It already applies to real people, doesn't it? I.e. if you read a book, you're not allowed to start printing and selling copies of that book without permission of the copyright owner, but if you learn something from that book you can use that knowledge, just like a model could.
Can I download a book without paying for it, and print copies of it? Stash copies in my bathroom, the gym, my office, my bedroom etc. to basically have a copy on hand to study from whenever I have some free time?
Yes, you're allowed to make personal copies of copyright works that you own. IANAL, but my understanding is that if you're using them for yourself, and you're not prevented from doing so by some sort of EULA or DRM, there's nothing in copyright law preventing you from e.g. photocopying a book and keeping a copy at home, as long as you don't distribute it. The test case here has always been CDs—you're allowed to make copies of CDs you legally own and keep one at home and one in your car.
To the best of my knowledge, no individual has ever been sued or prosecuted specifically for downloading books. As long as you're not massively sharing them with others, it's not an issue in practice. Enjoy your reading and learning.
Aaron Swartz, cofounder of Reddit and inventor of RSS and Markdown, was hounded to death by an overzealous prosecutor for downloading articles from JSTOR, with the intent to learn from them. He was charged with over a million dollars in fines and could have faced 35 years in prison.
He and Sam Altman were in the same YC class. OpenAI is doing the same thing at a larger scale, and their technology actually reproduces and distributes copyrighted material. It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.
I'm familiar with Aaron Swartz's case, and that is actually why I phrased it as "books". In any case, while tragic, Swartz wasn't prosecuted for copyright infringement, but rather for wire fraud and computer fraud due to the manner in which he bypassed protections in MIT's network and the JSTOR API. This wouldn't have been an issue if he downloaded the articles from a source that freely shared them, like sci-hub.
It would be incredibly naive to assume that the scraping done for these models did not at any point circumvent protections.
The fundamental contention is that both accessed, saved and distributed material that they didn't have a "right" to access, save, and distribute. One was made a billionaire for it and another was driven to suicide. It's not tragic, it's societal malpractice.
> It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.
Scraping the Internet is generally very different from piracy. You are given a limited right to that data when you access it, and you can make local copies. if further use does something sufficiently non-copying, then creator rights aren't being infringed.
> Can you compress the internet including copyrighted material and then sell access to it?
Define access?
If you mean sending out the compressed copy, generally no. For things people normally call compression.
If you want to run a search engine, then you should be fine.
> At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes infringement?
It would have to be very very lossy.
But some AI stuff is. For example there are image models with fewer parameters than source images. Those are, by and large, not able to store enough data to infringe with. (Copying can creep in with images that have multiple versions, but that's a small sliver of the data.)
Commercial audio generation models were caught reproducing parts of copyrighted music in a distorted and low-quality form. This is not "learning", just "imitating".
Also, as I understand they didn't even buy the CDs with music for training; they got it somewhere else. Why do organizations that prosecute people for downloading a movie do not want to look if it is ok to make a business on illegal copies of copyrighted works?
When you identify where the infringing party has stored the source material in their artifact.{zip,pdf,safetensor,connectome,etc}. In ML, this discovery stage is called "mechanistic interpretability", and in humans it's called "illegal."
It's not that clear cut. Since they're talking about taking lossy compression to the limit, there are ways to go so lossy that you're not longer infringing even if you can point exactly at where it's stored.
It was overzealous prosecution of the breaking into a closet to wire up some ethernet cables to gain access to the materials
Not the downloading with intent
And apparently the most controversial take on this community is the observation that many people would have done the trial, plea and time, regardless of how overzealous the prosecution was
I'm glad you still have that much faith in the system. That's much more faith than I have in the system (and more faith than I had in the system back then, too).
35 years is a press release sentence. The way DOJ calculates sentences when they write press releases ignores the alleged facts of the particular case and just uses for each charge the theoretically maximum possible sentence that someone could get for that charge.
To actually get that maximum typically requires things like the person is a repeat offender, drug dealing was involved, people were physically harmed, it involved organized crime, it involved terrorism, a large amount of money was involved, or other things that make it an unusual big and serious crime.
The DOJ knows exactly what they are alleging the defendant did. They could easily looks at the various factors that affect sentencing for the charge and see which apply to that case and come up with a realistic number but that doesn't make it sound as impressive in the press release.
Another thing that inflates the numbers in the press releases is that defendants are often charged with several related charges. For many crimes there are groups of related charges that for sentencing get merged. If you are charged with say 3 charges from the same group and convicted on all you are only sentenced for whichever one of them has the longest sentence.
If you've got 3 charges from such a group in the press release the DOJ might just take the completely bogus maximum for each as described above and just add those 3 together.
Here's a good article on DOJ's ridiculous sentence numbers [1].
Here's a couple of articles from an expert in this area of law that looks specifically at what Swartz was charged with and what kind of sentence he was actually looking at [2][3].
Why do you think Swartz was downloading the articles to learn from them? As far as I've seen know one knows for sure what he was intending.
If he wanted to learn from JSTOR articles he could have downloaded them using the JSTOR account he had through his research fellowship at Harvard. Why go to MIT and use their public JSTOR WiFi access, and then when that was cut off hide a computer in a wiring closet hooked into their ethernet?
I've seen claims that he wanted to do was meta research about scientific publishing as a whole which could explain why he needed to download more than he could download with his normal JSTOR account from Harvard, but again why do that using MIT's public WiFi access? JSTOR has granted more direct access to large amounts of data for such research. Did he talk to them first to try to get access that way?
He might have wanted other people to have access to the knowledge, and for free. In comparison, AI companies want to sell access to the knowledge they got by scraping copyrighted works.
Truly wow. The sucking up to coroporations is terrifying. This, when Aaron Swartz was institutionally murdered by the institutions and the state for "copyright infringement". And what he did wasn't even for profit, or even a 0.00001 of the scale of the theft that OpenAI and their ilk have done.
So it's totally OK to rip off and steal and lie through your teeth AND do it all for money, if you're a company.
But if you're a human being, doing it not for profit but for the betterment of your own fellow humans, you deserve to be imprisoned and systematically murdered and driven to suicide.
Thank you for putting my sentiment into words. THIS. It's not power to the people, it's power to the oligarchs. Once you have enough power and, more importantly, wealth, you're welcomed into the fold with open arms. Just how Spotify build a library of stolen music, as long as wealth was created, there is no problem because wealth is just money taken from the people and given to the ruling class.
> Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal argument or case law to support that.
Quite the opposite. The burden of proof is on you to show a single person ever, in history, who has been prosecuted for that.
If nobody in the world has ever been prosecuted for this, then that means it is either legal, or it is something else that is so effectively equivalent to "legal" that there is little point in using a different word.
If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its legal, technically!"
Then I guess go ahead. But for those in the real world, those two things are almost equivalent.
> If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its legal, technically!"
At home? Without ever sharing it with anyone? I thought making backups of things that you personally own was protected, at least in the US. Could you elaborate on my apparent misunderstanding?
This is a specific exception in Australia Copyright law. It allows reproducing works in books, newspapers and periodical publications in different form for private and domestic use.
It seems reasonably within the bounds described by fair use, but nobody's ever tested that particular constellation of factors in a lawsuit, so there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is.
17 U.S.C. § 107 is the fair use carveout.
Interestingly, digitizing and copying a book on your own, for your own private use, has also not been brought to court. Major rights holders seem to not want this particular fair use precedent to be established, which it likely would be, and might then invalidate crucial standing for other cases in which certain interpretations of fair use are preferred.
Digitally copying media you own is fair use. I'll die on that hill.
It doesn't grant commercial rights, you can't resell a copy as if it were the original, and so on, and so forth.
There's even a good case to be made that sharing a digitally copied work purchased legally, even to millions of people, 5 years after a book is first sold - for a vast majority of books, after 5 years, they've sold about 99.99% of the copies they're going to sell.
By sharing after the ~5 year mark, you're arguably doing marketing for the book, and if we cultivated a culture of direct donation to authors and content creators, it invalidates any of the reasons piracy is made illegal in the first place.
Right now publishers, studios, and platforms have a stranglehold on content markets, and the law serves them almost exclusively. It is exceedingly rare for the law to be invoked in defending or supporting an author or artist directly. It's very common for groups of wealthy lawyers LARPing as protectors of authors and artists to exploit the law and steal money from regular people.
Exclusively digital content should have a 3 year protected period, while physical works should get 5, whether it's text, audio, image, or video.
Once something is outside the protected period, it should be considered fair game for sharing until 20 years have passed, at which point it should enter public domain.
Copyright law serves two purposes - protecting and incentivizing content creators, and serving the interests of the public. Situations where a bunch of lawyers get rich by suing the pants off of regular people over technicalities is a despicable outcome.
> there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is
Thank you! I had looked this up myself last week, so I knew this. I had long believed, as GP does, that copying anything you own without distribution is either allowed or fair use. I wanted GP to learn as I did.
For reference, here's the US legal code in question:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
The spirit seems apparent, but in practice it's been used by awful people to destroy lives and exploit rent from artists and authors in damn near tyrannical ways.
Except you said "You can't make archival copies." and didn't provide a citation. That's quite a different claim than "there exists no precedent clearly establishing your right or lack thereof to make archival copies".
Congress expressly granted archival rights for digital media. If they wanted to do the same for books they could've done so. There's no law or legal precedent allowing it.
Given all this "can't do it" is more probably accurate than "can do it". IANAL but it's not like the question is finely balanced on a knife's edge and could go either way.
Congress didn't explicitly disallow it either. You left that bit out. As such it comes down to interpretation of the existing law. We both clearly agree that doesn't (yet) exist.
> IANAL but it's not like the question is finely balanced on a knife's edge and could go either way.
I agree, but my interpretation is opposite yours. It seems fairly obvious to me that the spirit of the law permits personal copies. That also seems to be in line with (explicitly legislated) digital practices.
But at the end of the day the only clearly correct statement on the matter is "there's no precedent, so we don't know". I suppose it's also generally good advice to avoid the legal quagmire if possible. Being in the right is unlikely to do you any good if it bankrupts you in the process.
That's the whole point of copyright: only the owner of a copyright has the right to make copies. I don't see how it can be more explicit than that. It's a default-deny policy.
There is an archival exception for digital media, so obviously Congress is open to granting exceptions for backup purposes. They chose not to include physical media in this exception.
> only the owner of a copyright has the right to make copies.
You are conveniently omitting the provisions about fair use, which is strange since you're clearly aware of them. The only things copyright is reasonably unambiguous about are sale and distribution. Even then there's lots of grey areas such as performance rights.
You are arguing that something is obviously disallowed but have nothing but your own interpretation to back that up. If the situation was as clear cut as you're trying to make out then where is the precedent showing that personal use archival copies of physical goods are not permitted?
> They chose not to include physical media in this exception.
That's irrelevant to the current discussion, though I'm fairly certain you realize that. Congress declined to weigh in on the matter which (as you clearly know) leaves it up to the courts to interpret the existing law.
> That's irrelevant to the current discussion, though I'm fairly certain you realize that.
I said it because it was relevant.
> where is the precedent showing that personal use archival copies of physical goods are not permitted
> Congress declined to weigh in on the matter
There was no "matter" to "weigh in on". The answer to "Can you make a full, complete copy of a copyrighted work without authorization?" has been "Almost always no" from the beginning of copyright. Even the term "fair use" arose in a US legal precedent over a century after the first copyright laws in England. It became an actual part of US copyright law in the 1970s, less than 50 years ago.
"Fair use" is plausible for a library or archive to make full copies, and keep them safe and archived, since that's their job.
Fair use isn't why we have archival rights for electronic media. That right was written into the law after electronic media became a thing.
In my comment above I gave one example why "fair use" wouldn't work for archival copies of physical media made by individuals. An actual lawyer who's paid by the copyright mafia to care about this stuff can surely find more and stronger reasons.
FWIW someone in another comment pointed out Australian copyright law allows making a copy of books, newspapers, and periodicals for personal, domestic use. Which means: a) it can be done and b) even they had to spell it out specifically
> which (as you clearly know) leaves it up to the courts to interpret the existing law.
You're repeating upthread comments. And no, you can't. There's an archival exception for electronic media. If you want to make copies of physical media you either:
1. Can't
Or
2. Rely on fair use to protect you (archival by individuals isn't necessarily fair use)
It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your personal archives.
The fair use criteria considers whether it is commercial in nature (in this case it is not) and the “ the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work” for which a personal copy of a personally owned book is non existent.
> the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
A copyright holder's lawyer would argue that having and using a photocopy of a book keeps the original from wearing out. This directly affects the potential market for the work, since the owner could resell the book in mint condition, after reading and burning their photocopies.
> You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep.
I mean maybe this is true. But the affected individual will have a very bad year and spend a ton of money on lawyers.
Why do you interpret this to mean "absolutely can't do this"? "No precedent" seems to equally support both sides of the argument (that is, it provides no evidence; courts have not ruled). The other commenters arguments on the actual text of the statute seem more convincing to me than what you have so far provided.
> The other commenters arguments...seem more convincing
Because you (and I) want it to be fair use. But as I already said in my comment, it potentially fails one leg of fair use. Keeping your purchased physical copy of the book pristine and untouched while you read the photocopy allows you to later, after destroying the copies you made, resell the book as new or like-new. This directly affects the market for that book.
Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out if it's really fair use? That's what "no precedent" means.
Multiple times in this thread you make the very confident assertion that this is not allowed, and that it is only allowed for electronic media. That is your opinion, which is fine. The argument that it is fair use is also an opinion. Until it becomes settled law with precedent, every argument about it will just opinion on what the text of the law means. But you are denigrating the other opinions while upholding your own as truth.
And whether or not I am personally interested in testing any of these opinions is completely beside the point.
Copyright is a restriction on making unauthorized, full copies under almost all circumstances. Default deny. There's only one documented exception on the books right now which is electronic media. None of these are opinions.
The idea that photocopying a book for archival purposes is potentially fair use is an untested opinion. I'm not denigrating that opinion. I just think it's likely to fail as an legal argument in the unlikely event that it comes up. I'm not a copyright apologist.
I myself believed the "fair use for archival"/"format shifting" thing applied to all works for most of my life. I only learned there was no law or precedent like 10 days ago.
> Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out if it's really fair use?
No. I'd much rather pirate the epub followed by lobbying for severe IP law reform. (Of course by "lobby" I actually mean complain about IP law online.)
You’re now arguing the assumption without a precedent you don’t have the right to do something. That’s not how the law works. If you believe that the courts would laugh at a publisher trying to bring suit against you for doing this, then you believe you have the right to do it.
Such a case would not require a year or a ton of money to defend. In fact, the potential damages would be so small that you could sensibly do it in small claims court.
> You’re now arguing the assumption without a precedent you don’t have the right to do something. That’s not how the law works.
I mean copyright law has always been "You can't make full copies for any reason (almost)". And you were the one saying "it absolutely is fair use [to make full personal copies]", which is quite a strong statement to make in the absence of a precedence.
An archive could argue fair use to make full copies of physical works, because that's their role, and by keeping the copies locked away they don't harm the market for the works. These fair use factors don't apply to individuals. But IANAL and maybe that's wrong, who knows? I do know if it comes up the copyright mafia will fight it tooth and nail, and I'd put my money on them winning.
> the potential damages would be so small that you could sensibly do it in small claims court
The publisher would sue the infringer in small claims court? This seems very unlikely since the publisher would prefer to scare or bankrupt you into submission.
Or would the defendant have the lawsuit moved to small claims court? Are defendants allowed to do this?
That's not a one-to-one analogy. The LLM isn't giving you the book, its giving you information it learned from the book.
The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?", and under US copyright law, the answer is: Yes.
> The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?"
The analogous scenario is actually "Can I read a book that I obtained illegally and face no consequences for obtaining it illegally?" The answer is "Yes" there are no consequences for reading said book, for individuals or machines.
But individuals can face serious consequences for obtaining it illegally. And corporations are trying to argue those consequences shouldn't apply to them.
Not to diminish the atrocity of what happened to Aaron, but is this a highly abnormal case of prosecutor overzeal or is it common for people to be charged and held liable for downloading and/or consuming (without distribution) of copyrighted materials (in any form) without obtaining a license?
Asking because I genuinely don't know. I believe all I've ever read about persecution of "commonplace" copyright violations was either about distributors or tied to bidirectional nature of peer-to-peer exchange (torrents typically upload to others even as you download = redistribution).
Aaron Swartz downloaded a lot of stuff. Did he publish the stuff too? That would be an infringement. But only downloading the stuff? And never distributing it? Not sure if it’s worth a violation .
There's no analogous because the scale of it takes it to a whole different level and degree, and for all intents and purposes we tend to care about level and degree.
Me taking over control of the lemonade market in my neighbourhood wouldn't ever be a problem to anyone, a very minor annoyance; instead if I managed to corner the lemonade market of a whole continent it'd be a very different thing.
The better analogy is "can my business use illegally downloaded works to save on buying a license". For example, can you use pirated copy of Windows in your company? Can you use pirated copy of a book to compute weights of a mathematical model?
> Can I download a book without paying for it, and print copies of it?
No, but you can read a book, learn its contents, and then write and publish your own book to teach the information to others. The operation of an AI is rather closer to that than it is to copyright violation.
"Should" there be protections against AI training? Maybe! But copyright law as it stands is woefully inadequate to the task, and IMHO a lot of people aren't really treating with this. We need a functioning government to write well-considered laws for the benefit of all here. We'll see what we get.
Yes, but the learning isn't constrained by those laws. If I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime of theft. You can put me in jail, try me before a jury, fine me, and put me in prison according to whatever laws I broke.
Nothing in my sentence constrains my ability to teach someone else the stuff I learned, though! In fact, the first amendment makes it pretty damn clear that nothing can constrain that freedom.
Also, note that the example is malformed: in almost all these cases, Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway. They're downloading and reading stuff on the internet that is available for free. If you or I can't be prosecuted for reading a preprint from arXiv.org or whatever, it's a very hard case to make that an AI can.
Again, copyright isn't the tool here. We need better laws.
Sure, but OpenAI (same as Google, and Facebook, and all the others) is illegally copying the book, and they want this to be legal for them.
It's perhaps arguable whether it's OK for an LLM to be trained on freely available but licensed works, such as the Linux source code. There you can get in arguments about learning vs machine processing, and whether the LLM is a derived work etc
But it's not arguable that copying a book that you have not even bought to store in your corporate data lake to later use for training is a blatant violation of basic copyright. It's exactly like borrowing a book from a library, photocopying it, and then putting it in your employee-only corporate library.
One thing is downloading pirated copy and reading it for yourself and another thing is running a business based on downloading millions of pirated works.
Yes, but this is not the right model. What OpenAI wants is to borrow a book, make a copy of it, and keep using that copy, in training their models. This is fully and simply illegal, under any basic copyright law.
Let's say Windows is downloadable from Microsoft website. Can you use it for free in your company to save on buying a license? Is it ok to use illegal copies of works in a business?
To the extent that this is how libraries function, yes.
The part of that which doesn't apply is "print copies", at least not complete copies, but libraries often have photocopiers in them for fragments needed for research.
AI models shouldn't do that either, IMO. But unlimited complete copies is the mistake the Internet Archive made, too.
I missed the part where we throw away rational logic skills
Have you never been to a public library and read a book while sitting there without checking it out? Clearly, age is a factor here, and us olds are confused by this lack of understanding of how libraries function. I did my entire term paper without ever checking out books from the library. I just showed up with my stack of blank index cards, then left with the necessary info written on them. Did an entire project on tracking stocks by visiting the library and viewing all of the papers for the days in one sitting rather than being schmuck and tracking it daily. Took me about an hour in one day. No library card required.
Also, a library card is ridiculously cheap even if you did decide to have one.
> Have you never been to a public library and read a book while sitting there without checking it out?
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355723. If OpenAI built a robot that physically went into libraries, pulled books off shelves by itself, and read them...that's so cool I wouldn't even be mad.
What about checking out eBooks? If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it at robot speed vs human feed, that would be the same thing. The idea that reading something that does not belong to you directly means stealing is just weird and very strained.
theGoogs essentially did that by having the robot that turned each page and scanned the pages. that's no different than having the librarian pull material for you so that you don't have to pull the book from the shelf yourself.
There's better arguments to make on why ClosedAI is bad. Reading text it doesn't own isn't one of them. How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique. There's laws for that in place now that does not require new laws to be enacted.
> You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem?
In precisely the same way as a robot scanning a physical book is.
If this is turned into a PDF and distributed, it's exactly the legal problem Google had[0] and that Facebook is currently fighting due to torrenting some of their training material[1].
If the tokens go directly into training an AI and no copies are retained, that's like how you as a human learn — except current AI models are not even remotely as able to absorb that information as you, and they only make up for being as thick as a plank by being stupid very very quickly.
> It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read the books, and us humans are not.
More that the copyright laws are not suited to what's going on. Under the copyright laws, statute and case law, that existed at the time GPT-3.5 was created, bots were understood as the kind of thing Google had and used to make web indexes — essentially legal, with some caveats about quoting too much verbatim from news articles.
(Google PageRank being a big pile of linear algebra and all, and the Transformer architecture from which ChatGPT get's the "T" being originally a Google effort to improve Google Translate).
Society is currently arguing amongst itself if this is still OK when the bot is a conversational entity, or perhaps even something that can be given agency.
You get to set those rules via your government representative, make it illegal for AI crawlers to read the internet like that — but it's hard to change the laws if you mistake what you want the law to be, with what the law currently is.
but you keep saying to read the books. there is no copyright violation to read a book. making copies starts to get into murky grounds, but does not immediately mean breaking the law.
If I spent every last second of my life in a public library, I couldn't even view a fraction of the information that OpenAI has ingested. The comparison is irrelevant. To make the comparison somehow valid, I'd have to back up my truck to a public library, steal the entire contents, then start selling copies out of my garage
Look, even I'm not a fan of ClosedAI, but this is ridiculous. ClosedAI isn't giving copies of anything. It is giving you a response it infers based on things it has "read" and/or "learned" by reading content. Does ClosedAI store a copy of the content it scrapes, or does it immediately start tokenizing it or whatever is involved in training? If they store it, that's a lot of data, and we should be able to prove that sites were scraped through lawsuit discovery process. Are you then also suggesting that ClosedAI will sell you copies of that raw data if you prompted correctly?
I'm in no way justifying anything about GPT/LLM training. I'm just calling out that these comparisons are extremely strained.
Let's say OpenAI developers use illegal copy of Windows on their laptops to save on buying a license. Is that ok to run a business this way?
Also I think it is different thing when someone uses copyrighted works for research and publishing a paper or when someone uses copyrighted works to earn money.
I don't need a card to read in the library, nor to use the photocopiers there, but it's merely one example anyway. (If it wasn't, you'd only need one library, any of the deposit libraries will do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit).
You also don't need permission, as a human, to read (and learn from) the internet in general. Machines by standard practice require such permission, hence robots.txt, and OpenAI's GPTBot complies with the robots.txt file and the company gives advice to web operators about how to disallow their bot.
How AI should be treated, more like a search index, or more like a mind that can learn by reading? Not my call. It's a new thing, and laws can be driven by economics or by moral outrage, and in this case those two driving forces are at odds.
How so? I don't have to pay to read most websites. To read most books I have to pay (or a library has to pay and I have to wait to get the book).
> IIRC, Google already did your sidenote
Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and have humans feed them into scanners. I'm talking about a robot that can walk (or roll) into a library, use arms to take books off the shelves, turn the pages and read them without putting them into a scanner.
They had humans turn the pages of intact books in scanning machines. The books mostly came from the shelves of academic libraries and were returned to the shelves after scanning. You can see some incidental captures of hands/fingers in the scans on Google Books or HathiTrust (the academic home of the Google Books scans). There are some examples collected here:
Fact is, you can read books for free, just as you can read (many but not all) websites for free. And in both cases you're allowed to use what you learned without paying ongoing licensing fees for having learned anything from either, and even to make money from what you learn.
> Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and have humans feed them into scanners.
owning a copy and learning the information is not the same. you can learn 2+2=4 from a book, but you no longer need that book to get that answer. each year in school, I was issued a book for class, learned from it, returned the book. I did not return the learning.
musicians can read the sheet music and memorize how to play it, and no longer need the music. they still have the information.
But you still need to buy the sheet music first, all the AI Labs used pirated materials to learn from.
There's two angles to the lawsuits that are getting confused - the largest one from the book publishers (Sarah Silverman et al) attacked from the angle that the models could reproduce copyrighted information. This was pretty easily quelled / RHLF'd out (used to be that if ChatGPT started producing lyrics a supervisor/censor would just cut off it's response early - tried it now and ChatGPT.com is now more eloquent, "Sorry, I can't provide the full lyrics to "Strawberry Fields Forever" as they are copyrighted. However, I can summarize the song or discuss its themes, meaning, and history if you're interested!")
But there's also the angle of "why does OpenAI have Sarah Silverman's book on their hard drive if they never paid her for it? This is the lawsuit against Meta regarding books3 and torrenting, seems like they're getting away with the "we never redistributed/seeded!" but it's unclear to me why this is a defense against copyright infringement.
Not only would the musician have to buy the sheet music first, but if they were going to perform that piece for profit at an event or on an album they'd need a license of some sort.
This whole mess seems to be another case of "if I can dance around the law fast enough, big enough, and with enough grey areas then I can get away with it".
As a student in a school band that debated whether to choose Pirates of the Caribbean vs Phantom of the Opera for our half time show, I remember the cost of the rights to the music was a factor in our decision.
The school and library purchased the materials outright, again, OpenAI Meta et al never paid to read them, nor borrowed them from an institution that had any right to share.
I'm a bit of an anti intellectual property anarchist myself but it grinds my gears that, given that we do live under the law, it is applied unequally.
if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers would absolutely love to hear about it.
We know Meta has done it. These companies have torrented or downloaded books that they did not pay for. Things like the The Pile, libgen, anna's library were scraped to build these models.
>if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers would absolutely love to hear about it.
when it comes to real people, they get sued into oblivion for downloading copyrighted content, even for the purpose of learning.
but when facebook & openai do it, at a much larger scale, suddenly the laws must be changed.
Swartz wasn’t “downloading copyrighted content…for the purpose of learning,” he was downloading with the intent to distribute. That doesn’t justify how he was treated. But it’s not analogous to the limited argument for LLMs that don’t regurgitate the copyrighted content.
This is not about memory or training. The LLM training process is not being run on books streamed directly off the internet or from real-time footage of a book.
What these companies are doing is:
1. Obtain a free copy of a work in some way.
2. Store this copy in a format that's amenable to training.
3. Train their models on the stored copy, months or years after step 1 happened.
The illegal part happens in steps 1 and/or 2. Step 3 is perhaps debatable - maybe it's fair to argue that the model is learning in the same sense as a human reading a book, so the model is perhaps not illegally created.
But the training set that the company is storing is full of illegally obtained or at least illegally copied works.
What they're doing before the training step is exactly like building a library by going with a portable copier into bookshops and creating copies of every book in that bookshop.
But making copies for yourself, without distributing them, is different than making copies for others. Google is downloading copyrighted content from everywhere online, but they don't redistribute their scraped content.
Even web browsing implies making copies of copyrighted pages, we can't tell the copyright status of a page without loading it, at which point a copy has been made in memory.
Making copies of an original you don't own/didn't obtain legally is not fair use. Also, this type of personal copying doesn't apply to corporations making copies to be distributed among their employees (it might apply to a company making a copy for archival, though).
> when it comes to real people, they get sued into oblivion for downloading copyrighted content, even for the purpose of learning.
Really? Or do they get sued for sharing as in republishing without transformation? Arguably a URL providing copyrighted content, is you offering a xerox machine.
It seems most "sued into oblivion" are the reshare problem, not the get one for myself problem.
This is why I think my array of hard drives full of movies isn't piracy. My server just learned about those movies and can tell me about them, is all. Just like a person!
These AI models are just obviously new things. They aren’t people, so any analogy about learning from the training material and selling your new skills is off base.
On the other hand, they aren’t just a copy of the training content, and whether the process that creates the weights is sufficiently transformative as to create a new work is… what’s up for debate, right?
Anyway I wish people would stop making these analogies. There isn’t a law covering AI models yet. It is a big industry at this point, and the lack of clarity seems like something we’d expect everybody (legislators and industry) to want to rectify.
Model cannot "learn" because it is not a human. What happens is a human obtains "a free copy" of a copyrighted work, processes it using a machine and sells the result.
> What happens is a human obtains "a free copy" of a copyrighted work, processes it using a machine and sells the result.
Right, so for example it is pretty common to snip up small bits of songs and to use in other songs (sampling). Maybe that could be an example of somewhere to start? But, these ML models seem quite different, I guess because the “samples” are much smaller and usually not individually identifiable. And really the model encodes information about trends in the sources… I dunno. I still think we need a new law.
It is not remotely the same, the companies training the models are stealing the content from the internet and then profiting from it when they charge for the use of those models.
We are not taking about billboards here, we are talking about copyrighted works, like books.
If you want to do mental gymnastics and call "consuming" the web the act of downloading books without paying for them, then go ahead, but don't pretend the rest will buy your delusion.
The more literature I consume, and the more I re-draft my own attempt, the more I see the patterns and tropes with everyone standing on the shoulders of those who came before.
The general concept of "warp drive" was introduced by John W. Campbell in 1957, "Islands of Space". Popularised by Trek, turned into maths by Alcubierre. Islands of Space feels like it took inspiration from both H G Wells (needing to explain why the War of the Worlds' ending was implausible) and Jules Verne (gang of gentlemen have call-to-action, encounter difficulties that would crush them like a bug and are not merely fine, they go on to further great adventure and reward).
Terry Pratchett had obvious inspirations from Shakespeare, Ringworld, Faust (in the title!).
In the pandemic I read "The Deathworlders" (web fic, not the book series of similar name), and by the time I'd read too many shark jumps to continue, I had spotted many obvious inspirations besides just the one that gave the name.
If I studied medieval lit, I could probably do the same with Shakespeare's inspiration.
It doesn't, a real person can't legally obtain a copy of a copyrighted work without paying the copyright holder for it. This is what OpenAI is asking for: they don't want to pay for a single copy of a single book, and still they want to train their models on every single book in history (and song, and movie, and painting, and code base, and anything else they can get their hands on).
Did OpenAI bought one copy of each book, or did they legaly borowed athe books and documents ?
if you copy paste rom books and claim is your content you are plagiarizing.
LLMs were provent to copy paste trained content so now what? Should only big Tech be excluded from plagiarizing ?
