5 ms·

The training jurisdiction one is interesting. Are future companies going to exclusively train their models in a copyright lack country? Seems like jurisdiction

The training jurisdiction one is interesting. Are future companies going to exclusively train their models in a copyright lack country? Seems like jurisdiction would be based on the copyright of the allegedly infringed images, and UK-based users creating copyright infringing copies in the UK. But that's apparently not the law or case law in the UK yet.

gumballindie 3y ago
As anyone stealing data or other digital goods in countries that dont respect property they will be punished when trying to sell in countries there property is protected.
- whythre 3y ago
  Still not convinced training AI is theft, and I think copyright law is a cudgel used by powerful corpos to extract rent and smash innovation.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    Yep. That is the question. Anyone that immediately comes back with “it’s stealing!”, especially those that were confidently saying it when this first became an issue, long before they would’ve had any time to contemplate it deeply, are just proving that techies’ sense of transferable expertise is completely unfounded.
    - Retric 3y ago
      No it isn’t, because ‘steeling’ is allowed. There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. However being a derivative work isn’t enough to guarantee copyright infringement. So, the only question is if we are going to carve out an exception here or not. The idea someone can use a VCR to copy live TV and let people watch it later came out of a court case not copyright law. There’s a lot of such exceptions, but getting one isn’t guaranteed.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        There are some ironclad exceptions but they would have to make it through the dysfunctional Congress. The big one is recipes. Recipes under the current copyright regime in the US are considered non-copyrightable facts, which is why every cookbook and recipe blog has lots of copyrightable splash photos and personal anecdotes. Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box.
        blibble 3y ago
        not sure what Congress has to do with a case in the UK fair use is mostly a US concept, there is no such thing in the UK or most other countries
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        It seems like UK and EU agree that you cannot copyright a recipe other than maybe the exact way it was written: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-property-rights-in-recipes-and-food https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-pr... https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ Though you can patent novel methods of food production, which is also true in the US. The root statement is still the same, legislatures can amend copyright laws as they wish if they really care. I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now, but that’s my impression from across the pond.
        blibble 3y ago
        > I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now in terms of ability to legislate it works considerably better than the US congress up to you if you call that well functioning
        surfacedetail 3y ago
        You can only copyright the actual expression of a recipe as a literary work, but the functional aspect, the cake let's say, isn't copyrightable.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. There isn’t much to debate, unless of course, you wish to benefit from that theft. Powerful corpos can train whatever they wish against the data they own. For instance, microsoft can train its bots on microsoft’s source code, instead of people’s code, but that is not going to happen because they are aware of the implications - the procedural generators are exactly that and nothing more. Meanwhile we cant use their products without a license. So if they decides to play this game then so should we.
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. Using publicly available information doesn’t require anybody’s consent.
    - tavavex 3y ago
      Theft is the act of taking away someone else's property. "Using" (aka copying) the public data I create isn't theft, be it with my consent or without. It may be copyright infringement under certain conditions, but arguing that this infringement is stealing is like arguing that digital piracy and shoplifting are basically the same thing.
    - Ukv 3y ago
      > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft Are text snippets, thumbnnails and site caches shown by search engines (on an opt-out basis) "theft"? If you draw a car, which you can do due to having seen many individually-copyrighted car designs, are you stealing from auto manufacturers? Have I just committed theft by using a portion of your comment above as a quote? I don't claim here that statistical model fitting inherently needs to be treated the same as the above examples, but rather use examples to show that the bar of "using" is far too broad. Legally, copyright infringement in the US requires that the works are substantially similar and not covered by Fair Use. Morally, I believe that artificial scarcity, such as evergreening of medical patents, is detrimental and needs to be prevented wherever feasible - and wouldn't call any kind of copying/sharing/piracy "theft". The digital equivalent of theft is, for example, account theft where you're actually removing the object from the owner's possession.
  - Loughla 3y ago
    What is your justification for AI training not being theft?
    - artninja1988 3y ago
      Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody
      - oblib 3y ago
        >>Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody That's a perfect oxymoron.
      - anonymousab 3y ago
        The major corps and tech companies loved to claim otherwise for years as it suited their interests.
    - gedy 3y ago
      Fair use. (Even if the creator doesn't like that)
    - prvc 3y ago
      If including a copyrighted work in an AI training corpus is theft because of its influence on some artificial neural net, then so is viewing it by a human being, whose memory is now somehow the property of the copyright holder, an absurd conclusion.
      - poidos 3y ago
        Your premise that a neural net is equivalent to a human brain seems much more absurd.
        prvc 3y ago
        You wouldn't look at a car.
      - 3y ago
  - JambalayaJim 3y ago
    Training a model on another person’s work shouldn’t be considered theft, but the model also shouldn’t be allowed to generate profits. Without of course compensating the owner of the training data. Someone needs to come up with a royalty structure for this stuff.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway14356 3y ago
    if you can legally use something its not stealing. Even the argument that its logical to call it that isn't certain. If i take your picture I own it? If you take a picture and i upload it to fb meta gets to use it? If I publish your book under my name and no one finds out, did I write it? If no author can be found, may I read it?
    - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - rasz 3y ago
    Thats because the word 'training' is doing all the heavy lifting here. Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database. Humans learn, humans train, computers encode data. You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie.
    - davely 3y ago
      > Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database. But it isn’t. It’s just a series of vectors that point to a likely occurrence of the next word or pixel or bit in a sequence.
      - rasz 3y ago
        You are trying to argue encoding semantics, but at the end of a day the "AI" was completely happy to recite Carmack's Fast inverse square root including original comments verbatim word for word. https://twitter.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://twitter.com/StefanKarpinski/status/14109710611816816...
        surfacedetail 3y ago
        Reciting common text or common license elements and commentary isn't necessarily copyright infringement.
        davely 3y ago
        With the way these AI models work, that data isn’t stored in a database though. It’s hard for people to understand this concept, but the fact that a model repeated some data verbatim is a happy coincidence (!) solely based on patterns of data that it seen before. I think people have also have a hard time with how these models are trained. They are vacuuming up all sorts of data and learning from them by creating vectors that determine how follow-up data should be generated. Sure, the original creators of this content aren’t being compensated or even recognized for it. I don’t have a good idea on how that should be handled. For normal humans though, looking at art or reading a book, and later repeating some passage or drawing something from your own memory is not a crime. (Unless you’re sharing the DeCSS source code I guess…) Slightly changing the topic here, but I do wonder what were to happen if someone wrote a program called “Monkeys on Typewriters” that just iterated through various combinations of characters (or bits or pixels) and was able to recreate things verbatim. Is that random happenstance copyright infringement?
  - jterrys 3y ago
    I think using data that you don't have the copyrights to train AI is theft. That being said, Getty is hardly the paragon of goodwill considering they regularly steal from public domain databases, issue DMCA takedown requests of the stolen content from said databases, and then turn around to sell it to unwitting people for a subscription. They own none of the copyrights for what they are doing but have been allowed to get away with it.
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      Have you only read books you own the copyright to? What’s the legal distinction between you learning and AI learning?
      - keonix 3y ago
        If I regurgiate something I read in copyrighted book without proper license that also would be theft, no distinction there. I'm not distributing my brain, at least same (but probably more restrictive) should apply to models - training is okay, but using and distributing should be limited by copyright
        broken-kebab 3y ago
        Explaining anything publicly based on my understanding I got reading books would be illegal following this logic. I'm not sure this is how it works.
        visarga 3y ago
        They want to muddle the distinction between ideas and expression. You can't copyright ideas. Everyone is entitled to copy ideas.
        keonix 3y ago
        It would not be illegal based on fair use (though you have to be careful there also), but if you try to regurgiate large portions of the book then it would be. And we do know that models regurgiate training material verbatim (Copilot)
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    I think that if you stick to a definition of 'fair use' that allows the slurping of entire corpuses, then copyright doesn't have any teeth anymore. If the license makes the data public viewing, like with websites, then slurp all you want. If the license forbids automated bulk processing, then stop whining about fair use and pay for a license that allows bulk processing. "Out system actively uses every single byte of data to produce any output" is so obviously not the intention fair use clauses.
    - surfacedetail 3y ago
      Fair use doesn't exist in the UK.
  - vohk 3y ago
    While I somewhat agree with that take on copyright, I think you have to pick a lane to keep that position coherent: Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation, or You throw out copyright completely in this context, but that means the resulting models cannot be treated as proprietary either unless they were produced using absolutely no unlicensed training data. I think there is an argument for both. Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. The current status quo is perfectly described by powerful corpos extracting rent. Billions for themselves and pennies for the average artist.
    - tavavex 3y ago
      > Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation I don't think that current copyright laws automatically entitles people to royalties from something like AI-generated imagery. The dichotomy you've presented here isn't pro-copyright vs anti-copyright, but "so pro-copyright that they argue for expanding the current laws" vs not. > Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. That definitely benefits all the "powerful corpos" you've mentioned here. Now, Disney, Adobe, Meta etc. can use a fraction of their money to get all the data they would ever need and be the sole profiteers, while all newcomers will face an impassable barrier to entry that prevents them from ever threatening the existing players.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      There is at least one middle ground area where you acknowledge that copyright and intellectual property restrictions should be removed, but that we should also recognize that all of the existing work was created by artists who expected they would have copyright protection. We should in my view not take from artists without their consent, and there is no implied consent when their works were posted at a time they believed they were protected by copyright. This would mean we have to do a few difficult and worthwhile things: explicitly dismantle the copyright system, encourage artists to donate their existing works to the commons, and then only make datasets based on legally collected information. This would also have the side effect of encouraging the development of new training techniques and model designs which are more sample efficient. I am afraid that what we will do instead is allow some erosion of copyright for small creators without dismantling the power large intellectual property holders have over the rest of us.
  - anonymousab 3y ago
    > I think copyright law is a cudgel It is interesting to me that we are finally seeing a case where many smaller, independent artists and creators are using these laws to assert their rights against the encroachment of the moneyed tech interests, and of course now all of the powerful corpos are singing another tune. Rules for thee, not for me.

gumballindie 3y ago

As anyone stealing data or other digital goods in countries that dont respect property they will be punished when trying to sell in countries there property is protected.

whythre 3y ago
Still not convinced training AI is theft, and I think copyright law is a cudgel used by powerful corpos to extract rent and smash innovation.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  Yep. That is the question. Anyone that immediately comes back with “it’s stealing!”, especially those that were confidently saying it when this first became an issue, long before they would’ve had any time to contemplate it deeply, are just proving that techies’ sense of transferable expertise is completely unfounded.
  - Retric 3y ago
    No it isn’t, because ‘steeling’ is allowed. There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. However being a derivative work isn’t enough to guarantee copyright infringement. So, the only question is if we are going to carve out an exception here or not. The idea someone can use a VCR to copy live TV and let people watch it later came out of a court case not copyright law. There’s a lot of such exceptions, but getting one isn’t guaranteed.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      There are some ironclad exceptions but they would have to make it through the dysfunctional Congress. The big one is recipes. Recipes under the current copyright regime in the US are considered non-copyrightable facts, which is why every cookbook and recipe blog has lots of copyrightable splash photos and personal anecdotes. Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box.
      - blibble 3y ago
        not sure what Congress has to do with a case in the UK fair use is mostly a US concept, there is no such thing in the UK or most other countries
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        It seems like UK and EU agree that you cannot copyright a recipe other than maybe the exact way it was written: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-property-rights-in-recipes-and-food https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-pr... https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ Though you can patent novel methods of food production, which is also true in the US. The root statement is still the same, legislatures can amend copyright laws as they wish if they really care. I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now, but that’s my impression from across the pond.
        blibble 3y ago
        > I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now in terms of ability to legislate it works considerably better than the US congress up to you if you call that well functioning
        surfacedetail 3y ago
        You can only copyright the actual expression of a recipe as a literary work, but the functional aspect, the cake let's say, isn't copyrightable.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. There isn’t much to debate, unless of course, you wish to benefit from that theft. Powerful corpos can train whatever they wish against the data they own. For instance, microsoft can train its bots on microsoft’s source code, instead of people’s code, but that is not going to happen because they are aware of the implications - the procedural generators are exactly that and nothing more. Meanwhile we cant use their products without a license. So if they decides to play this game then so should we.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. Using publicly available information doesn’t require anybody’s consent.
  - tavavex 3y ago
    Theft is the act of taking away someone else's property. "Using" (aka copying) the public data I create isn't theft, be it with my consent or without. It may be copyright infringement under certain conditions, but arguing that this infringement is stealing is like arguing that digital piracy and shoplifting are basically the same thing.
  - Ukv 3y ago
    > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft Are text snippets, thumbnnails and site caches shown by search engines (on an opt-out basis) "theft"? If you draw a car, which you can do due to having seen many individually-copyrighted car designs, are you stealing from auto manufacturers? Have I just committed theft by using a portion of your comment above as a quote? I don't claim here that statistical model fitting inherently needs to be treated the same as the above examples, but rather use examples to show that the bar of "using" is far too broad. Legally, copyright infringement in the US requires that the works are substantially similar and not covered by Fair Use. Morally, I believe that artificial scarcity, such as evergreening of medical patents, is detrimental and needs to be prevented wherever feasible - and wouldn't call any kind of copying/sharing/piracy "theft". The digital equivalent of theft is, for example, account theft where you're actually removing the object from the owner's possession.
- Loughla 3y ago
  What is your justification for AI training not being theft?
  - artninja1988 3y ago
    Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody
    - oblib 3y ago
      >>Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody That's a perfect oxymoron.
    - anonymousab 3y ago
      The major corps and tech companies loved to claim otherwise for years as it suited their interests.
  - gedy 3y ago
    Fair use. (Even if the creator doesn't like that)
  - prvc 3y ago
    If including a copyrighted work in an AI training corpus is theft because of its influence on some artificial neural net, then so is viewing it by a human being, whose memory is now somehow the property of the copyright holder, an absurd conclusion.
    - poidos 3y ago
      Your premise that a neural net is equivalent to a human brain seems much more absurd.
      - prvc 3y ago
        You wouldn't look at a car.
    - 3y ago
- JambalayaJim 3y ago
  Training a model on another person’s work shouldn’t be considered theft, but the model also shouldn’t be allowed to generate profits. Without of course compensating the owner of the training data. Someone needs to come up with a royalty structure for this stuff.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  if you can legally use something its not stealing. Even the argument that its logical to call it that isn't certain. If i take your picture I own it? If you take a picture and i upload it to fb meta gets to use it? If I publish your book under my name and no one finds out, did I write it? If no author can be found, may I read it?
  - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
    [flagged]
- rasz 3y ago
  Thats because the word 'training' is doing all the heavy lifting here. Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database. Humans learn, humans train, computers encode data. You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie.
  - davely 3y ago
    > Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database. But it isn’t. It’s just a series of vectors that point to a likely occurrence of the next word or pixel or bit in a sequence.
    - rasz 3y ago
      You are trying to argue encoding semantics, but at the end of a day the "AI" was completely happy to recite Carmack's Fast inverse square root including original comments verbatim word for word. https://twitter.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://twitter.com/StefanKarpinski/status/14109710611816816...
      - surfacedetail 3y ago
        Reciting common text or common license elements and commentary isn't necessarily copyright infringement.
      - davely 3y ago
        With the way these AI models work, that data isn’t stored in a database though. It’s hard for people to understand this concept, but the fact that a model repeated some data verbatim is a happy coincidence (!) solely based on patterns of data that it seen before. I think people have also have a hard time with how these models are trained. They are vacuuming up all sorts of data and learning from them by creating vectors that determine how follow-up data should be generated. Sure, the original creators of this content aren’t being compensated or even recognized for it. I don’t have a good idea on how that should be handled. For normal humans though, looking at art or reading a book, and later repeating some passage or drawing something from your own memory is not a crime. (Unless you’re sharing the DeCSS source code I guess…) Slightly changing the topic here, but I do wonder what were to happen if someone wrote a program called “Monkeys on Typewriters” that just iterated through various combinations of characters (or bits or pixels) and was able to recreate things verbatim. Is that random happenstance copyright infringement?
- jterrys 3y ago
  I think using data that you don't have the copyrights to train AI is theft. That being said, Getty is hardly the paragon of goodwill considering they regularly steal from public domain databases, issue DMCA takedown requests of the stolen content from said databases, and then turn around to sell it to unwitting people for a subscription. They own none of the copyrights for what they are doing but have been allowed to get away with it.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    Have you only read books you own the copyright to? What’s the legal distinction between you learning and AI learning?
    - keonix 3y ago
      If I regurgiate something I read in copyrighted book without proper license that also would be theft, no distinction there. I'm not distributing my brain, at least same (but probably more restrictive) should apply to models - training is okay, but using and distributing should be limited by copyright
      - broken-kebab 3y ago
        Explaining anything publicly based on my understanding I got reading books would be illegal following this logic. I'm not sure this is how it works.
        visarga 3y ago
        They want to muddle the distinction between ideas and expression. You can't copyright ideas. Everyone is entitled to copy ideas.
        keonix 3y ago
        It would not be illegal based on fair use (though you have to be careful there also), but if you try to regurgiate large portions of the book then it would be. And we do know that models regurgiate training material verbatim (Copilot)
- lelanthran 3y ago
  I think that if you stick to a definition of 'fair use' that allows the slurping of entire corpuses, then copyright doesn't have any teeth anymore. If the license makes the data public viewing, like with websites, then slurp all you want. If the license forbids automated bulk processing, then stop whining about fair use and pay for a license that allows bulk processing. "Out system actively uses every single byte of data to produce any output" is so obviously not the intention fair use clauses.
  - surfacedetail 3y ago
    Fair use doesn't exist in the UK.
- vohk 3y ago
  While I somewhat agree with that take on copyright, I think you have to pick a lane to keep that position coherent: Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation, or You throw out copyright completely in this context, but that means the resulting models cannot be treated as proprietary either unless they were produced using absolutely no unlicensed training data. I think there is an argument for both. Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. The current status quo is perfectly described by powerful corpos extracting rent. Billions for themselves and pennies for the average artist.
  - tavavex 3y ago
    > Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation I don't think that current copyright laws automatically entitles people to royalties from something like AI-generated imagery. The dichotomy you've presented here isn't pro-copyright vs anti-copyright, but "so pro-copyright that they argue for expanding the current laws" vs not. > Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. That definitely benefits all the "powerful corpos" you've mentioned here. Now, Disney, Adobe, Meta etc. can use a fraction of their money to get all the data they would ever need and be the sole profiteers, while all newcomers will face an impassable barrier to entry that prevents them from ever threatening the existing players.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    There is at least one middle ground area where you acknowledge that copyright and intellectual property restrictions should be removed, but that we should also recognize that all of the existing work was created by artists who expected they would have copyright protection. We should in my view not take from artists without their consent, and there is no implied consent when their works were posted at a time they believed they were protected by copyright. This would mean we have to do a few difficult and worthwhile things: explicitly dismantle the copyright system, encourage artists to donate their existing works to the commons, and then only make datasets based on legally collected information. This would also have the side effect of encouraging the development of new training techniques and model designs which are more sample efficient. I am afraid that what we will do instead is allow some erosion of copyright for small creators without dismantling the power large intellectual property holders have over the rest of us.
- anonymousab 3y ago
  > I think copyright law is a cudgel It is interesting to me that we are finally seeing a case where many smaller, independent artists and creators are using these laws to assert their rights against the encroachment of the moneyed tech interests, and of course now all of the powerful corpos are singing another tune. Rules for thee, not for me.