[TheSoftwareGuy]

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.

[triceratops]

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?

What about movies and music?

[nightpool]

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.

[croes]

> Yes, you're allowed to make personal copies of copyright works that you own.

That’s not the point. It’s about books you don’t own. Are you allowed to download books from Z-Library, Sci-Hub etc. because you want to learn?

[falcor84]

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.

[jlev]

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.

https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

[falcor84]

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.

[kgdiem]

Will what OpenAI & others serve as precedent for Alexandra Elbakyan of SciHub and avenge Aaron?

Cynically, I imagine it will not but I hope that it could.

[Dylan16807]

I'm responding specifically to this sentence:

> 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.

[yieldcrv]

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

[apetresc]

Wasn’t John Gruber the inventor of Markdown?

[andsoitis]

> for downloading articles from JSTOR, with the intent to learn from them

For context, according to sources, he downloaded 4.8 million articles.

[tzs]

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?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230107080107/https://www.popeh...

[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...

[bluSCALE4]

Wow, just wow.

[anjaliNYC]

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.

[triceratops]

CDs, software, and electronic media, yes. Physical books, no. You can't make archival copies.

[bryanrasmussen]

sure you can, you could take a physical book, and painstakingly copy each page at a time, that is totally fair use.

[paulddraper]

Leaving aside the broader discussion...

You cannot legally photocopy copy an entire book even if you own a physical copy.

Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal argument or case law to support that.

[stale2002]

> 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.

[fc417fc802]

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?

[sidewndr46]

I believe the post you are replying to is suggesting the copy is made by hand, one word at a time.

[triceratops]

Citation needed.

[mjmas]

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.

(Copyright Act 1968 Part III div. 1, section 43C) https://www.legislation.gov.au/C1968A00063/latest/text

[observationist]

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.

[jncfhnb]

You can make copies of things. You just can’t distribute them

[croes]

You may copy, but you may not circumvent the copy protection.

[triceratops]

Correct. For electronic media.

[timeon]

I'm moving goal-post here since it was not OpenAI (as far as we know): Where Meta training on torrented data fits into this?

[carlosdp]

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.

[triceratops]

> 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.

[umanwizard]

> But individuals can face serious consequences for obtaining it illegally.

Can they? Who has ever faced serious consequences for pirating books in the US?

[triceratops]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

(Please no pedantry about how scientific papers aren't books)

[drdaeman]

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).

[nashashmi]

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 .

[piva00]

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.

[codedokode]

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?

[ajross]

> 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.

[triceratops]

But I can't legally obtain the book to read and learn from without me (or a library) paying for it. Let's start there first.

[ajross]

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.

[tsimionescu]

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.

[triceratops]

> copyright isn't the tool here

It's not the only tool. I agree that "use for ML" should be an additional right.

What people are pissed about is that copyright only ever serves to constrain the little guys.

> If I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime of theft

You or I would never dare to do this in the first place.

[riversflow]

> Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway

They were caught downloading the entirety of libgen.

[codedokode]

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.

[zombiwoof]

If you buy it

[ajross]

No, even if I steal it. I can teach you anything I know. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, as it were.

[tsimionescu]

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.

[nickpsecurity]

To support your point, lawsuits are already coming in for illegal copying of books:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224450/anthropic-copyri...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-sued-by-top-...

[Terretta]

Is the book online and accessible to your eyeballs through your open standards client tool, such that you can learn from seeing it?

[codedokode]

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?

[triceratops]

Most books aren't. Unless you pay for them.

[ben_w]

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.

[triceratops]

I missed the part where OpenAI got library cards for all the libraries in the world.

Is having a library card a requirement for being hired over there?

[dylan604]

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.

[triceratops]

> 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.

[dylan604]

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.

[sidewndr46]

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

[dylan604]

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.

[ben_w]

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.

[triceratops]

We started with libraries and books, now you're moving the goalposts to websites.

Sidenote: I wouldn't even be mad if OpenAI built robots to go into all of the libraries and read all of the books. That would be amazing!

[ben_w]

I started with libraries. OpenAI started with the internet.

The argument for both is identical, your objection is specific to libraries.

IIRC, Google already did your sidenote. Or started to, may have had legal issues.

[paulddraper]

> Can I download a book without paying for it

Yes, you can read books without paying, if that's how it is offered.

And you can photocopy books you own for your own personal use. But again....the analogy is remembering/leaning from a book.

[dylan604]

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.

[jazzyjackson]

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.

[nunSpQyeJR]

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".

[dylan604]

I was handed sheet music every year in band, and within a few weeks had it memorized. Books with music are also available in the library.

[jazzyjackson]

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.

[notatoad]

>Can I download a book without paying for it

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.

[nickthegreek]

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.

[lawlessone]

>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.

Lol, so why are OpenAI challenging these laws?

[croes]

Do you think OpenAI used fewer sources than Meta?

[m1el]

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.

[ryoshu]

Case in point - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

[JumpCrisscross]

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.

[conjectures]

It does apply to people? When you read a copy of a book, you can't be sued for making a copy of the book in the synapses of your brain.

Now, if you have eidetic memory and write out large chunks of the book from memory and publish them, that's what you could be sued for.

[tsimionescu]

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.

[visarga]

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.

[tsimionescu]

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).

[codedokode]

> But making copies for yourself, without distributing them,

If this was legal, nobody would be paying for software.

[triceratops]

> When you read a copy of a book

They're not talking about reading a book FFS. You absolutely can be sued for illegally obtaining a copy of the book.

[Terretta]

> 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.

[alabastervlog]

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!

[bee_rider]

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.

[codedokode]

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.

[bee_rider]

> Model cannot "learn" because it is not a human.

Sure, that’s why don’t like the analogy.

> 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.

[amelius]

Totally agree. Except the current administration probably will interpret things the way they see fit ...

[pier25]

> just like a model could

Not really. You can't multiply yourself a million times to produce content at an industrial scale.

[aiono]

Can I pirate books to train myself?

[echelon]

If models can learn for free, then the models (training code, inference code, training data, weights) should also be free. No copyright for anybody.

And if you sell the outputs of your model that you trained on free content, you shouldn't be able to hide behind trade secret.

[crorella]

> just like a model could

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.

[Terretta]

> the companies training the models are stealing the content from the internet

Are you stealing a billboard when you see and remember it?

The notion that consuming the web is "stealing" needs to stop.

[llamaimperative]

The question is whether it destroys the incentive to produce the work. That is the entire point of copyright and patent law.

LLMs do indeed significantly reduce the incentive to produce original work.

[codedokode]

Are you stealing when using a pirated software to run a billion-dollar business?

[crorella]

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.

[Terretta]

On the contrary, even telling people which billboards are posted about what, and how to get to them to look at them, is "how it works".

But the courts will get to clarify (in today's news):

https://www.reuters.com/legal/news-corp-sued-by-brave-softwa...

[ben_w]

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.

[sidewndr46]

And when I "learn" a verbatim copy of pages of that book, then write those pages out in Microsoft Word & sell those pages its legal?

[tsimionescu]

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).

[amelius]

Do you know Numerical Recipes in C?

This discussion reminds me of it.

[simion314]

>you can use that knowledge,

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 ?