beneficially for society.
So, I do not believe that anyone is entitled to windfall profits. I have published stuff on the web for my own reasons. Other people have found a new use for that by creating AI training datasets. I do not believe I have any moral justification to demand a share of their work.
I hope that clears it up.
Clearly you do not agree with this view. Obviously, you have some more absolutist view of intellectual property. I would appreciate it if you laid out your view of things. You don’t need to answer these question, I’m just putting them here to say what is unclear: How does one create or obtain intellectual property? What can be intellectual property and what are the limits? To what does this property entitle one?
Finally: How come that these threads bring out so much support for right wing views? Looking at other threads, I would have expected left wing views to dominate. Looking at the piracy community around the corner, I would have thought that even among the right, copyright abolitionist views would dominate here. What gives?
That’s exactly what you wrote?
Your argument was that the sources that get scraped have already been paid for. I don’t see how it’s any different for newspapers than it is for movies and such. It’s not like news agencies are eternally profitable and never go bankrupt. Nor do I want corporations to profit for free off the comments I wrote, even if I may or may not have signed my soul away in some EULA nobody reads.
I take it that my post was too long to read. The only thing I can do is write more, which obviously will not help. So there’s nothing I can do.
I don’t believe you actually want that right-wing hellhole you are clamoring for. But in the end, what counts is what you vote for, what you ask for, and not what you want inside.
No. They fucking aren’t. 🤦🏼♂️
Exactly! Copyright law is terrible. We need to hold AI companies to the same standard that everyone else is held. Then we might actually get big corporations lobbying to improve copyright law for once. Giving them a free pass right now would be a terrible waste of an opportunity in addition to being an injustice.