[HN Gopher] The Battle over Books3
___________________________________________________________________
The Battle over Books3
Author : pseudolus
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-09-04 11:04 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| rhdunn wrote:
| I wonder how this affects things like the Oxford English
| Dictionary, wiktionary, and other corpus-based linguistics, which
| rely on sample sentences of the word usage in order to determine
| the context.
|
| Because language is an evolving thing, it is almost certain that
| they have referenced sentences from copyrighted sources. E.g. I'm
| willing to bet that they have the sentence where Cory Doctorow
| introduces the term "enshittification". (The OALD 7ed in it's
| foreword even states "Corpus analysis now makes it possible to
| draw authentic examples from a vast range of attested
| contemporary usage. A concordance will display hundreds or
| thousands of them to choose from.")
|
| I suspect that the inclusion of a few sentences -- especially
| those that introduce a new word or usage of a word -- are fair
| use, but the inclusion of the entire texts is not.
|
| This then brings up an interesting point where the computer
| scientists/linguists developing tools like WordNet or other NLP
| databases would be at an advantage to those that take the
| approach of throwing a lot of data into a neural network and
| hoping for the best. Yes, it is a lot more work/effort to develop
| those NLP databases, but in the end they may end up being more
| robust, especially around the question of copyright.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| oed.com has 0 results for "enshittification" yet.
| astrange wrote:
| Thankfully. People should really stop using words that make
| them sound like especially zany comic book characters.
| swyx wrote:
| "enshittification" so far is mostly a shibboleth for cranky
| old guys who only criticize things and don't _ahem_ get in
| the arena
| __loam wrote:
| Interesting way to defend anti consumer behavior by huge
| corporate interests.
| crote wrote:
| Sample sentences like those in the OED are pretty much the
| textbook example of fair use.
|
| They are obviously transformative (the whole "dictionary"
| part), copy factual information (use of a word, not what the
| sentence itself is saying), are not substantial (one sentence
| out of many thousands), and do not impact the original work's
| value (nobody would buy a dictionary instead of a novel because
| it contains a sample phrase from that novel). The OED cites its
| sources, which also strengthens its case.
|
| Compare that to AI, which is more than happy to write a short
| story to the prompt "Write a story about Bucky and Captain
| America falling in love, and living happily ever after in a
| mountain cabin." (Transformative? Maybe. Factual? No.
| Substantial? Yes. Impacts value? Yes.) Works like the AI's
| output have been dealt with in lawsuits like Salinger v.
| Colting, and it simply is not allowed. The big question right
| now is: what about the AI model itself?
| __loam wrote:
| The funniest thing about this whole debacle has been seeing
| how little tech bros understand fair use.
| artninja1988 wrote:
| A real legal scholar over here. You're not like other
| guys...
| PeterisP wrote:
| It shouldn't affect corpus linguistics but the other way
| around, because all these things have long ago (even before
| computers) been legally contested by authors and publishers
| w.r.t. what can be done to text by dictionary makers and
| corpora managers without the authors' permission, so unless new
| laws get passed, the current precedents establishing what's
| permissible for corpus linguistics would still be valid and
| also be relevant for treatment of machine learning models.
|
| In essence, the long established principles for text analysis
| is that facts about text (concordances, collocation statistics,
| n-gram counts) are neither copyrightable nor derived work, and
| thus can be calculated, gathered, used and distributed even if
| copyright holders of the source data object. Now a court might
| judge that training a large language model is substantially
| different or that it's effectively the same, but such a
| decision wouldn't affect corpus linguistics and how they use
| sample sentences, only whether LLMs get the same treatment or
| not.
| rhdunn wrote:
| Interesting, thanks!
| skilled wrote:
| What's next for models like GPT now that _a lot_ of sites will
| outright block CCBot, GPTBot and others? How big of an impact is
| this going to have on the LLM itself? Isn 't OpenAI in a bit of a
| pickle in regards to this?
|
| The problem with my question is the following:
|
| Content gets syndicated anyway, so if DigitalOcean blocks GPTBot
| (which it does), pretty much every single one of those tutorials
| will be syphoned off to other sites, which are unlikely to block
| GPTBot themselves. How will DigitalOcean (or any other company)
| address this?
|
| It looks to me like it's Catch 22 in every direction you look,
| and unless you're someone like The New York Times who can afford
| to outright protect the data with licensing...
|
| It's just something thats been on my mind lately but I don't
| understand the finer details of it.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| My guess is the big players hope is to steal an enough content
| and then build a self training LLM based off synthetic content
| (rehashed original works) before the theft part matters. Not
| sure how close they are to achieving but this seems to be a
| common SV gamble.
|
| Steal or do something shady, raise enough money / power so by
| the time your noticed, you have the money to win in the courts.
|
| You already see the propaganda about "none of this should
| matter because the cure for cancer is on the way courtesy of
| AI." I mean maybe it it but it smells fishy to me.
| p1esk wrote:
| An LLM can be trained to find relevant knowledge online. It
| doesn't have to be trained on the entirety of all existing
| knowledge.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Good luck when everything is paywalled
| Sindisil wrote:
| Given the already huge cost of training, and the evident
| lack of concern the LLM folks seem to have for copyright,
| why wouldn't the AI groups purchase subs to scrape the
| paywalled content?
|
| The would possibly need to apply some effort to appear
| human, but that should only throttle the rate, not stop
| their scraping all together.
| chasing wrote:
| Laws. And the lawsuits that arise when such theft is
| discovered.
| crote wrote:
| Who is going to enforce those laws?
|
| Big publishers are more than happy to settle with AI
| companies - they just their slice of the pie after all. But
| who is going to protect, say, your Hacker News comments? Are
| _you_ going to sue the AI company? Is YC going to sue? Are
| you going to sue YC for not banning crawlers in their
| robots.txt?
| dale_glass wrote:
| Why would I even bother doing that? I just write comments,
| it's not some ineffable wisdom. I'm writing them in public.
| I don't expect to profit from them somehow.
|
| Heck, collecting whatever cents I might be owed for being a
| drop in the ocean is a losing move in my country.
| capableweb wrote:
| Easy to work around. Contract someone outside of the
| jurisdiction to provide a dataset, then it's up to them to
| deliver it to you. You "weren't aware" of the data source
| until people outside the organization starts shouting or the
| police starts asking questions, but the model "doesn't
| contain any of the data" so you continue shipping the
| model/product.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| You will need to train the model in the same jurisdiction
| too, to avoid any kind of intervention into the training
| process. Ideally that would be a shelter company that
| "sells" you "training services" in that jurisdiction.
| thechao wrote:
| I don't know a lot of judges, but shenanigans like that
| (maybe the second or third time) are a great way to get a
| summary judgement, and find your way to county for a few
| days to think about the intent of a law.
| blibble wrote:
| I did a random sample of some news sites
|
| across the political spectrum: every single one I checked,
| other than ft.com blocks GPTBot
| meiraleal wrote:
| SPAs being difficult to crawl is a feature, after all! :)
| civilitty wrote:
| Is all the data on the internet from 2010 to 2025 that much
| more valuable than all the data on the internet from 2010 to
| 2022? _Better_ data yes, but more data up to the present day?
| Do we really need that to keep improving AI?
|
| GPT is already capable of incredible generalized language
| understanding and I'd wager we've long since hit diminishing
| returns from raw internet data. RLHF, fine tuning, and better
| (and more data efficient) architectures are what we need now.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| People have somehow conflated artificial intelligence with
| "oracle that knows everything" and so keeping models up to
| date with recent knowledge has become a must. Of course, that
| could be done by fine tuning techniques and better
| architectures that can outsource knowledge retrieval to
| tools, all very interesting ongoing work on that topic, but
| even these approaches require to not be "blocked" in their
| data retrieval tasks for them to work well.
|
| I'm sure you can do lots of interesting research using
| outdated datasets but for companies creating products this
| will not be sufficient.
| photonerd wrote:
| The "somehow" being "it was explicitly marketed that way"
| rhdunn wrote:
| Language shifts, so NLP models need to understand those. For
| example, compare the use of "gay" before ~1980 and after.
| Some words change in spelling, like "to-morrow" present in
| works around 1800 changing to "tomorrow" in current usage.
| Some words are also coined, like "woke" or "enshitification".
|
| If your data or models don't account for those then it can
| make mistakes. For example, if a model is only trained on
| modern sources (and does not know about Early Modern English
| 2nd person pronouns "thy"/"thine"/etc.) then it can easily
| get confused when determining parts of speech, which then
| affects other down-stream processing.
| cj wrote:
| I always imagined a great source of training would be
| subtitles of live news or other live programming.
|
| Would help to stay up to date on current events, and up to
| date on its general understanding of the world.
|
| With the risk being adopting the bias of news media.
| barrysteve wrote:
| People involved in AI have incentive to say 'yes' to
| everything.
|
| Nobody will make anything value in public, that they didn't
| want to be released for free anyway.
|
| ChatGPT's vacuum has brought back a desire for privacy and
| will probably contribute to destroying piracy too.
|
| ChatGPT has destroyed the 'study hard and get reward loop'
| for collaborative effort on the internet. If you use chatGPT,
| it absorbs all your question data and gives you nothing in
| return. You can't commit to random people, as they are
| expected to leak your IP onto gpt.
|
| Isaac Newton using chatGPT would upload the core of calculus
| to GPT in research questions, and see no personal benefit for
| doing so.
|
| There is no greater thief in history of academic work, than
| electronics.
| drubio wrote:
| It's going to be a walled garden dystopia, with everyone and
| everything asking to sign-up, subscribe or whatever to monetize
| content.
|
| Scraping & siphoning content, ad blockers, both sides have been
| in arms race for years, AI and LLMs will just be the last
| straw, before almost anything of value is behind a
| pay/subscription wall.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > "It is only fair that you compensate us for using our writings,
| without which AI would be banal and extremely limited," the
| letter states.
|
| These models are going to come out so fast from one-off
| contracts. Its not the line that some creatives think it is. Its
| a 2 year delay at best.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Interesting. When it's copyrighted works in a digital form (plain
| text, ePub, whatever) it's a legal issue.
|
| ROT13 the text is the data still a copyright violation? I imagine
| so since it's a trivial thing to restore it to a legally volatile
| form.
|
| I understand that an unresolved issue is whether, once ingested
| into an LLM, the trained LLM is in violation of copyright. One
| wonders if human readers too are in violation of copyright for
| having been "trained" as well when they read a book.
|
| Is a "brain transplant" from one LLM to another a thing? Perhaps
| just a trivial copy of the node weights or whatever they're
| called. That would would not let the target LLM off the hook with
| regard to copyright violation I expect.
|
| But what if one LLM "taught" another. Maybe that is not a thing
| yet.
| the8472 wrote:
| > Is a "brain transplant" from one LLM to another a thing?
|
| At least it's a thing for vision models and was also used to
| train OpenAI Five (the dota AI)[0]. So it probably applies to
| LLMs too.
|
| [0] https://cdn.openai.com/dota-2.pdf (page 2)
| DanHulton wrote:
| Any time I see the phrase "democratize access," my spidey-sense
| starts tingling. It's almost never used to describe an action
| that's an unadulterated good for society. It's USUALLY used to
| describe something sketchy at best, or even outright evil, with
| the justification that only "the bad guys" have access currently,
| and everything would be better if EVERYONE had access.
|
| Look, I get that unethical corporations using this pirated
| training data for their artist-usurpation machines is bad, right?
| But EVERYONE being able to dismiss the rights and wishes of
| current artists while they work to create artist-usurpation
| machines of their own? That's not any better! You don't need to
| "democratize access" to that!
| gunshai wrote:
| Replace democratize with lower the barriers to entry. Yes it
| removes initial skill but typically doesn't remove the skill
| cap.
| bartread wrote:
| I think this is an oversimplification. The concern about
| entrenching the positions of big tech companies is, I think,
| genuine, and I do believe it's important to find ways to foster
| competition and opportunity for smaller players. Possibly the
| law needs to evolve and/or there need to be licensing solutions
| for this content that work both for creators, and for those
| looking to train models (and, in some sense, licensing payments
| that are "means-tested").
| csh0 wrote:
| I always took democratize access to X to mean "I would like to
| give many people the opportunity to give me lots of money by
| buying my product."
| __loam wrote:
| I saw a funny tweet recently from a guy who was spending $187
| a month to not learn art. He was subscribed to like 9
| different ai subscription services
| crazygringo wrote:
| Funny, my reaction is the total opposite.
|
| Generally speaking, democratizing access is about removing
| monopoly power that extracts illegitimate rents -- and that
| tingles in a _good_ way.
|
| Libraries have always been at the forefront of democratizing
| access, and hasn't that been an unadulterated good? Or whether
| it's community colleges that democratized access to higher ed,
| or the deregulation of air travel that democratized air travel
| through cheaper prices that made it more available to the
| masses, instead of artificially restricting routes.
|
| I can't think of a single example of "democratizing access"
| that is "sketchy at best" or "outright evil". They all seem
| pretty great to me!
|
| But I guess I'm also firmly on the side of AI training here --
| I see no reason for additional compensation to authors/artists
| for training on their data, when anyone can go to a library or
| museum and then go and create their own works influenced by
| what they've seen. Who cares if I hire an expensive consultant
| who's read a lot of books at the library, or a cheap AI who's
| read a lot of books from Books3? Why would authors/artists
| deserve extra compensation for the latter but not the former?
| There's just no clear legal principle behind that.
| itsokimbatman wrote:
| I mean that's part of the conversation that needs to be had.
| I would argue libraries are an unadulterated good, but it is
| generally considered at best unethical and at worst illegal
| to re-use content that isn't your own, at least without a
| proper citation.
|
| Then there's also the issue with things like art, music, and
| code. Where does the line fall with scraping Github,
| Soundcloud, DeviantArt, or Instagram and using things like
| that without permission? Most of the code on Github is open
| source, but there's a lot of difference between the GPL and
| BSD licenses.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _but it is generally considered at best unethical and at
| worst illegal to re-use content that isn 't your own, at
| least without a proper citation._
|
| No it's not at all, except in extremely limited
| circumstances.
|
| When George Lucas made Star Wars, did he cite all the
| Westerns and space opera serials and movies that influenced
| him? When you give a presentation at work on why you should
| move to a sharded database, do you cite the history of
| academic work on sharded databases? When you use Times New
| Roman in a document, do you cite the British newspaper _The
| Times_ , or Robert Granjon's prior serif designs from the
| 1500's?
|
| Of course not.
|
| Legally, you can do whatever you want with _ideas_ and
| styles and whatnot, which is what AI is about. Legally, you
| only run into problems when you reproduce sections of
| copyrighted works _verbatim_ , without a license, in a
| manner that's not considered fair use. Your answer to
| "where does the line fall" is quite clear legally -- it's
| the line demarcated by fair use, which has nothing to do
| with licenses. AI doesn't change that.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Any time I see the phrase "democratize access," my spidey-
| sense starts tingling._
|
| Funny, I get the same tingling feeling when I see the phrase
| "restrict access." I guess it's an unreliable signal, huh.
| lewhoo wrote:
| That's how I see it as well. To democratize art, music etc. now
| means to remove the skill component with the usage of all the
| work done so far. No one is actually prevented from pursuing
| those things and if you don't want your art to become training
| data you're ruining democratization and are somehow against the
| will of the people.
| __loam wrote:
| The level of disrespect for artists I've seen here and on
| other forums with regards to this technology has been
| staggering. The entitlement for work you didn't do is so
| gross.
| msoad wrote:
| it would be a shame if it would be possible to train a very
| useful AI using all the books in the world but corporate greed
| wouldn't allow it
| edent wrote:
| What if I don't want my book used for that purpose?
|
| It isn't as though the AI companies have even paid for a single
| copy of the authors' books.
| primordialsoup wrote:
| It's pretty much the opposite: Big corporates are the ones
| training the models (and benefiting from it).
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Other big corporation hold a large portion of copyrights
| trained on as well. I tend to side with everyone being able
| to do it
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Either way, it has to happen, and it will happen. It might as
| well happen on universally-equitable terms.
| bagswatchesus wrote:
| [dead]
| Aurornis wrote:
| Does anyone have more content about what makes Books3 so special
| relative to Bibliotik? Was it processed somehow, or just compiled
| into a single file?
|
| I feel like I'm missing something from this and all of the other
| articles about Books3. It sounds like he downloaded all of the
| books from a book piracy site then rehosted them with the
| "Books3" name. Surely there must be more to the story? Or is the
| story simply that a professor hosted pirated content under his
| own name under the guise of AI training?
|
| This is the kind of effort that could have been done anonymously,
| just as all of the pirated books had already been uploaded and
| hosted anonymously. I'm not sure why he expected any different
| outcome by re-pirating everything under his own name.
|
| The journalists seem to be loving it, though. All of the tech
| journals have an article about this guy.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Does anyone have more content about what makes Books3 so
| special relative to Bibliotik?
|
| They are essentially the same content (that is, the
| documentation for the copy of books3 seoarately hosted in
| huggingface says that it is all of Bibliotik in plaintext form,
| presumably as of a particular point in time.)
|
| > This is the kind of effort that could have been done
| anonymously
|
| Sure, its something each group training an AI could do
| independently at greater aggregate cost until someone succeeds
| in taking the original source down, but not only would that be
| costlier, but it in would involve less transparency and
| comparability across model architecture, or at least required
| the transparent, comparable trained version to be different
| from the full version.
| Michelangelo11 wrote:
| So his contribution consisted of putting Bibliotik into
| plaintext format? Or is there more to it?
| gisely wrote:
| How dare you profane the contributions of a literal god of
| AI!
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Sure, its something each group training an AI could do
| independently at greater aggregate cost until someone
| succeeds in taking the original source down, but not only
| would that be costlier, but it in would involve less
| transparency and comparability across model architecture, or
| at least required the transparent, comparable trained version
| to be different from the full version.
|
| I meant he could have uploaded it under a pseudonym rather
| than broadcasting to the world that he was the one doing the
| uploading.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| It would be interesting to see someone dig into the differences
| between the capture of language and culture, and control over how
| it gets fed back into cultural discourse, that we fear
| corporations achieving with commercialized LLMs, and the control
| pre-internet publishers had (and to a certain extent, still do),
| over what content, and in what format, language was disbursed and
| distributed. I am not at all certain that having your work used
| to train LLMs is a bigger threat to writers ownership of their
| work than publishing houses were and are.
|
| I also suspect that if we had an effective mechanism to prevent
| use of copyrighted work in training, it would necessarily behoove
| an artist to opt their content out. Will you really want to be
| excluded what may well become the canonical mechanism for
| searching and generating language?
| fiforpg wrote:
| "I was poking around, Googling 'how to download Library
| Genesis,'"
|
| LG literally has this info on its front page. Researchers will
| research, I suppose.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| More to the point, it's huge. 33 TB is a massive amount, and I
| was grateful to sidestep it by downloading just the epubs.
|
| Still, there's always room for books4.
| fsckboy wrote:
| is there enough data on the web for a LLM to be agnostic about
| the source languages, Russian, Chinese, English, German, etc?
| Where training on Russian and Chinese and English and German etc
| sources would also incorporate enough information about
| translation that if the AI learned about some topic only through
| Chinese sources, it could still recognize/use/apply/express those
| ideas in English?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| That's a fascinating question. I'm not sure. It seems like if
| it learned about a topic in Chinese, it would be able to
| express it in English, but I haven't seen this tested.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I lean to the side of AI progress over copyright, though I fear
| AI becoming stupid when incentive for original works maybe goes
| down, so I think society needs to figure out some social contract
| at least, like subsidies to keep new content flowing.
|
| For instance blogs will stop posting if chatbots in search grab
| all the answers directly from their sites bypassing all ad
| revenue.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The blog posts I see that are based around some small specific
| answer that could be extracted all seen to be spam anyway.
| intrasight wrote:
| > incentive for original works maybe goes down
|
| I don't know why you would have that concern. LOTS of people
| write because they just want to share. Now broaden it out to
| include speech. LOTS of people talk - it's what we do.
|
| Progress in AI will happen because humans like to express
| themselves. The challenge isn't copyright. It's figuring out
| how to capture the vast content that just isn't getting
| captured. Also, this is really only an issue for "new
| intelligence" - if you really think there is such a thing.
| Personally, I do not. I think like 99% of all human
| intelligence is in the out of copyright corpus.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > LOTS of people write because they just want to share.
|
| The blogging scene from the early millennium is now a shadow
| of its former self, and one of the most often stated reasons
| for abandoning blogging is "my site just wasn't getting many
| views any more". In a world where AI generated content
| abounds, there will be even fewer eyeballs on whatever one
| shares and therefore less feeling of reward for sharing.
| Moreover, the people still blogging are often loading their
| content with referral links, because in an economy full of
| glamorous influencers, even ordinary people are tempted to
| seek some financial reward for sharing beyond the mere
| pleasure of it. Less eyeballs due to AI competition means
| fewer people clicking those referral links.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Yah, blogs are already a rounding error in the corpus, and
| that has nothing to do with llms. Those of us who are still
| blogging are already doing it in spite of ~waves hand
| broadly at the world~.
|
| I'm not truly sure that llms mean less eyeballs, though.
| They produce mediocre content in an arena where high
| quality content matters. There's already a massive pile of
| crap on the internet; it's already all about surfacing the
| relevant and the interesting bits.
| lewhoo wrote:
| > LOTS of people write because they just want to share.
|
| You just gave up the "for a living" group, who arguably
| produce overall better content (of course there are
| exceptions), and focused on hobbyists. I'd call that a self-
| defeat.
| intrasight wrote:
| Most all humans communicate for a living. I don't see your
| point.
| lewhoo wrote:
| But not all and not most produce intellectual content for
| a living. And those who do you seem to be ok with
| ditching because if I read you correctly it's a small
| loss.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| From a preservation angle, how big is Books3? Is it easy enough
| for mortals to mirror for that unlikely future where it might be
| possible to self-train reasonably good models from scratch if
| provisioned with data?
| bvm wrote:
| 800gb
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Where are you getting that figure?
| sirodoht wrote:
| 39.52Gb gzipped and 108.79GB uncompressed.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| books3.tar.gz itself is ~37gb compressed. Often really the
| entire "The Pile" dataset (composed of both the mostly
| compressed archives, along with a ~450gb compressed jsonl
| compilation of the data) is being discussed. That's around
| 825gb.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| That is shockingly approachable for a large fraction of
| English literature.
| Tokumei-no-hito wrote:
| Out of curiosity why is jsonl so popular in the ML space?
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Not speaking for ML, but I love jsonl as a distribution
| format. Lots of storage overhead vs a more appropriate bulk
| container, but it makes it trivial to stream, sample,
| concatenate, etc. Anything else (eg csv or parquet) is
| going to require better tooling and/or just a little shell
| magic to handle headers.
| crote wrote:
| What worries me most is that this is likely to only increase the
| gap between large corporate creator and small independent
| creators.
|
| Large AI companies probably are not too worried about making
| deals with corporate content creators. Having access to content
| from a trigger-happy creator is only going to increase their
| advantage over competitors, after all. And if those creators were
| instead to try to introduce legislation, the AI companies would
| risk losing access to content from small creators without the
| means to sue too.
|
| We seem to be moving into a world where corporate content cannot
| in any way be reused, remixed, or even archived. You cannot even
| _own_ a copy - it is only accessible for a monthly fee and can
| disappear at any time. Meanwhile, anything created by independent
| creators is fair game to steal and rip off. Copyright was
| intended to promote and protect human creativity, but instead we
| got a rent-seeking mechanism used to stifle original creation.
| EGreg wrote:
| How shocking! A monopoly right granted by the government to
| exclude others from use of an idea (patents) and creative works
| (intellectual property) was intended to help the little guy,
| but ended up helping the big boys extract rents instead, while
| exploiting the little guy because they sold their rights to
| survive and get access to a platform?
|
| https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-pirated...
|
| It's almost as if governments (even capitalist ones) work with
| industry and concentration of power perpetuates this kind of
| consolidation further. They keep us distracted so we don't have
| enough collective willpower to get together and demand reform,
| or even better -- create our own alternative open ecosystems.
|
| I write about many other examples of government-industry
| distracting us here: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
| blibble wrote:
| > And if those creators were instead to try to introduce
| legislation, the AI companies would risk losing access to
| content from small creators without the means to sue too.
|
| this is the point of a class action suit isn't it?
|
| if it turns out training isn't fair use then
| Microsoft/Google/OpenAI will suddenly have class action suits
| for billions if not trillions of damages against them
|
| ($150,000 damages per willful infringement, after all)
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Have you never seen the outcome of a class action? They're
| all slaps in the wrist, less than speeding tickets, and the
| action members get like a free hotdog or red bull as
| compensation if they're lucky
| blibble wrote:
| yes, the lawyers always clean up
|
| the aim would be to make training on copyrighted material
| legally toxic and render all existing datasets and trained
| weights unlawful
|
| the damages are simply a bonus
| __loam wrote:
| Yeah that's the real goal. You can make it impossible for
| big corporations to use this technology because it paints
| a huge target on them while ignoring the de facto state
| of open source models that are impossible to enforce
| regulation against. Best of both worlds maybe.
| blibble wrote:
| exactly
|
| it's like patent trolling, but with no expensive patent
| required
| gochi wrote:
| [flagged]
| lewhoo wrote:
| How so ? Copyright was introduced along with the print press
| to protect the works of authors. When you buy a copy of a
| book it's not exactly private property of the author that you
| buy, is it ?
| smokel wrote:
| Texts were copied even before the printing press.
|
| See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
| for more information.
| lewhoo wrote:
| They were, _usually_ to preserve the work, not distribute
| it on a large scale because there was no large scale.
| What 's your argument ?
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| This isn't the case. In Ancient Rome it was a common
| practice for someone in the audience to note down poets'
| performances, then give that transcript to a team of
| amanuenses who would produce copies for sale, with none
| of the proceeds going back to the original creator. In
| the pre-copyright world, no one saw any problem with this
| practice; as the other poster mentioned, the creator
| economy was patronage-based. All that the poets objected
| to (Martial has at least one biting epigram about this)
| was people putting their own names on the poetry instead
| of crediting the creator. That is, plagiarism instead of
| copyright violation.
| lewhoo wrote:
| > In Ancient Rome it was a common practice for someone in
| the audience to note down poets' performances
|
| Which was not at scale and in a different model of
| economy. Since it was the printing press which introduced
| the issue then what's the point in making an example from
| times where such issues didn't exist ?
|
| > In the pre-copyright world, no one saw any problem with
| this practice
|
| Because in the pre-industrial-revolution world the scale
| of the problem probably wasn't noticeable.
|
| I know works of art were occasionally copied prior to
| printing press, hence the _usually_. I guess the modern
| analogy to your example would be something like CAM /TS
| films. You go to a show and copy the content. Are you
| arguing this should be legal ?
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > Which was not at scale
|
| I doubt you are playing here with a good-faith definition
| of "at scale". In any event, copying of works for sale in
| Antiquity was certainly of scale, we know that many
| literary works spread quickly across the Mediterranean
| through commercial production. Furthermore, some of the
| earliest printed books were made in such limited editions
| that Roman mass production can certainly be compared. The
| development of the printing press is generally viewed in
| contrast to the medieval manuscript era that immediately
| preceded it, but that was a time marked by a decline in
| literary rates and amanuensis workforce since Antiquity.
|
| As for going to a show and copying the content, yes, I
| would argue that this should be legal. Plenty of people
| on HN are from cultures that never entirely accepted
| copyright on entertainment, even if their countries'
| governments were pressured to enact copyright
| legislation.
| lewhoo wrote:
| > I doubt you are playing here with a good-faith
| definition of "at scale".
|
| I could say the same thing about you because you make it
| sound like the _appearance_ of some works in various
| places on the map is equivalent to their vast abundance.
|
| > development of the printing press is generally viewed
| in contrast to the medieval manuscript era that
| immediately preceded it
|
| If you skip renaissance.
|
| > As for going to a show and copying the content, yes
|
| I guess it's one thing to argue something like that from
| the spectators pov and another from the artists. If you
| actually have evidence that there are large circles of
| professional artists who argue their work should be
| copied at will with no compensation then ok, you are
| right.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > the appearance of some works in various places on the
| map is equivalent to their vast abundance.
|
| As I said, historians know that some popular works not
| only appeared across the map quickly, they were
| commercially sold in the marketplace such that the
| educated class was able to purchase their own copies of
| prominent recent works with, of course, no money going
| back to the creator. Again, I don't think your definition
| of "abundance" is good faith.
|
| With regard to your last point, why should the artists'
| desire for compensation outweigh the desire of audiences
| to consume the media for free, or other artists' desire
| to rework prior art for free? This is a moral debate that
| is quite culturally dependent, and though you want to
| claim that your views are the right ones, that just won't
| fly on a forum as international as HN. Many posters on HN
| grew up with pirated DVD and cassette/CD stands at the
| market (some might even still have them where they live),
| or in their countries Bittorrent or now pirate streaming
| sites are things used by ordinary people.
| lewhoo wrote:
| Ok, I'd like to call you on that and provide actual
| numbers. I found this:
|
| _Before the invention of printing, the number of
| manuscript books in Europe could be counted in thousands.
| By 1500, after only 50 years of printing, there were more
| than 9,000,000 books._
| https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/The-medieval-
| boo...
|
| Which illustrates what the difference in scale I'm
| talking about.
|
| > why should the artists' desire for compensation
| outweigh the desire of audiences to consume the media for
| free
|
| Because if you disincentivize the artist there are no
| media to consume. Why should your desire to consume for
| free deprive me from consuming at all if there is no
| artist willing to accept such conditions ?
| a2800276 wrote:
| I'd guess the point is that prior to the invention of the
| printing press, an "author" would be financed through a
| patron. That patron could monetize their initial
| investment by either hiring people to copy a work by hand
| or allowing access to the book.
|
| Once the printing press arrived the patron / publisher
| needed another way to monetize their initial investment
| as modes of reproduction became more easy, copyright
| became more restrictive.
|
| Depending on your side of the copyright argument, it
| either allows whomever is making the initial investment
| (publisher, author) to be a generous patron of human
| creative progress ... or ... it allows the to maintain a
| monopoly on knowledge and be able to profit off it.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > * or ... it allows the to maintain a monopoly on
| knowledge and be able to profit off it.*
|
| The length of modern copyright terms is absurd and
| harmful.
|
| The USA started with 14 (plus optionally another 14)
| which was better.
|
| Last I checked - quite a few year ago - I think there
| were academic papers calculating that an "optimal"
| copyright term is probably around 10-14 years.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| >as it's integral to capitalism functioning
|
| Copyright in the united states begins in 1776 and even
| earlier in Europe. At this time the economy consisted almost
| solely of agriculture as well as some light manufacturing. So
| it seems highly unlikely that the authors of the constitution
| saw copyright as "integral to capitalism functioning" rather
| than as a way to promote the arts.
|
| Regarding your second point:
|
| >The first statutory police force is believed to be the High
| Constables of Edinburgh, who were created by the Scottish
| parliament in 1611 to "guard their streets and to commit to
| ward all person found on the streets after the said hour".[0]
|
| I understand that you will likely view this source through a
| communist lens, and I wouldn't either take every primary
| source at face value but having a city watch and balif was
| common. As goverments became more centralized these were
| replaced by "police" but it is misleading to say police were
| simply invented one day, and that it was invented soley with
| ulterior motives.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_criminal_justice
| throw10920 wrote:
| > So it seems highly unlikely that the authors of the
| constitution saw copyright as "integral to capitalism
| functioning" rather than as a way to promote the arts.
|
| They didn't. GP is speaking out of ignorance and desire to
| prove that "capitalism bad".
| tbrownaw wrote:
| >> Copyright was intended to promote and protect human
| creativity
|
| > _This was never the case. Copyright was always a method to
| enforce private property as a core concept as it 's integral
| to capitalism functioning._
|
| Yeah, copyright was never intended to protect creativity, it
| was just intended to allow people to make a living by being
| creative.
|
| Somehow something about that doesn't seem to quite add up.
|
| > _Just like police were never about promoting safety and
| wellbeing._
|
| Please do a bit of research on what happens when laws stop
| being enforced.
|
| Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Metropolit
| an_Po...
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