I wish there was a open fund anyone could donate with the exclusive aim of suing Perplexity, OpenAI and others for copyright violations, where a team of lawyers would help the cases with the most likelihood to win, that would try to highlight that the way such systems are "learning" have little similitude to the intent of the law when it was written to give layaway for other artists/authors to create similar creations.
Amazing how many copyright maximalists there are on a site called "Hacker News."
Seems to be a fairly recent trend. Wonder what changed.
Nothing changed on my case (and many others), is that perhaps you never grasped the big picture of our view, in that copyright law should be soft against consumers that violate it (for non-profit reasons) and hard against corporations that do.
Let's see if training a model is actually considered a copyright violation. I don't know that, and neither do you.
If it is adjudicated to be a violation, well, that's the end of copyright, for better or worse. AI is more important. Don't fight to lock down information; fight for equitable access instead.
What changed is that copyright violation used to be something individuals did quietly, and got punished for. Now it’s something big companies are doing openly and they’re getting tons of money for it and zero consequences.
"Copyright violation?" That remains to be seen, doesn't it? Which court do you sit on, and how many trillions of dollars in future value do you feel comfortable tossing away?
The copyright industry has done all it can for us, even in the most charitable interpretation. They literally, by constitutional mandate, can't be allowed to stand in the way of progress. We're not talking Napster 2.0 here.
You’re going to give me shit for calling out a clear copyright violation because I’m not a judge, and yet you feel comfortable saying that it’s unconstitutional(?!) to stand in their way? What court do you sit on?
A literal, plain-language reading of the Constitution is sufficient. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: [The 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.
Copyright doesn't promote the progress of science. Rather the opposite, as it allows journals that contribute nothing to progress to charge the rest of us to access research our taxes paid for.
As for "arts," useful and otherwise, those are secured these days via unbreakable permanent DRM, which overtly violates the constitutional basis of copyright law as a time-limited bargain with the public domain. You should be at least as outraged about that as you are about AI, but evidently you're not.
Meanwhile, you'd have to have rocks in your head to argue that AI doesn't constitute scientific progress at a bare minimum.
Actual judges on actual courts seem to think DRM is fine. So I’m confused. Do you reject laymen interpreting the law and only accept the evaluation of a judge, as indicated by your first comment? Or do you reject what judges say and go with your own “plain reading”? Seems like you’re confused about who’s qualified to say what constitutes lawbreaking.
You do understand who the Constitution was written for, right? It wasn't written primarily for interpretation by judges. Judicial review came along later. It was written for you and me, and for the legislators we elect.
I don't view any decision or legislation that grants unbreakable DRM the force of law as legitimate. A work should benefit from temporary legal protection or permanent technical protection, but not both. My position is that if the founders had meant something other than a "Limited Time," they would have said so. If you disagree, great, but that means we're done here.
Matters such as whether AI training is fair use are better subjects for judicial review, IMO, because there's no plain language to go by. Of course I reserve the right to disagree with that decision, and to subsequently ignore it, in keeping with the spirit of the times. :)
And a billion people in China will respect a copyright-maximalist decision even less than I will.
I wish there would be an open fund that allows me to do opposite and the fund would countersue copyright holders for holding development back and demanding excessive mafia payments
People getting paid for the work they do is offensive to you?
I personally find this argument really lazy. In a very reductionist reframing, independent artists who uploaded some art to the internet for fun believe that AI shouldn't be allowed to exist without them being paid, essential alleging their contribution to AI is fundamental to it's existence. I would be a lot more receptive to the fact that all humans generally contributed to the information this system consumed and we enact some democratic law that 15% of all profits flow into some public tax fund, rather than litigate every single instance of potential copywrite on the per person or organizational level.
There are obviously laws that differ in every region but at a philosophical level I believe in the ideal of fair use. An AI is a distinctly different "work" than these originals and much like a human's own output is informed by all the information they have taken in over their lifetime, so is the output of a model.
If these AIs can't exist without also gobbling up those artist's work, then yes? You can't have it both ways, either their artwork is worthless for the purposes of training an AI (in which case there should be no problem not hoovering up their art, right?) or it's worth something and they should be compensated for it.
You are entitled to your opinion. Personally, I would only be able to accept your worldview if these artists grew up on something like an island without books or internet and pursued their craft 100% intuitively without any external influence. Then they could make a claim their work was 100% original. Otherwise, I find all human output to be derivative and build off the body of work of the entire race. This is one of mankind's greatest advantages IMO.
edit: When many make this argument, what they are really saying is "big fucks small". This may not be what you are saying, but seems to be the general philosophy of many who make this argument. I am sympathetic to that which is why I believe we should have something like a 15% tax or 2% of revenue of AI paid into a general tax fund. I find it impossible to litigate how much a news article should be "worth" when 400 of the same news article were written the same day with the value immeadiately diminishing after the "news" was new.
Copyright is bad, but one rule for the rich and another for the poor is even worse.