[avereveard]

Training method and recall are of no consequences because copyright law doesn't deal with technology for the most part. There is a test to wether the image is stored or not which is interesting here for the topic at hand, but it's always in the context of distribution.

The worst is that weight may be considered storage, but the point is... Law already covers that. Because it doesn't concern with technology, but with results of actions.

That is the whole problem with the argumentation, law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between.

[josephg]

> law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between.

What makes you think that?

The law cares about whatever lawyers decide to care about. There was a case a few years ago where (if memory serves) a black woman sued an insurance company for discrimination after the insurance company refused to provide her cover. The company was using a neural net to decide whether to cover someone. The court demanded they explain the neural networks' decision - and of course, they couldn't. The insurance company lost the case.

In the aftermath they moved from a neural net to a decision tree based ML system. The decision tree made slightly worse decisions, but they figured if it lowered their legal exposure, it was worth it. With a decision tree, they can print out the decision tree if they were ever sued again and hand it to a judge.

> law is technology agnostic

Clearly not in this case.

There's plenty of other examples if you go looking. In criminal law, they care a great deal about the technology used in forensic analysis - both in its strengths and weaknesses.

If you don't know much about law, being humble and wrong will serve you better than being confident and wrong.

[avereveard]

Insurance is not copyright and the case is not even the same subject matter.

And again that case is technology agnostic, discrimination law requires you to be able to provide proof that results are non discriminatory, law itself doesn't care that it was specifically a neural network, it only cares about the end result, the firm lost because it failed to provide required data about their decision process, not because it was using neural networks, that they used a neural network was irrelevant on its own, and it could have been fine if they baked explainability in it.

[couchand]

It's worth noting that "worse decisions" is from the point of view of the insurance company, which would prefer to act racist if only that pesky law didn't stop them, and will continue to do so to the extent they can get away with it.

[josephg]

Curious that you assume the insurance company was racist / malicious in this case. There's nothing to suggest that reading in the story I gave.

[couchand]

As you said, they were sued for discrimination and lost.

Also, differential insurance coverage tends to be one of the worst ways that systemic racism is perpetuated.