Most people in my social circles are various flavours of anti-AI, and it drives me crazy how many of them, who were once stridently anti-copyright, are now using copyright as one of the great pillars of AI opposition
I think besides the points already brought up by other responses, it's important to distinguish attribution from copyright. AI training ignores both while people who are against copyright might not want to get rid of attribution requirements.
I take it because copyright was used to hurt independent and smaller harmless creators, they’re dislike of AI is entirely consistent with that given smaller creatives are being harmed in a sense with their work mimicked and work deprived of them.
Personally I think creatives have an edge as I personally don’t think AI is great at exercising discretion in creativity or design. Which you can see in coding agents their discretion in design is often arbitrary and poor. So I think at least for now that’s still where humans tend to out perform AI
IMHO AI generated content should be treated the same way with how human generated content and I don't see the problem.
However as with technology the problem is a bit different, e.g.: When subletting your apartment requires manual effort, this is not a problem. Automated, it became an industry and that's a huge headache.
I think this is the key point where the derived work has unlimited possibility that they want to curb it early on. In a way it's a fair effort to keep human's competitiveness but may prove to be futile.
Characters are copyrightable, its a similar situation to song compositions vs song masters. There is the copyright of the original picture/song master but separately there is the copyright of the song composition/character. Making your own work derived from the same character or song composition is still a derivative work even if it doesn't directly copy the song master/original picture.
Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry, that is until they started doing it themselves at scale and now they are claiming it’s the law that’s broken, it’s crazy.
Basically a rage bait. If the law was bad, does it make it okay to violate it? In fact Anthropic is literally paying $1.5B on the copyright settlement, that indicates its completely a settled issue that AI companies have been violating this law. Some have been caught and fined, others are been lucky or that influence over the government.
> Copyright Law Was Built for Human Scale
No where in the law it has this kinda scoped limits. It has a time limit and scale doesnt not matter. Scale matter in a way that its gets harder to enforces buts that not the fault of copyright law. If you steal at a big scale, its still stealing.
copyright is not “broken,” it was always a two-faced scam designed to protect “owners” at the expense of creators. don’t expect this blatant hypocrisy to kill copyright, either - death of copyright is a slippery slope leading straight to communist utopia, and the death of the global acqui-parasite class
Copyright law has always been excessively restrictive, and is long overdue for reform. The informal practices that people have been following (i.e. free creation and distribution but no monetization and no confusion with official releases) are pretty close to what a reasonable law would state.
Hopefully, future legislation will cater less to publishers and copyright trolls. I'm not optimistic though. While certain kinds of publishers are indeed becoming less powerful, sports-related media conglomerates are successfully lobbying for more surveillance.
The general population will likely get the worst of both worlds, with copyright trolls getting to enforce unjust laws against regular people, while big tech gets to pay their way out.
In the past, many developers were against copyright law because they saw it as a way for big corps to stifle competition and curb creativity in order to increase their profits. A lot of people right now invoke the violation of the same copyright law because the tide has changed and now companies, by ignoring copyright law, are hurting artists/smaller companies and/or not contributing back or unlawfully closing the code in the case of GPL.
I don't see any kind of hypocritical stance here honestly. All this time the criticism of the enforcement of copyright law or now the lack of it just reflects the fact that some people are genuinely concerned that bad actors(big corps) are using the law to damage society in order to pursue their own interests.
Correct, and for some reason America has gotten to an "over legalization" state where every concept has to filter through a legal system in order to be good / bad. I think that's where the matter comes from. Pedantic legalists insist that everyone couch their ideas in a rigid set of legal statutes.
"But you just said that an individual should be able to use copyrighted works. Therefore you should have no qualms with a legal individual (corp) utilizing every copyrighted work in the world to destroy society, as nothing they are doing is illegal under your rubric."
The reality is most humans operate from a more natural and intuitive sense. A single artist who made a song shouldn't be destroyed by the big corp that is stealing it for their own profit (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon). But its hard to interpret this in the strict legalist sense, because in the US, law is setup to make corps/people, money/speech, art/product, all hard to distinguish, and generally doesn't give much affordance to "what the law reasonably meant" when challenged by corporations (but it does seem to be applied quite conservatively for individuals).
For example, data protection laws tend to be applied quite loosely to corps with slaps on the wrist and stern words. For individuals, accessing data you shouldn't can mean the rest of your life in prison. People feel this is unfair, but the legalists will use a bunch of reasoning to excuse the clear immorality.
Its definitely "using the intellect and words to override correct human moral intuitions."
This is exactly why some legal systems are intentionally not codified in language, i.e. the Qadi system. There are no laws, there are only mutually agreed upon judges who adjudicate between parties who bring a complaint. Every case is different and there are no set of rules that can cover every edge case. Programmers of all people should know this.
Developers in the past were strongly for copyleft. The promise of copyleft is how we got all the great software that underlies the Internet today, starting with Linux itself.
The fact to keep in mind is that, despite what the name might suggest, copyleft is not at odds with copyright! The core feature of copyright is having a degree of control over what you have authored, and copyleft is ingeniously using copyright to prevent corporations from just taking open code, volunteer contributions, and modifying and using it for profit without giving anything back to the community.
Death of copyright would be the death of copyleft.
This is a particularly well written article. Plaudits to poster and original writer. It took me from no clue to a context or sieve I could organize the noise through. And darn it, it made it look easy. Like the John Daily line it's so good I'm mad. Sheesh, thanks a lot!
The law (and the system/society) generally serves capital, instead of humans.
That's why big corporations can both use copyright against smaller companies and individual creators, while also ignoring the same copyright laws when it suits them.
I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy because it undermines the stability of the whole system upon which their wealth depends.
Not copywrite but the whole democracy is broken. A big company with an army of lawyers and an OS project will claim exactly the same case. Who has more probability to win? It happens in every occasion, it's just that copywrite ones are more common. Only when two giants collide justice is rendered, eg Oracle vs Google over Java on Android.
The article fundamentally misrepresents what AI is doing.
It claims that people using AI to create works that violate copyright is equivalent to individual artists painting pictures or people writing fan fiction. But that is not at all what is happening.
OpenAI and others are taking money from customers to generate copyrighted works. That's back-letter copyright infringement.
The states that it is unreasonable to go after all the individual customers. That's true, but that's not how copyright law has ever been enforced. If you have a company selling copyrighted works without permission, you go after that company not after their customers.
The argument here is founded on motivated reasoning.
Copyright was founded on similar principles to property rights, it encourages desirable economic by ensuring investment in RnD doesn’t have a free-rider disincentive. Whether it’s the right tool for the job and how enforcement carries out its a another matter. While these laws for property and IP aren’t without issues they do address actual problems.
Personally I would be more open to the idea of open AI flouting copy rights if they weren’t planning on taking a portion of the claim of other peoples creations used via the product while failing to properly compensate the sources of its training data.
30 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 55.6 ms ] threadPeople hate it when copyright law is ignored by corporations to crush people.
This isn't particularly hard to grasp.
Personally I think creatives have an edge as I personally don’t think AI is great at exercising discretion in creativity or design. Which you can see in coding agents their discretion in design is often arbitrary and poor. So I think at least for now that’s still where humans tend to out perform AI
Is this even true? It might violate a trademark, but I don't think it would violate copyright law unless it was a copy of an existing picture.
If even WWII-era documents are still under copyright, building a model respecting that would be impossible.
Her position is all artists copy
https://ninapaley.com/category/creativity/
> Copyright Law Was Built for Human Scale
No where in the law it has this kinda scoped limits. It has a time limit and scale doesnt not matter. Scale matter in a way that its gets harder to enforces buts that not the fault of copyright law. If you steal at a big scale, its still stealing.
Hopefully, future legislation will cater less to publishers and copyright trolls. I'm not optimistic though. While certain kinds of publishers are indeed becoming less powerful, sports-related media conglomerates are successfully lobbying for more surveillance.
The general population will likely get the worst of both worlds, with copyright trolls getting to enforce unjust laws against regular people, while big tech gets to pay their way out.
I don't see any kind of hypocritical stance here honestly. All this time the criticism of the enforcement of copyright law or now the lack of it just reflects the fact that some people are genuinely concerned that bad actors(big corps) are using the law to damage society in order to pursue their own interests.
"But you just said that an individual should be able to use copyrighted works. Therefore you should have no qualms with a legal individual (corp) utilizing every copyrighted work in the world to destroy society, as nothing they are doing is illegal under your rubric."
The reality is most humans operate from a more natural and intuitive sense. A single artist who made a song shouldn't be destroyed by the big corp that is stealing it for their own profit (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon). But its hard to interpret this in the strict legalist sense, because in the US, law is setup to make corps/people, money/speech, art/product, all hard to distinguish, and generally doesn't give much affordance to "what the law reasonably meant" when challenged by corporations (but it does seem to be applied quite conservatively for individuals).
For example, data protection laws tend to be applied quite loosely to corps with slaps on the wrist and stern words. For individuals, accessing data you shouldn't can mean the rest of your life in prison. People feel this is unfair, but the legalists will use a bunch of reasoning to excuse the clear immorality.
Its definitely "using the intellect and words to override correct human moral intuitions."
The fact to keep in mind is that, despite what the name might suggest, copyleft is not at odds with copyright! The core feature of copyright is having a degree of control over what you have authored, and copyleft is ingeniously using copyright to prevent corporations from just taking open code, volunteer contributions, and modifying and using it for profit without giving anything back to the community.
Death of copyright would be the death of copyleft.
Money, money broke copyright.
Remember the DMCA?
I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy because it undermines the stability of the whole system upon which their wealth depends.
It never made sense to me that just because you drew a shitty picture of a mouse, somehow I’m no longer allowed to do that.
"I twist the truth, i rule the world"...
Tell this to kids raided by BSA for downloading pirated Microsoft and Adobe programms.
Fixed that for you.
It claims that people using AI to create works that violate copyright is equivalent to individual artists painting pictures or people writing fan fiction. But that is not at all what is happening.
OpenAI and others are taking money from customers to generate copyrighted works. That's back-letter copyright infringement.
The states that it is unreasonable to go after all the individual customers. That's true, but that's not how copyright law has ever been enforced. If you have a company selling copyrighted works without permission, you go after that company not after their customers.
Copyright was founded on similar principles to property rights, it encourages desirable economic by ensuring investment in RnD doesn’t have a free-rider disincentive. Whether it’s the right tool for the job and how enforcement carries out its a another matter. While these laws for property and IP aren’t without issues they do address actual problems.
Personally I would be more open to the idea of open AI flouting copy rights if they weren’t planning on taking a portion of the claim of other peoples creations used via the product while failing to properly compensate the sources of its training data.