Two thoughts

1. You are assuming that "greatest computing power" is a requirement. I think we're actually seeing a trend in the opposite direction with recent generative art models: It turns out consumer grade hardware is "enough" in basically all cases, and renting the compute you might otherwise be missing is cheap. I don't buy this as the barrier.

2. Given #1, I think you are framing the conversation in a very duplicitive manner by pitching this as "either Microsoft or Disney - pick your oppressor". I'd suggest that breaking the current fuckery in copyright, and restoring something more sane (like the 7 + 7 year original timespans) would benefit individuals who want to make stories and art far more than it would benefit corporations. Disney is literaly THE reason for half of the current extensions in timespan. They don't want reduced copyright - they want to curtail expression in favor of profit. This case just happens to have a convienent opponent for public sentiment.

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Further - "All property rights depends on public funding the infrastructure to enforce them" Is false. This is only the case for intellectual property rights, where nothing need be removed from one person for the other to be "in violation".

> Either copyrights exist, and people can't copy creative works "owned" by somebody else, or copyrights don't exist and people can copy those at will.

that's not how copyright works, it's not a binary thing. Also, it's similar but not the same in every legislation. You can make partial copies, you can make full copies as personal backup, you can make copies to transform copyrighted material (like create art and parodies.)

These cases are going to decide whether Google Books was a fluke or indeed, there is a limit to the power of the big copyright holders (not the artists/creators: those keep on starving, except few lucky ones.)

> Either copyrights exist, and people can't copy creative works "owned" by somebody else, or copyrights don't exist and people can copy those at will.

Like most simple binaries, this is a false dichotomy, and not only do more options exist in possibility, but neither of those matches the overt state of the law (where copyrights exist, but so do a range of caveats and exceptions, so people can copy and otherwise make use of works by others without permission under certain circumstances, but not at will, satisfying neither of the two options you present as exhaustive of all possibilities.)

I don't think you need to be a Marxist to accept that his observation that people are being alienated from their work capacity is spot on.

The "Marxsist" name is either about believing on the parts that aren't true or about the political philosophy (that honestly, can't stand by its own without the wrong facts). The ones that fit reality only make one a "realist".

I mean, not to be that guy, but multiple Marxist and Marxist-adjacent people I know and am have been out here pointing out how this was exactly and always what was going to happen since the LLM hype cycle really kicked into high-gear in mid-2023. And I was told in no uncertain terms, many times, on here, about how I was being a doomer, a pessimist, a luddite, etc. etc. because I and many like me saw the writing on the wall, immediately, that while generative AI represented a neat thing for folks to play with, that it would, like every other emerging tech, quickly become the sole domain of the monied entities that already run the rest of our lives, and this would be bad for basically everyone long term.

And yeah it looks be shaping up as exactly that.

This isn't really an argument though. It's an assertion that not honoring a commission agreement (or an employment contract) is equivalent to not paying for a license to an existing work. I tend to disagree. I could be persuaded otherwise, but I'd need to hear an argument other than "clearly these are the same thing."

If you hire Alice that means there is a contract you both have agreed to and need to honor. If alice just shows up in your kitchen making burgers she doesn't get to tell you what to do with the burgers after you kick her out. With copyright there is no explicit contract you can choose to enter. Instead everyone is effectively forced into a contract with every creator. A contract that is unconciably biased to benefit the creator.

Do you think it would be reasonable for Mallory to sell burgers and then demand that if you share some of them with your friend you need to seek her permission? And of course since the burger becomes part of your body then perhaps Mallory should have a say in what you can do with that too and can extract some fee for you existing after eating her burgers. That's how copyright is usually (mis)used - to extract rent in perpetuity for work that was done long ago. This kind of business model just doesn't exist out of IP. It's entirely artificial.

> But the fundamental difference between rivalrous possession of physical artifacts and infinitely reproducible ideas really needs to stay the hell out of these debates. It's a tired, empty talking point that doesn't actually address the substance of what IP laws are really about.

On the contrary, it is a very important point. We don't burgers just sitting around to feed everyone for their entire lives. We do have all kinds of art and entertainment as well as productivity tools that have essentially infinite free copies. We don't really NEED to artificially encourage more creation for a lot of these whereas if people stopped producing food everyone would be in big trouble.

I'm answering in reverse order because I think a lot of this comment covers stuff that we don't really disagree with. Thus I will answer the conclusion and then I put my responses to everything else because I find them interesting, but not required for what I want to convey.

> Copyright duration is too long. But the fundamental difference between rivalrous possession of physical artifacts and infinitely reproducible ideas really needs to stay the hell out of these debates. It's a tired, empty talking point that doesn't actually address the substance of what IP laws are really about.

I would argue that it is perhaps the opposite of tired: ironically less relevant in the past and more relevant as technology advances and mere thought experiments become practical reality. I think many of these issues weren't dealt with in the past because these edge cases existed as mere hypotheticals. Kind of like a mathematician saying that copyright doesn't make any sense because he could write a program that iterates through all books. Lawyers just roll their eyes not because they have a counter-argument, but because they don't think that scenario exists as something they'd ever have to deal with. I think the idea of a computer that reads all the text in the world and learns from it is definitely tied to the questions of unresolved issues with the nature of data, but would have until very recently been considered an annoying hypothetical in a serious discussion about copyright, allowing us to actual dismiss it and continue not addressing it.

We all agree that copyright is too long. And I also think this would just become a non-issue if we had a reasonable duration for copyrights. Even if you philosophically disagreed with it, it wouldn't be worth arguing over vs. just waiting it out.

> This is a stupid argument, no matter how often it comes up.

I knew bringing this up would rekindle these arguments from 20 years ago, but it was necessary for a later point, so I was hoping I was making it value-neutral enough that it wouldn't trigger this, but I guess I was wrong.

To be clear, I am not making the same argument you have seen several times before. I am making a strictly weaker argument. The only goal of this distinction is to demonstrate that these properties are "different", and that the law aims to make "intellectual property" behave like physical property. Notice for example that I didn't then assert that IP thus doesn't exist. I didn't even argue whether this goal of matching the behavior was good or bad. I am simply stating that it doesn't by default behave the way we seem to want it to, and, people don't seem to intuitively ascribe the same morality to it either. My only intention is to make the point that this goal thus requires work, and (as I'll explain in more detail below), more work than in the physical case. So far I don't think there is anything necessarily unreasonable about this as a set of premise conditions for establishing the terms under which the public at large agrees to take on the costs of maintaining said system.

> A bunch of stuff about Alice making sandwiches and drawing pictures

Disclaimer: I don't think we're really in disagreement about the important points, and I don't think this section is relevant to the important points which I return to below, however I find it intellectually interesting to talk about, so I have a retort here, which I believe is just an unrelated digression

These analysis of Alice making sandwiches and drawings (IMO) misses the actual meaningful differences in these scenarios since it (IMO) focuses on the uncontroversial, but also irrelevant, breach-of-contract issues. In both these scenarios, the issue is not really the "property," it is the refusal to comply with a previously agreed arrangement. You can see this if we add a third scenario where I pay Alice to do jumping jacks for a week, she does them, and then I refuse to pay at the end of the week. No need to pay you, you already did the jumping jacks. No one "got" anything here, other than I guess "satisfaction" or "exercise". We can make the example even more abstract by having me pay Alice to do nothing all week, and she once again does a great job by sitting quietly in her room all week, and then I once again don't pay her. The sandwiches and drawings are just props in the original examples -- they're not actually necessary since this is a contract question, not a theft question.

The actual interesting aspects around the sandwiches and drawings are 1) what happens much after this transaction, and 2) what happens with third parties. With the sandwiches, "what happens after" is straight-forward. I either the sandwiches, resell them immediately, or they go bad. There's not much interesting there. No one needs to think hard about the "ramifications" of the sale of the sandwiches. Compare this to the drawing. What if after I have paid you, just like we agreed, I proceed to make my infinite copies. You might think that's not fair, you thought you'd have a repeat customer. I assumed I was free to do as I please with the drawing. In fact, ironically enough, in this instance if I treat the drawing like physical property, where the expectation is I can do as I please with it, it ironically creates this conundrum because "putting the paper in the photocopier" is in the set of "do as I please". But let's go one step further, what if I make all those copies and then sell them.

I'm sure you'll now respond that the royalties or usage rights were all implied in your original story. Great! But that's my point. Those were required. You needed a supremely complex web of laws and binding contracts (and litigation if they aren't followed) as a necessary component of that transaction due to the existence of degrees of freedom that simply don't exist for the sandwiches. You can write up a contract around the resale of a sandwich, but most sandwich shops don't because me eating sandwiches for the rest of my life by copying the original sandwich isn't a realistic scenario (so no need to price that into the original cost of the sandwich), and me out-sandwiching you by carbon-cloning the sandwich isn't feasible, and even if it was it would still have material ingredient costs that would bound its effect on my shop, and even "figuring out the recipe" isn't that much of a worry since you still need to like buy ingredients and make sandwiches as opposed to hitting paste over and over. These scenarios are dramatically different, and that's why sandwich shops usually don't employ lawyers but design shops do. And again, we didn't even go into third parties. What if someone manages to somehow make a copy of your image just as you're handing it to the client. Now both of you are in compliance with your deal, neither of you is angry at each other, but there's this weird situation where you were never expecting to get money from me, but I have a copy of the picture now, and it's really hard to reason about what that means in terms of "gain" and "loss" if I never do anything other than hang it up in my room. This is simply not possible with the sandwich, no one could quickly "copy the sandwich" in transit and potentially introduce an entirely new threat to your business.

Again, my only point here is that it seems very strange to insist that there physical property is identical to intellectual property, and that it isn't fairly complicated to make intellectual property approximate the relationships we have with physical property. And to be clear, nothing even derogatory has been said about this goal yet. You could take everything I've written in this comment so far, and use it as part of argument for copyright. However important is it precisely because of the explosion of complexity in possibilities that simply don't exist for the vast majority of physical items.

I hate to break it to you, but we continued that pattern of making up rules. The main difference is that we let lobbyists play a bigger role over time. The updated rules (life of the author plus 70 years) was passed in 1976, so I don't think they had global data networks in mind either. But perhaps you believe neither side has presented a persuasive argument.

I will however say that I think my comment was not just an appeal to authority. Again, I think the fact that using public domain works was critical to Disney's early success is a fairly important data point, especially considering some of those works would not have allowed to be used with the current lifespans (e.g. Pinocchio's copyright would have lasted until 1960, 20 years after the film premiered).

But again, the most important thing I want taken away from this is that we the "consumers" of the content should not consider ourselves bystanders, but understand that we do have an active stake here as well. You're first sentence is perhaps more important than you realize, making up the rules wasn't something one-off incidental property of being first to the table, we could choose to make up the rules too, so we should act like it, as opposed to trying to "deduce" the ownership of a sentence. This is unique, we don't have that ability with physical property. We can't simply declare that everyone gets Ferrari tomorrow and then have them magically appear in everyone's garage. But we could declare that everyone can have the rights to Superman tomorrow, and they would "magically just have them".

There's no real baseline here. We should just weigh the pros and cons. The fashion industry operates more or less copyright-free. The infrastructure to enforce copyright has real costs. Not to mention there is all the collateral damage from the abuse of copyright takedowns this system brings along with it. And any sort of appeal to authorship is also highly suspicious given that authors rarely end up owning these rights. Every time one of these Marvel movies comes out there's a mini outcry when people see the guy whose comic the movie is based on is just some dude who gets nothing from the making of the movie. On the flip side we take for granted that every public domain character was of course at one point created. Robin Hood, Zorro, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes. Are we unhappy with the diversity of adaptations we've gotten from these? Would it be that Earth shattering if Harry Potter joined that list? As things stand right now no one on this website will likely ever get to legally publish "their take Harry Potter". The clock doesn't start ticking until after JK Rowling dies. It would have entered the public domain 2011 under the original rules. In case you're curious, her net worth in 2011 was $500M, if you want to factor that into whether you think that would have been "fair" (and its not like she stops making money at that point, its just other people start to be able to do stuff with the first book). I think it is worthwhile to imagine a different approach to this.

Society-scale unemployment is certainly liberating people from their work, but also their food.

I think the biggest change would be that if characters and stories lose their copyright after 10 years then you would see even more sequels and remakes because anyone could make their own Star Wars sequel series for example.

If you posted on blogger.com (or any platform with enough money to hire lawyers) you probably gave them a license that is irrevocable, non-exclusive and able to be sublicensed.

There are reasons for that (they need a license to show it on the platform) but usually these agreements are overly broad because everyone except the user is covering their ass too much.

Those licenses will now be used to sell that content/data for purposes that nobody thought about when you started your account.

Wouldn't the point of the class action to be to dilute the cost of representation? If the damages per article are high and there's plenty of class members, I imagine the limit would be how much OpenAI has to pay out.

But all content is DMCA protected. Avoiding copyrighted content means not having content as all material is automatically copyrighted. One would be limited to licensed content, which is another minefield.

The apparant loophole is between copyrighted work and copyrighted work that is also registered. But registration can occur at any time, meaning there is little practical difference. Unless you have perfect licenses for all your training data, which nobody does, you have to accept the risk of copyright suits.

It would make sense from a legal standpoint, but I don't think they could do that without massively regressing their models performance to the point that it would jeopardize their viability as a company.

Re-training can be done, but, and it is not a small but, models already do exist and can be used locally suggesting that the milk has been spilled for too long at this point. Separately, neutering them effectively lowers their value as opposed to their non-neutered counterparts.

What about bombing? You could always smuggle dmca content in training sets hoping for a payout?

It's actually the opposite of what you're saying. I can 100% legally do all the things that they're suing OpenAI for. Their whole argument is that the rules should be different when a machine does it than a human.

Except LLMs are in no way violating copyright in the true sense of the word. They aren’t spitting out a copy of what they ingested.

I don't know about you but my friends don't tell me that Joe Schmoe of Reuters published a report that said XYZ copyright XXXX. They say "XYZ happened."

And if I rip a blu ray to my hard drive and then give the hard drive to my friend so he can output a movie is just the same as if I had told him my recollections of the movie from my brain. Both are claims you can make without anything to back them up.

The OpenAI that is assumed to keep being able to harvest every form of IP without compensation is valued at $150B, an OpenAI that has to pay for data would be worth significantly less. They're currently not even expecting to turn a profit until 2029, and that's without paying for data.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-reveals-openais-44-bil...

OpenAI is not profitable, and to achieve what they have achieved they had to scrape basically the entire internet. I don't have a hard time believing that OpenAI could not exist if they had to respect copyright.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...

That's not real money tough. You need actual cash on hand to pay for stuff, OpenAI only have the money they've been given by investors. I suspect that many of the investors wouldn't have been so keen if they knew that OpenAI would need an additional couple of billions a year to pay for data.

That doesn’t mean they have $150B to hand over. What you can cite is the $10 billion they got from Microsoft.

I’m sure they could use a chunk of that to buy competitive I.P. for both companies to use for training. They can also pay experts to create it. They could even sell that to others for use in smaller models to finance creating or buying even more I.P. for their models.

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Lots of people create without getting paid to do it. A lot of music and art is unprofitable. In fact, you could argue that when the mainstream media companies got completely captured by suits with no interest in the things their companies invested in, that was when creativity died and we got consigned to genre-box superhero pop hell.

> Isn't it a greater risk that creators lose their income and nobody is creating the content anymore?

There are already multiple lifetimes of quality content out there. It's difficult to get worked up about the potential future losses.

I don’t know. When I look at news from before, there never was investigative journalism. It was all opinion swaying editos, until alternate voices voiced their counternarratives. It’s just not in newspapers because they are too politically biased to produce the two sides of stories that we’ve always asked them to do. It’s on other media.

But investigative journalism has not disappeared. If anything, it has grown.

Copyright is a dead man walking and that's a good thing. Let's applaud the end of a temporary unnatural state of affairs.

It's hysterical to compare training an ML model with slave labour. It's perfectly fine and accepted for a human to read and learn from content online without paying anything to the author when that content has been made available online for free, it's absurd to assert that it somehow becomes a human rights violation when the learning is done by a non-biological brain instead.

Exactly. They rushed to violate copyright on a massive scale quickly, and now are making the argument that it shouldn't apply to them and they couldn't possibly operate in compliance with it. As long as humans don't get to ignore copyright, AI shouldn't either.

> they're just straight-up breaking the law and getting away with it.

So far this has not been determined and there's plenty of reasonable arguments that they are not breaking copyright law.

> Absolutely: if copyright is slowing down innovation, we should abolish copyright.

Is this sarcasm?

Easy to turn one into the other, just get someone to leak the model weights.

Am I jazzed about Sam Altman making billions? No.

Am I even more concerned about the state having control over the future corpus of knowledge via this doomed-in-any-case vector of "intellectual property"? Yes.

I think it will be easier to overcome the influence of billionaires when we drop the pretext that the state is a more primal force than the internet.

The plaintiffs focused on exactly this part - removal of metadata - probably because it's the most likely to hold in courts. One judge remarked on it pretty explicitly, saying that it's just a proxy topic for the real issue of the usage of copyrighted material in model training.

I.e., it's some legalese trick, but "everyone knows" what's really at stake.

“ If OpenAI is found to be in violation, he can then order permanent destruction of the models and OpenAI would have to start over from scratch in a manner that doesn't violate the law.”

That is exactly why I suggested companies train some models on public domain and licensed data. That risk disappears or is very minimal. They could also be used for code and synthetic data generation without legal issues on the outputs.

> he can order all of OpenAIs computer equipment be impounded.

Arrrrr matey, this is going to be fun.

There would be a highly embarrassing walking back of such a ruling, when Sam Altman flexes his political network and effectively overrules it.

He spends his time amassing power and is well positioned to plow over a speed bump like that.

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>Also, is there really any benefit to stripping author metadata? Was it basically a preprocessing step?

Have you read 1202? It's all about hiding your infringement.

Then we don't respect their copyrights? Why is this some sort of unsolvable problem and the only solution is to allow mega corporations to sell us AI that is trained on the work of artists without their consent?

Is this specific to AI or specific to summaries in general? Do summaries, like the ones found in Wikipedia or Cliffs Notes, not have the same effect of making it such that people no longer have to view the original work as much?

Note: do you mean the model is transformative, or the summaries are transformative? I think your comment holds up either way but I think it's better to be clear which one you mean.

Open AI scrapping copyrighted materials to make a proprietary model is the exact opposite of what GNU promotes.

Creators freely sharing with attribution requested is different than creations being ruthlessly harvested and repurposed without permission.

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/

I think an ethical hacker is someone who uses their expertise to help those without.

How could an ethical hacker side with OpenAI, when OpenAI is using its technological expertise to exploit creators without?

I don't understand what the "hacker ethos" could have to do with defending openai's blatant stealing of people's content for their own profit.

Openai is not sharing their data(they're keeping it private to profit off of), so how could it be anywhere near the "hacker ethos" to believe that everyone else needs to hand over their data to openai for free?

oh please, then, riddle me why does my comment has -1 votes on "hacker" news

which has indeed turned into "i-am-rich-cuz-i-own-tech-stock"news

Obviously we're all impacted in these perceptions by our bubbles, but it would surprise me at this particular moment in the history of US politics to find that most people favor the existence of the state at all, let alone its ability to keep secret personal information regarding citizens.

That argument stands on the mother of all slippery slopes! Just find a way to make your product mpressive or ubiquitous and all of a sudden it doesn't matter how much you break the law along the way? That's so insane I don't even know where to start.

That is not in any way the biggest defense

I think the point of the comment isn't to have this finishing layer to make things "better", but to make things "legal".

Humans are allowed to synthesize a bunch of inputs together and produce a new novel copyrighted.

An algorithm, if it mixes a bunch of copyrighted things together by itself, plausibly is incapable of producing a novel copyright, and instead inherits the old copyright.

Just like Clean Room Design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design) can be used to re-create the same software free of the original copyright, I think the parent is arguing that a mechanical turk process could allow AI to produce the same output free of the original copyright.

However, I get my personal gain regardless of whether or not the text is also ingested into ChatGPT.

In fact, since I use ChatGPT a lot, I get more gain if it is.

Yes, just like my download speed is capped by the speed of me writing bytes on paper.

Is there any other information processing we limit to human speed?

I'd actually leave it up to the owner. Some want their work removed, some don't care.

I don’t mean 10% of their taxes, I mean charge 10% of their revenue to settle cooyright

My understanding is that this confidence value is not a measure of how likely something is correct/true, but more along the lines of how likely that sentence would be. Including it could be more misleading than helpful, for example if it is repeating commonly misunderstood information.

I'm not sure that it's possible to produce anything reasonable in that space. It would need to know how far it is away from correct to provide a usable confidence value otherwise it'd just be hallucinating a number in the same way as the result.

An analogy. Take a former commuter friend of mine, Mr Skol (named after his favourite breakfast drink). Seen on a minibus I had to get to work years ago, we shared many interesting conversations. Now he was a confident expert on everything. If asked to rate his confidence in a subject it would be a good 95% at least. However he spoke absolute garbage because his brain was rotten away from drinking Skol for breakfast, and the odd crack chaser. I suspect his model was still better than GPT-4o. But an average person could determine the veracity of his arguments.

Thus confidence should be externally rated as an entity with knowledge cannot necessarily rate itself for it has bias. Which then brings in the question of how do you do that. Well you'd have to do the research you were going to do anyway and compare. So now you've used the AI and done the research which you would have had to do if the AI didn't exist. So the AI at this point becomes a cost over benefit if you need something with any level of confidence and accuracy.

Thus the value is zero unless you need crap information, which is at least here, never, unless I'm generating a picture of a goat driving a train or something. And I'm not sure that has any commercial value. But it's fun at least.

More often than not in my experience, clicking these sources takes me to pages that either don’t exist, don’t have the information ChatGPT is quoting, or ChatGPT completely misinterpreted the content.

Wouldn’t the better method to throw all your money at one suit you can make an example of and try to win that one? You can’t effectively settle every single suit if you have no realistic chance of winning, otherwise every single publisher on the internet will come and try to get their money.

it's a ~ 160 billion company that only reached this far because of copyright violation

Sora's presentation [0]: on multiple text input examples "... the video does not contain any text or additional objects."

are you gonna say it's a prompt for no text on signs or banners or is it a way to get rid of subtitles & watermark logos?

[0] https://hpcaitech.github.io/Open-Sora/

> and it's for financial gains, but not motivated by morals.

Which is why nothing is going to happen, can't have people starting with the latter.

Yes. And they're being marked as bad during the alignment process.

For sure. The models are definitely safety tuned after pre-training

Fair. But I made a comment somewhere else that, if their models become better than ours, they'll be incorporated into products. Then we're back to being depended on China for LLM model development as well, on top of manufacturing. Realistically that'll be banned because of National Security laws or something, but companies tend to choose the path of "best and cheapest" no matter what.

You seem to know more about this than me. I have a family member who "invented" some electronics things. He hasn't done anything with the inventions (I'm pretty sure they're quackery).

But to ensure his patent, he mailed himself a sealed copy of the plans. He claims the postage date stamp will hold up in court if he ever needs it.

Is that a thing? Or is it just more tinfoil business? It's hard to tell with him.

Right, you can register before you bring a lawsuit. Pre-registration makes your claim stronger, as does notice of copyright.

That's what I thought too, but why does the article say:

> Infringement suits require that relevant works were first registered with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO).

> It's hard to see how they can argue with a straight face that it is accidental

It's another instance of "move fast, break things" (i.e. "keep your eyes shut while breaking the law at scale")

What is a "journalist?" It sounds old-fashioned.

They are "content creators" now.