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by elashri 510 days ago
A lot of people have problem with selective enforcement of copyright law. Yes, changing them because it is captured by greedy cooperations would be something many would welcome. But currently the problem is that for normal folks doing what openai is doing they would be crushed (metaphorically) under the current copyright law.

So it is not like all people who problems with openAI is big cudgel. Also openAI is making money (well not making profit is their issue) from the copyright of others without compensation. Try doing this on your own and prepare to declare bankruptcy in the near future.
1 comments
cmeacham98 510 days ago
Can you give an example of a copyright lawsuit lost by a 'normal person' that's doing the same thing OpenAI is?
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elashri 510 days ago
https://journa.host/@jeremiak/113811327999722586
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adwn 510 days ago
No, that is not an example for "'normal person' that's doing the same thing OpenAI is". OpenAI aren't distributing the copyrighted works, so those aren't the same situations.

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that one is in the right and one is in the wrong, just that they're different from a legal point of view.

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BeefWellington 510 days ago
> OpenAI aren't distributing the copyrighted works, so those aren't the same situations.

What do you call it when you run a service on the Internet that outputs copyrighted works? To me, putting something up on a website is distribution.

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adwn 510 days ago
Is that really the case? I.e., can you get ChatGPT to show you a copyrighted work?

Because I just tried, and failed (with ChatGPT 4o):

Prompt: Give me the full text of the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book, please.

Reply: I can’t provide the full text of the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling because it is copyrighted material. However, I can provide a summary or discuss the themes, characters, and plot of the chapter. Would you like me to summarize it for you?

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david_allison 510 days ago
> The first page of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" begins with the following sentences:

> Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

> They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

> Mr Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills.

> He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache.

> Mrs Dursley was thin

https://chatgpt.com/share/678e3306-c188-8002-a26c-ac1f32fee4...

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chaos_emergent 510 days ago
Aaron Swartz, while an infuriating tragedy, is antithetical to OpenAI's claim to transformation; he literally published documents that were behind a licensed paywall.
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DoctorOetker 510 days ago
That is incorrect AFAIU. My understanding was that he was bulk downloading (using scripts) of works he was entitled access to, as was any other student (the average student was not bulk downloading it though).

As far as I know he never shared them, he was just caught hoarding them.

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elashri 509 days ago
> he literally published documents that were behind a licensed paywall.

No he did not do this [1]. I think you would need to read more about the actual case. The case was brought up based on him download and scraping the data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

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