[HN Gopher] OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules
        
       Author : jonbaer
       Score  : 361 points
       Date   : 2025-03-13 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
        
       | freedomben wrote:
       | Related (adjacent content from the same report):
       | 
       |  _OpenAI urges Trump administration to remove guardrails for the
       | industry (cnbc.com)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43354324
        
         | freedomben wrote:
         | Apparently the above has been marked as a dupe (I hope not from
         | a misunderstanding of what "adjacent" means), but ftr it covers
         | different stuff. e.g. there's nothing about the classified data
         | model proposal in TFA
        
           | pvg wrote:
           | Slightly different coverage of the same event usually count
           | as dupes on HN. You could link the reporting you want to
           | emphasize/discuss, the HN submission itself is not that
           | important.
        
       | dsr_ wrote:
       | You see, American AI is going to take over the world. It's just
       | that it's temporarily short of funds. I mean, GPUs. Uh, there are
       | pesky laws in the way.
       | 
       | Totally not the fault of a gigantic overcommitment based on
       | wishing, no.
        
       | gkoberger wrote:
       | I hate this game. I hate that Sam Altman publicly supported Trump
       | (both financially and by showing up). Maybe I hate that he "had"
       | to do this for the sake of his company, or maybe I hate that he
       | _didn't_ have to do it and is a hypocrite. Maybe I just hate how
       | easily laws can be shaped by $1M and a few nice words. Either
       | way, I hate that it worked.
        
         | jokethrowaway wrote:
         | centralising power never works well for the good of society
        
           | kelseyfrog wrote:
           | That's correct. Voluntary association advocated by anarchy is
           | the only truly free social model.
        
             | UncleEntity wrote:
             | I heard rumblings about some sort of system where power is
             | shared equally across three branches of government with
             | checks and balances to ensure one branch doesn't go rogue
             | and just do whatever they want.
             | 
             | Forget what they called it, united something or other.
        
               | int_19h wrote:
               | Well, the people who designed that system were very
               | skeptical of political parties in general, and thought
               | they could be avoided. Turns out that this isn't true,
               | and once you have parties, they can in fact capture all
               | three branches of government, and then those "checks and
               | balances" kinda stop working.
        
               | UncleEntity wrote:
               | Yeah, I think that is unfortunately the fate of all
               | political systems.
               | 
               | Maybe our AI overlords will do a better job this time if
               | they are unconstrained from any lawful oversight. I mean,
               | one can hope...
        
               | kelseyfrog wrote:
               | In fact, that's not too far away from our current
               | trajectory. Algorithmically enforced sovereign oversight
               | is part of the patchwork state and Yarvinism
               | specifically.
        
               | slt2021 wrote:
               | whatever you had in mind, thats definitely not the USA,
               | where money/lobbying and inter-partisan corruption trump
               | everything
        
           | danans wrote:
           | It's not true that it never works.
           | 
           | Centralizing production goals, decision making, and
           | expenditure at the Federal government is what made the
           | industrial response to WW2 successful. Centralizing tax
           | revenue to fund retirements for the elderly (Social Security)
           | resulted in the poverty rate of seniors being brought far
           | lower. Centralizing zoning control at the state of California
           | is _finally_ starting to make localities take responsibility
           | for building more housing. These were/are centralizing
           | efforts with the intent of helping the masses over the
           | wealthy few.
           | 
           | What doesn't work is centralizing power with the intent of
           | concentrating wealth and security by taking wealth, labor,
           | and security from working people, AKA extractive
           | institutions.
           | 
           | That's true whether it's the donor-class funded political
           | establishment or regimes like the current US kleptocracy
           | doing it.
        
             | int_19h wrote:
             | Problem is, once you centralize, that remains in place for
             | a long time, but the original intent, even if it was
             | genuine, rarely outlives the people who implemented it for
             | long.
             | 
             | Generally speaking, every point of centralization is also a
             | point where a lot of power can be acquired with relatively
             | little resources. So regardless of intent, it attracts
             | people who are into power, and over time, they take over.
             | The original intent often remains symbolically and in the
             | rhetoric used, but when you look beyond that into the
             | actual policies, they are increasingly divorced from what
             | is actually claimed.
        
               | danans wrote:
               | > Generally speaking, every point of centralization is
               | also a point where a lot of power can be acquired with
               | relatively little resources
               | 
               | This is why (1) shared principles and (2) credible
               | democracy is important, to allow evolution of the
               | centralized power (i.e. government) towards the shared
               | principles, and why its corporate-bribed facsimile or
               | oligarchic authoritarianism don't work.
        
         | Cheer2171 wrote:
         | > I hate this game.
         | 
         | This is tech. This is how it has always been. From Archemedes
         | to DaVinci to Edison to Ford, technologists are always captured
         | to serve the interests of those in power. Most modern
         | technologists don't want to believe this. They grew up building
         | an Internet that had a bit of countercultural flair to it and
         | undermined a few subsets of entrenched elites (mass media, taxi
         | cartels, etc.), so they convinced themselves that they could
         | control society under their wise hands. Except the same thing
         | that always happened happened: the powers that be are now
         | treating tech the way tech treats everyone else.
        
           | nwhnwh wrote:
           | Could you please recommend a book about this?
        
             | corndoge wrote:
             | _A Canticle for Leibowitz_
        
             | mystraline wrote:
             | Wealth of Nations (read past pg 50, unlike most current
             | economists)
             | 
             | Das kapital, as a critique to Smith's writing.
             | 
             | Communist manifesto, to understand the point of the
             | laborer, and not capital.
             | 
             | Read about worker cooperatives and democracy in the
             | workplace, including Mondragon corp in Spain.
             | 
             | (One of the largest problems we have with any economic
             | system is that none can properly model infinites. The cost
             | of creating new is expensive be it art or science. But cost
             | of copying is effectively 0. I can highlight the problem,
             | but I have no good solution. But OpenAI's response is 'let
             | us ignore copyright law' which wrongs creators.)
        
           | wildpeaks wrote:
           | It made sense to ponder given HN attracts people with the
           | hacker mindset (the drive of curiosity to understand how
           | things work and how to improve them, not merely accepting the
           | status quo as gospel like the dry monkeys) and frustration is
           | a good signal that something could be improved.
        
             | scudsworth wrote:
             | whats a dry monkey
        
           | lmc wrote:
           | Apple seem to be holding the line ok:
           | 
           | https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-investors-reject-
           | pr...
           | 
           | https://news.sky.com/story/apple-removes-end-to-end-
           | security...
        
       | dchichkov wrote:
       | >> In the proposal, OpenAI also said the U.S. needs "a copyright
       | strategy that promotes the freedom to learn" and on "preserving
       | American AI models' ability to learn from copyrighted material."
       | 
       | Perhaps also symmetric "freedom to learn" from OpenAI models,
       | with some provisions / naming convention? U.S. labs are limited
       | in this way, while labs in China are not.
        
         | sega_sai wrote:
         | I like how this "freedom to learn" should apply to models, but
         | not real people..
        
           | TheSoftwareGuy wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | m1el wrote:
             | 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 wrote:
               | Case in point -
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | Terretta wrote:
               | > _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.
        
               | conjectures wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | > 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.
        
               | tsimionescu wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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).
        
             | triceratops wrote:
             | 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?
        
               | ajross wrote:
               | > 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | > 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.
        
               | tsimionescu wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | riversflow wrote:
               | > Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway
               | 
               | They were caught downloading the entirety of libgen.
        
               | zombiwoof wrote:
               | If you buy it
        
               | ajross wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | Terretta wrote:
               | Is the book online and accessible to your eyeballs
               | through your open standards client tool, such that you
               | can learn from seeing it?
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | Most books aren't. Unless you pay for them.
        
               | notatoad wrote:
               | >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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | >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 wrote:
               | Do you think OpenAI used fewer sources than Meta?
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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?
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | > The argument for both is identical
               | 
               | How so? I don't have to pay to read most websites. To
               | read most books I have to pay (or a library has to pay
               | and I have to wait to get the book).
               | 
               | > IIRC, Google already did your sidenote
               | 
               | Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and have
               | humans feed them into scanners. I'm talking about a robot
               | that can walk (or roll) into a library, use arms to take
               | books off the shelves, turn the pages and read them
               | without putting them into a scanner.
        
               | philipkglass wrote:
               | They had humans turn the pages of intact books in
               | scanning machines. The books mostly came from the shelves
               | of academic libraries and were returned to the shelves
               | after scanning. You can see some incidental captures of
               | hands/fingers in the scans on Google Books or HathiTrust
               | (the academic home of the Google Books scans). There are
               | some examples collected here:
               | 
               | https://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com/
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | > How so? I don't have to pay to read most websites. To
               | read most books I have to pay (or a library has to pay
               | and I have to wait to get the book).
               | 
               | "or" does a lot of work, even ignoring that I'd already
               | linked you to a page about deposit libraries:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit
               | 
               | Fact is, you _can_ read books for free, just as you can
               | read (many but not all) websites for free. And in both
               | cases you 're allowed to use what you learned without
               | paying ongoing licensing fees for having learned anything
               | from either, and even to make money from what you learn.
               | 
               | > Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and
               | have humans feed them into scanners.
               | 
               | Your statement is over 20 years out of date:
               | https://patents.google.com/patent/US7508978B1/en
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | sidewndr46 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | > 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 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | > If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it
               | 
               | You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the
               | problem?
               | 
               | > How they acquired the text would be a better thing to
               | critique
               | 
               | Well...yeah that's what I said in the comment that
               | started this discussion branch:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355147
               | 
               | This isn't about humans or robots _reading_ books. It 's
               | that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read
               | the books, and us humans are not.
        
               | nightpool wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | CDs, software, and electronic media, yes. Physical books,
               | no. You can't make archival copies.
        
               | bryanrasmussen wrote:
               | sure you can, you could take a physical book, and
               | painstakingly copy each page at a time, that is totally
               | fair use.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | Citation needed.
        
               | jncfhnb wrote:
               | You can make copies of things. You just can't distribute
               | them
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | You're repeating upthread comments. And no, you can't.
               | There's an archival exception for _electronic media_. If
               | you want to make copies of physical media you either:
               | 
               | 1. Can't
               | 
               | Or
               | 
               | 2. Rely on fair use to protect you (archival by
               | individuals isn't necessarily fair use)
        
               | jncfhnb wrote:
               | It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your
               | personal archives.
               | 
               | The fair use criteria considers whether it is commercial
               | in nature (in this case it is not) and the " the effect
               | of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
               | copyrighted work" for which a personal copy of a
               | personally owned book is non existent.
               | 
               | https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
               | 
               | You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to
               | prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they
               | bought just to keep.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | > It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your
               | personal archives.
               | 
               | There's no legal precedent for this. See
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356042
               | 
               | > the effect of the use upon the potential market for or
               | value of the copyrighted work
               | 
               | A copyright holder's lawyer would argue that having and
               | using a photocopy of a book keeps the original from
               | wearing out. This directly affects the potential market
               | for the work, since the owner could resell the book in
               | mint condition, after reading and burning their
               | photocopies.
               | 
               | > You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to
               | prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they
               | bought just to keep.
               | 
               | I mean maybe this is true. But the affected individual
               | will have a very bad year and spend a ton of money on
               | lawyers.
        
               | MostlyStable wrote:
               | >No legal precedent
               | 
               | Why do you interpret this to mean "absolutely can't do
               | this"? "No precedent" seems to equally support both sides
               | of the argument (that is, it provides no evidence; courts
               | have not ruled). The other commenters arguments on the
               | actual text of the statute seem more convincing to me
               | than what you have so far provided.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | I was responding to
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356240 which said
               | it "absolutely is fair use".
               | 
               | > The other commenters arguments...seem more convincing
               | 
               | Because you (and I) want it to be fair use. But as I
               | already said in my comment, it potentially fails one leg
               | of fair use. Keeping your purchased physical copy of the
               | book pristine and untouched while you read the photocopy
               | allows you to later, after destroying the copies you
               | made, resell the book as new or like-new. This directly
               | affects the market for that book.
               | 
               | Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out
               | if it's really fair use? That's what "no precedent"
               | means.
        
               | observationist wrote:
               | 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. SS 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.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | > there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is
               | 
               | Thank you! I had looked this up myself last week, so I
               | knew this. I had long believed, as GP does, that copying
               | anything you own without distribution is either allowed
               | or fair use. I wanted GP to learn as I did.
        
               | observationist wrote:
               | For reference, here's the US legal code in question:
               | 
               | Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A,
               | the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by
               | reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other
               | means specified by that section, for purposes such as
               | criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including
               | multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or
               | research, is not an infringement of copyright. In
               | determining whether the use made of a work in any
               | particular case is a fair use the factors to be
               | considered shall include-- (1) the purpose and character
               | of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial
               | nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the
               | nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and
               | substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
               | copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the
               | use upon the potential market for or value of the
               | copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished
               | shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such
               | finding is made upon consideration of all the above
               | factors.
               | 
               | The spirit seems apparent, but in practice it's been used
               | by awful people to destroy lives and exploit rent from
               | artists and authors in damn near tyrannical ways.
        
               | paulddraper wrote:
               | I take the contrary view.
               | 
               | What part of fair use pertains to making a physical copy
               | of the complete work?
        
               | mjmas wrote:
               | 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
        
               | paulddraper wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | sidewndr46 wrote:
               | I believe the post you are replying to is suggesting the
               | copy is made by hand, one word at a time.
        
               | croes wrote:
               | You may copy, but you may not circumvent the copy
               | protection.
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | Correct. For electronic media.
        
               | croes wrote:
               | > 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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
        
               | kgdiem wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | concerndc1tizen wrote:
               | You could argue that they are avenging him in doing
               | exactly what he did, or worse, and not being punished for
               | it. They are establishing precedent.
        
               | yieldcrv wrote:
               | 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
        
               | triceratops wrote:
               | > breaking into a closet
               | 
               | "The closet's door was kept unlocked, according to press
               | reports"
               | 
               | When's the last time a kid with no record, a research
               | fellow at Harvard, got threatened with 35 years for a
               | simple B&E?
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | mirekrusin wrote:
               | Can you compress the internet including copyrighted
               | material and then sell access to it?
               | 
               | At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes
               | infringement?
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | > Can you compress the internet including copyrighted
               | material and then sell access to it?
               | 
               | Define access?
               | 
               | If you mean sending out the compressed copy, generally
               | no. For things people normally call compression.
               | 
               | If you want to run a search engine, then you should be
               | fine.
               | 
               | > At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes
               | infringement?
               | 
               | It would have to be very very lossy.
               | 
               | But some AI stuff is. For example there are image models
               | with fewer parameters than source images. Those are, by
               | and large, not able to store enough data to infringe
               | with. (Copying can creep in with images that have
               | multiple versions, but that's a small sliver of the
               | data.)
        
               | a_wild_dandan wrote:
               | When you identify where the infringing party has stored
               | the source material in their
               | artifact.{zip,pdf,safetensor,connectome,etc}. In ML, this
               | discovery stage is called "mechanistic interpretability",
               | and in humans it's called "illegal."
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | It's not that clear cut. Since they're talking about
               | taking lossy compression to the limit, there are ways to
               | go so lossy that you're not longer infringing even if you
               | can point exactly at where it's stored.
               | 
               | Like cliff's notes.
        
               | apetresc wrote:
               | Wasn't John Gruber the inventor of Markdown?
        
               | falcor84 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | tzs wrote:
               | 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://ww
               | w.popeh...
               | 
               | [2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
               | 
               | [3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-
               | against-a...
        
               | bluSCALE4 wrote:
               | Wow, just wow.
        
               | anjaliNYC wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | bluSCALE4 wrote:
               | Thank you for putting my sentiment into words. THIS. It's
               | not power to the people, it's power to the oligarchs.
               | Once you have enough power and, more importantly, wealth,
               | you're welcomed into the fold with open arms. Just how
               | Spotify build a library of stolen music, as long as
               | wealth was created, there is no problem because wealth is
               | just money taken from the people and given to the ruling
               | class.
        
               | carlosdp wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | > 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 wrote:
               | > 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 wrote:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
               | 
               | (Please no pedantry about how scientific papers aren't
               | books)
        
               | drdaeman wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 .
        
               | mburns wrote:
               | >Aaron Swartz downloaded a lot of stuff.
               | 
               | A tiny fraction compared to the 80+ terabytes Facebook
               | downloaded.
               | 
               | >Did he publish the stuff too?
               | 
               | No.
               | 
               | > Not sure if it's worth a violation .
               | 
               | Exactly.
        
               | piva00 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | paulddraper wrote:
               | > 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.
        
               | nickpsecurity wrote:
               | 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-...
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | echelon wrote:
             | 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 wrote:
             | > 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 wrote:
               | > _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.
        
               | crorella wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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...
        
               | llamaimperative wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | simion314 wrote:
             | >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 ?
        
             | pier25 wrote:
             | > _just like a model could_
             | 
             | Not really. You can't multiply yourself a million times to
             | produce content at an industrial scale.
        
             | alabastervlog wrote:
             | 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!
        
             | tsimionescu wrote:
             | 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).
        
             | bee_rider wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | amelius wrote:
               | Totally agree. Except the current administration probably
               | will interpret things the way they see fit ...
        
             | aiono wrote:
             | Can I pirate books to train myself?
        
             | amelius wrote:
             | Do you know Numerical Recipes in C?
             | 
             | This discussion reminds me of it.
        
             | sidewndr46 wrote:
             | 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?
        
           | DebtDeflation wrote:
           | Even moreso, it only applies to initial model training by
           | companies like OpenAI not other companies using those models
           | to generate synthetic data to train their own models.
        
           | binarymax wrote:
           | Yeah it's crazy. I also suspect they might not be confident
           | in their defense from the NYT lawsuit - if they're found in
           | fault then it's going to be trouble.
        
             | logsr wrote:
             | It is hard to see how a court could decide that copyright
             | does not apply to training LLMs without completely
             | collapsing the entire legal structure for intellectual
             | property.
             | 
             | Conceptually, AI basically zeros out existing IP, and makes
             | the AI the only IP that has any value. It is hard to
             | imagine large rights holders and courts accepting that.
             | 
             | The likely outcome is that courts rule against LLM
             | creators/providers and they eventually have to settle on
             | licensing fees with large corporate copyright holders
             | similar to YouTube. Unlike YouTube though, this would open
             | up LLM companies to class action lawsuits from the general
             | public, and so it could be a much worse outcome for them.
        
           | IncreasePosts wrote:
           | Are there certain books that federal law prevents you from
           | reading? Which ones?
           | 
           | Maybe terrorist manuals and some child pornography, but what
           | else?
        
           | diego_sandoval wrote:
           | I would assume that the request is for it to apply to models
           | in the way that it currently applies to humans.
           | 
           | If a human buys a movie, he can watch it and learn about its
           | contents, and then talk about those contents, and he can
           | create a similar movie with a similar theme.
           | 
           | If OpenAI buys a movie and shows it to their model, it's
           | unclear whether the model can talk about the contents of the
           | movie and create a similar movie with a similar theme.
        
             | m1el wrote:
             | somehow, I suspect openai didn't "buy" all of the articles,
             | books, websites they crawled and torrented.
        
             | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
             | Is OpenAI buying the movie, or just taking it?
             | 
             | Since "buying" a movie (as it currently applies to humans)
             | is just buying a limited license to it for private viewing,
             | can't the copyright holder opt to limit the $4.99 license
             | terms to human viewing, and charge $4999 for an AI training
             | license?
             | 
             | Or OpenAI could buy movies the way Disney does, by buying
             | the actual copyright to the film.
        
               | htrp wrote:
               | >Since "buying" a movie (as it currently applies to
               | humans) is just buying a limited license to it for
               | private viewing, can't the copyright holder opt to limit
               | the $4.99 license terms to human viewing, and charge
               | $4999 for an AI training license?
               | 
               | the Reddit data licensing model
        
               | da_chicken wrote:
               | > Since "buying" a movie is just buying a license to it,
               | can't the copyright holder opt to limit the $4.99 license
               | terms to human viewing, and charge $4999 for an AI
               | training license?
               | 
               | That's exactly what already happens currently. Buying a
               | movie on DVD doesn't give you the right to present it for
               | hundreds of people. You need to pay for a public
               | performance license or commercial licence. This is why a
               | TV network or movie theatre can't just buy a DVD at
               | Walmart and then show the movie as often as it likes.
               | 
               | Copyright doesn't just grant exclusive distribution
               | rights. It grants exclusive _use_ rights as well, and
               | permits the owner to control how their work is used.
               | Since AI rights are not granted by any existing licenses,
               | and license terms generally reserve any rights not
               | explicitly specified, feeding copyrighted works into an
               | AI data model is a reserved right of the owner.
        
             | regularjack wrote:
             | OpenAI didn't pay for most of the content it used.
        
           | voytec wrote:
           | This is basically "allow us to steal others' IP". It's hard
           | not to treat Altman like a common thief.
        
           | kranke155 wrote:
           | Not only that
           | 
           | The model gets to use training data of all humans.
           | 
           | But if you use the model as training data OAI will say you're
           | infringing T&Cs
        
         | taurath wrote:
         | It still warps my brain, they've taken trillions of dollars of
         | industry and made a product worth billions by stealing it. IP
         | is practically the basis of the economy, and these models warp
         | and obfuscate ownership of everything, like a giant reset
         | button on who can hold knowledge. It wouldn't be legal, or
         | allowed if tech wasn't seen as the growth path of our economy.
         | It's a hell of a needle to thread and it's unlikely that anyone
         | will ever again be able to model from data so open.
        
           | woah wrote:
           | "IP" is a very new concept in our culture and completely
           | absent in other cultures. It was invented to prevent verbatim
           | reprints of books, but even so, the publishing industry
           | existed for hundreds of years before then. It's been expanded
           | greatly in the past 50 years.
           | 
           | Acting like copyright is some natural law of the universe
           | that LLMs are upending simply because they can learn from
           | written texts is silly.
           | 
           | If you want to argue that it should be radically expanded to
           | the point that not only a work, but even the ideas and
           | knowledge contained in that work should be censored and
           | restricted, fine. But at least have the honesty to admit that
           | this is a radical new expansion for a body of law that has
           | already been radically expanded relatively recently.
        
             | mullingitover wrote:
             | > It was invented to prevent verbatim reprints of books
             | 
             | It was also invented to keep the publishing houses under
             | control and keep them from papering the land in anti-crown
             | propaganda (like the stuff that fueled the civil war in
             | England and got Charles I beheaded).
             | 
             | Probably one of the biggest brewing fights will be whether
             | the models are free to tell the truth or whether they'll be
             | mouthpieces for the ruling class. As long as they play ball
             | with the powers that be, I predict copyrights won't be a
             | problem at all for the chosen winners.
        
             | LtWorf wrote:
             | The problem here is it's still illegal for me to do a
             | backup copy of the stuff i bought, but they can do whatever
             | they want.
        
         | EGreg wrote:
         | Gearing up for a fight between the two major industries based
         | on exploitative business models:
         | 
         | Copyright cartels (RIAA, MPAA) that monetized young artists
         | without paying them much at all [1], vs the AI megalomaniacs
         | who took all the work for free and used Kenyans at $2 an hour
         | [2] so that they can raise "$7 trillion" for their AI
         | infrastructure
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/comments/1fzyr0u/arti...
         | 
         | [2] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
        
           | Bjorkbat wrote:
           | Can't believe I'm actually rooting for the copyright cartels
           | in this fight.
           | 
           | But that does make me think, that in a sane society with a
           | functional legislature I wouldn't have to pick a dog in this
           | fight. I'd have have enough faith in lawmakers and the
           | political process to pursue a path towards copyright reform
           | that reigns in abuses from both AI companies and megacorp
           | rightsholders
           | 
           | Alas, for now I'm hoping that aforementioned megacorps sue
           | OpenAI into a painful lesson.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | > Can't believe I'm actually rooting for the copyright
             | cartels in this fight.
             | 
             | The same megacorps are suing Internet Archive for their
             | collection of 78rpm records. These guys would rather see
             | art orphaned and die.
        
               | disgruntledphd2 wrote:
               | Yup, we live in a pretty depressing world.
               | 
               | More generally the best we can hope for us to discourage
               | concentrated power, both in government and corporate
               | forms.
        
               | __loam wrote:
               | They're suing Internet Archive because IA scanned a bunch
               | of copyrighted books to put online for free (e: without
               | even attempting to get permission to do so) then refused
               | to take them down when they got a C&D lol. IA is putting
               | the whole project at risk so they can do literal
               | copyright infringement with no consequences.
        
         | blitzar wrote:
         | I should have "freedom to learn" about any Tesla in the
         | showroom, any F-35 I see laying around an airbase or the
         | contents of anyone in the governments bank account.
        
           | NoOn3 wrote:
           | According to this scheme, if you find a bug and can read the
           | bank's data, then you can use it as you want.
        
             | JonChesterfield wrote:
             | Nope, have to feed it into an llm first, afterwards it's
             | legitimate.
        
         | seanmcdirmid wrote:
         | Chinese AI must implement socialist values by law, but law is a
         | much more fluid fuzzy thing in China than in the USA (although
         | the USA seems to be moving away from rule of law recently).
        
           | sva_ wrote:
           | > Chinese AI must implement socialist values by law
           | 
           | I don't doubt it but am interested to read a source? I know
           | the models can't talk about things like Tiananmen Square
           | 1989, but what does 'implementing socialist values by law'
           | look like?
        
             | doctorwho42 wrote:
             | Socialism and freedom of speech aren't mutually exclusive
        
         | samstave wrote:
         | Highly recommend the Lex Fridman pod on Deepseek:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1f-o0nqpEI
         | 
         | >> _Dylan Patel is the founder of SemiAnalysis, a research &
         | analysis company specializing in semiconductors, GPUs, CPUs,
         | and AI hardware. Nathan Lambert is a research scientist at the
         | Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of a blog on AI
         | called Interconnects._
        
           | cadamsdotcom wrote:
           | Can you expand your post and explain why?
        
       | pr337h4m wrote:
       | >Chris Lehane, OpenAI's vice president of global affairs, said in
       | an interview that the US AI Safety Institute - a key government
       | group focused on AI - could act as the main point of contact
       | between the federal government and the private sector. If
       | companies work with the group voluntarily to review models, the
       | government could provide them "with liability protections
       | including preemption from state based regulations that focus on
       | frontier model security," according to the proposal.
       | 
       | Given OpenAI's history and relationship with the "AI safety"
       | movement, I wouldn't be surprised to find out later that they
       | also lobbied for the same proposed state-level regulations
       | they're seeking relief from.
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | Regulatory moat and copyright relief for me, but not for thee.
        
           | MisterTea wrote:
           | Problem is they built the moat before moving into the castle.
        
             | altairprime wrote:
             | Moats are not a problem if your liege lord teleports in and
             | lowers the drawbridge for you.
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | no need for teleportation. just climb the walls. the
               | castle is not protected, and has no pots of oil or
               | flaming arrows yet.
        
               | mjmas wrote:
               | unfortunately their Ai refuses to help them attack the
               | castle, citing safety concerns.
        
           | hayst4ck wrote:
           | Moat is an Orwellian word and we should reject words that
           | contain a conceptual metaphor that is convenient for abusing
           | power.
           | 
           | "Building a moat" frames anti-competitive behavior as a
           | defense rather than an assault on the free market by implying
           | that monopolistic behavior is a survival strategy rather than
           | an attempt to dominate the market and coerce customers.
           | 
           | "We need to build a moat" is much more agreeable to tell
           | employees than "we need to be more anti-competitive."
        
             | sitkack wrote:
             | It is pretty obvious that every use of that word is to
             | communicate a stance that is allergic to free markets.
             | 
             | A moat by definition has such a large strategic asymmetry
             | that one cannot cross it without a very high chance of
             | death. A functioning SEC and FTC as well as CFPB https://en
             | .wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_... are
             | necessary for efficient markets.
             | 
             | Now might be the time to rollout consumer club cards that
             | are adversarial in nature.
        
             | pclmulqdq wrote:
             | A "moat" is a fine business term for what it relates to,
             | and most moats are innocuous:
             | 
             | * The secret formula for Coke
             | 
             | * ASML's technology
             | 
             | * The "Gucci" brand
             | 
             | * Apple's network effects
             | 
             | These are genuine competitive advantages in the market.
             | Regulatory moats and other similar things _are_ an assault
             | on the free market. Moats in general are not.
        
             | mullingitover wrote:
             | > "Building a moat" frames anti-competitive behavior as a
             | defense
             | 
             | This is a drastic take, I think to most of us in the
             | industry "moat" simply means whatever difficult-to-
             | replicate competitive advantage that a firm has invested
             | heavily in.
             | 
             | Regulatory capture and graft aren't moats, they're plain
             | old corrupt business practices.
        
         | svilen_dobrev wrote:
         | > ask for regulation then ask for exempt
         | 
         | That's exactly what has been happening:
         | 
         | Ask HN: Why is OpenAI pushing for regulation so much - 2023
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36045397
        
           | api wrote:
           | OpenAI lobbied for restrictive rules, and now they want an
           | "out" but only for themselves. Absolute naked regulatory
           | capture.
        
             | hnlurker22 wrote:
             | Just like when people complain about OpenAI's ill practices
             | then they use it the most
        
               | tdeck wrote:
               | Can anyone say which of the LLM companies is the least
               | "shady"?
               | 
               | If I want to use an LLM to augment my work, and don't
               | have a massively powerful local machine to run local
               | models, what are the best options?
               | 
               | Obviously I saw the news about OpenAI's head of research
               | openly supporting war crimes, but I don't feel confident
               | about what's up with the other companies.
        
               | bakuninsbart wrote:
               | The Claude people seem to be quite chill.
        
               | disgruntledphd2 wrote:
               | Agreed. They're a bit mental on "safety" but given that's
               | not likely to be a real issue then they're fine.
        
               | PeterStuer wrote:
               | Just use what works for you.
               | 
               | E.g. i'm _very_ outspoken about my preferences for open
               | llm practices like executed by Meta and Deepseek. I 'm
               | very aware of the regulatory caption and pulling up the
               | ladder tactics by the "AI safety" lobby.
               | 
               | However. In my own operations I do still rely on OpenAI
               | because it works better than what I tried so far for my
               | use case.
               | 
               | That said, when I can find an open model based SaaS
               | operator that serves my needs as well without major
               | change investment, I will switch.
        
               | hnlurker22 wrote:
               | Why not vibe-code it using OpenAI
        
               | PeterStuer wrote:
               | I'm not talking about me developing the applications, but
               | about using LLM services inside the products in
               | operation.
               | 
               | For my "vibe coding" I've been using OpenAI, Grok and
               | Deepseek if using small method generation, documentation
               | shortcuts, library discovery and debugging counts as
               | such.
        
               | bigbuppo wrote:
               | My AI strategy is still "No".
        
               | ramses0 wrote:
               | You don't have to like it, or agree with it, but even
               | right now saying "I don't use AI's" is like saying "I
               | don't use search engines".
               | 
               | It'll carry you a little farther but not much.
               | 
               | I'm on the same page as you, preferring to have things
               | locally and a bit of arms length with AI, but it's a hell
               | of a lot better than googling for stack overflow on stuff
               | like "how to invert the keys and values in a python
               | dict?" or whatever random syntax and customary way of
               | doing things when crossing among different programming
               | languages.
               | 
               | I haven't messed around with "scaffold me an HTML5
               | three.js app and make it play space invaders" level
               | stuff, but it seems like we might get there, one way or
               | the other.
               | 
               | The nice thing is it's like having a conversation with a
               | topical expert on $SOMETHING instead of of piecing
               | conversations together from stack overflow, blog posts,
               | and forums.
        
               | ceejayoz wrote:
               | https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-
               | som...
        
               | hnlurker22 wrote:
               | https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/analogia-is-my-passion
        
             | arkadiytehgraet wrote:
             | I believe with regulatory capture the companies that pushed
             | for the regulation in the first place at least comply with
             | it (and hopefully the regulation is not worthless). This
             | behaviour by ClosedAI is even worse: push for the
             | regulation, then push for the exemption.
        
               | cogman10 wrote:
               | Regulatory capture is usually the company pushing for
               | regulations that align with the business practices they
               | already implement and would be hard for a competitor to
               | implement. For example, a car company that wants to
               | require all other manufactures to build and operate wind
               | tunnels for aerodynamics testing. Or more realistically,
               | regulations requiring 3rd party sellers for vehicles.
        
             | samstave wrote:
             | The beautiful thing about AI is that we can use such tools
             | to expose so much corruptionand collusion in the
             | government.
             | 
             | The insider trading (i.e. Pelosi and such) is absolute
             | nuts.
             | 
             | But OpenAI is pulling a super weird version of Google's
             | pulling of the "Don't be evil" statement whereby OAI has
             | been courting extreme MIC stance - and I would really like
             | to know what tooling they have given the intel communities.
             | What does the NSA have access to via their massive Utah
             | DAtacenters managed by AWS.
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
             | 
             | https://www.npr.org/2025/01/30/nx-s1-5279550/openai-touts-
             | ne...
             | 
             | And what and how do these facts play into DOGE?
             | 
             | ---
             | 
             | https://www.timesofisrael.com/openais-sam-altman-says-
             | israel...
        
               | mystified5016 wrote:
               | No amount of exposure so far has had any effect on
               | corruption. That AI will somehow improve this is just
               | magical thinking.
        
           | bmitc wrote:
           | It's a common tactic in new fields. Fusion, AI, you name it
           | are all actively lobbying to get new regulation because they
           | are "different", and the individual companies want to ensure
           | that it's them that sets the tone.
        
             | mkagenius wrote:
             | Looks the same as taking "rebate for green energy" and then
             | asking to "stop such rebates" a few years later
        
         | CPLX wrote:
         | The fact that Chris Lehane is the one involved in this should
         | tell you all you need to know about how on the level all this
         | is.
        
           | OkGoDoIt wrote:
           | For those of us who don't recognize him by name, can you
           | spell it out a little more clearly please?
        
             | PeterStuer wrote:
             | Was he not the one that lead coverups for the Clintons?
        
             | natch wrote:
             | Heavy hitter lawyer, PR expert. Some google terms: Masters
             | of disaster, Spin cycle.
        
               | stuckkeys wrote:
               | Sounds like a pleasant person.
        
           | sunshine-o wrote:
           | Just learning about that guy and reading his Wikipedia page
           | will give me nightmares for the years to come.
        
         | Joel_Mckay wrote:
         | Regulatory capture is a common strategy for synthetic
         | monopolistic competitive firms, and suckers high on their own
         | ego.
         | 
         | Deepseek already proved regulation will not be effective at
         | maintaining a market lead. =3
        
           | onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
           | Why won't it?
           | 
           | If you get fined millions of dollars (for copyright, of
           | course) if you're found to have anything resembling DeepSeek
           | on your machine - no company in the US is going to run it.
           | 
           | The personal market is going to be much smaller than the
           | enterprise market.
        
             | Joel_Mckay wrote:
             | The artificial token commodity can now be functionally
             | replicated on a per location basis on $40k in hardware (far
             | lower cost than nvidia hardware.)
             | 
             | Copyright licensing is just a detail corporations are well
             | experienced dealing with in a commercial setting, and note
             | some gov organizations are already exempt from copyright
             | laws. However, people likely just won't host in countries
             | with silly policies.
             | 
             | Best regards =3
        
             | doctorwho42 wrote:
             | Great another market force to widdle away the US' economic
             | power, so obviously trump/musk will pass this immediately
        
         | HillRat wrote:
         | As it is, this is a bullshit document, which I'm sure their
         | lobbyists know; OSTP is authorized to "serve as a source of
         | scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the
         | President with respect to major policies, plans, and programs
         | of the Federal Government," and has no statutory authority to
         | regulate _anything_ , let alone preempt state law. In the
         | absence of any explicit Congressional legislation to serve to
         | federally preempt state regulation of AI, there's nothing the
         | White House can do. (In fact, other than export controls and a
         | couple of Defense Production Act wishlist items, everything in
         | their "proposal" is out of the Executive's hands and the ambit
         | of Congress.)
        
           | throwway120385 wrote:
           | You mean there's nothing the White House can do under the
           | rule of law. There's plenty the White House can do under the
           | color of law.
        
         | fsndz wrote:
         | DeepSeek really shook them to their core. Now they go for
         | regulatory capture. Such a huge disappointment. Open source AI
         | will win: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/the-
         | laymans-...
        
           | noosphr wrote:
           | It's not just them. Everyone is scrambling.
           | 
           | US tech, and western tech in general, is very culturally -
           | and by this I mean in the type of coding people have done -
           | homogeneous.
           | 
           | The deep seek papers published over the last two weeks are
           | the biggest thing to happen in IA since GPT3 came out. But
           | unless you understand distributed file systems, networking,
           | low level linear algebra, and half a dozen other fields at
           | least tangentially then you'd have not realized they are
           | anything important at all.
           | 
           | Meanwhile I'm going through the interview process for a tier
           | 1 US AI lab and I'm having to take a test about circles and
           | squares, then write a compsci 101 red/black tree search
           | algorithm while talking to an AI, being told not to use AI at
           | the same time. This is with an internal reference being keen
           | for me to be on board. At this point I'm honestly wondering
           | if they aren't just using the interview process to generate
           | high quality validation data for free.
           | 
           | Xing Yun De Shi ,Tong Guo Zhuan Huan Qi Mo Xing ,Dang Wo Men
           | Guang Rong De Ling Dao Ren Xi Jin Ping Cong Zi Ben Zhu Yi Zou
           | Gou Shou Zhong Jie Fang Wo Men Shi ,Wo Bu Xu Yao Xue Xi Zhong
           | Wen .
        
             | mattgreenrocks wrote:
             | 100%. Western tech needs the competition. They are very
             | prone to navel-gazing simply because SV ended up being the
             | location for tech once.
             | 
             | Funny how they like to crow about free markets, while also
             | running to daddy government when their position is
             | threatened.
        
               | noosphr wrote:
               | Competition can only work when there is variation between
               | the entities competing.
               | 
               | In the US right now you can have a death match between
               | every AI lab, then give all the resources to the one
               | which wins and you'd still have largely the same results
               | as if you didn't.
               | 
               | The reason why Deepseek - it started life as a HFT firm -
               | hit as hard as it did is because it was a cross
               | disciplinary team that had very non-standard skill sets.
               | 
               | I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA engineers
               | away from HFT firms and it was basically impossible. They
               | already make big tech (or higher) salaries without the
               | big tech bullshit - which none of them would ever pass.
        
               | cbzbc wrote:
               | > I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA
               | engineers away from HFT firms and it was basically
               | impossible. They already make big tech (or higher)
               | salaries without the big tech bullshit - which none of
               | them would ever pass.
               | 
               | Can confirm. There are downsides, and it can get
               | incredibly stressed at times, but there are all sorts of
               | big tech imposed hoops you don't have to jump through.
        
           | spaceguillotine wrote:
           | Bottom is about to drop out thats why, ethics are out the
           | window already and its gonna be worse as they claw to stay
           | relevant.
           | 
           | Its a niche product that tried to go mainstream and the
           | general public doesn't want it, just look at iPhone 16 sales
           | and Windows 11, everyone is happier with the last version
           | without AI.
        
         | comboy wrote:
         | Has OpenAI hired McKinsey yet?
        
           | sidewndr46 wrote:
           | I'm unsure if you can layoff AI
        
       | 6stringmerc wrote:
       | Tell you what, set up a Federal level disclosure process online
       | of all the copyright protected works used in training OpenAI for
       | the creators / rights holders to get equity (out of the pockets
       | of the C-Suite and Board) via claiming their due, and we'll take
       | you seriously.
       | 
       | All the profit and none of the liability is Coward Capitalism.
        
         | _bin_ wrote:
         | this is a misread. it's still unclear whether use of
         | copyrighted works to train LLMs falls under fair use but, with
         | current laws, the answer is probably yes. you may not like that
         | but, even if it changes, existing models were trained under
         | existing law.
         | 
         | also what liability do you expect them to assume? they want to
         | offer models while saying "to use these, you must agree we
         | don't have liability for their outputs." if companies want to
         | use these models but don't want to deal with liability
         | themselves, so they demand the government shift the liability
         | to the model vendor (despite the conditions the vendor
         | applied), that sounds like coward capitalism to me. don't like
         | it? don't use their models.
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | That's just feudalism with extra steps
        
         | bilbo0s wrote:
         | _All the profit and none of the liability is Coward Capitalism_
         | 
         | While I agree with you in principle, there's little that can be
         | done because the current crop of crony capitalists will likely
         | support the idea of no liability for tech companies. Especially
         | when it comes to ripping off copyrighted material. Everything
         | from blog posts, to videos, to music, to any source code you
         | post on the internet will be used to train models to be better
         | writers, artists, musicians, and programmers.
         | 
         | I feel like the only option left is to find some way to make
         | money on the output of the models. Because the politicians are
         | definitely going to allow the models to make money based on
         | your output.
        
           | mistrial9 wrote:
           | appeasement?
        
         | reverendsteveii wrote:
         | There's an extra word in your last sentence. Privatizing profit
         | and socializing risk and loss is maximizing profit for the
         | individual, and profit maximizing behavior is the only
         | fundamental underpinning of capitalism.
        
       | Jcampuzano2 wrote:
       | I know a lot of people will hate on things like this, but the
       | reality is they are right that guardrails only serve to hurt us
       | in the long run, at least at this pivotal point in time. I don't
       | like Trump personally as a caveat.
       | 
       | Yes it is a fact they did build themselves up on top of mountains
       | of copyrighted material, and that AI has a lot of potential to do
       | harm, but if they are forced to stop or slow down foreign actors
       | will just push forward and innovate without guardrails and we
       | will just fall behind as the rest of the world pushes forward.
       | 
       | Its easy to see how foreign tech is quickly gaining ground. If
       | they truly cared about still propping America up, they should
       | allow some guardrails to be pushed past.
        
         | notavalleyman wrote:
         | > guardrails only serve to hurt us in the long run, at least at
         | this pivotal point in time.
         | 
         | What evidence led you to that conclusion?
        
           | int_19h wrote:
           | Look up "alignment tax".
        
         | tasty_freeze wrote:
         | The law which prevented US corporations from using bribery to
         | win business in other nations was recently rescinded on exactly
         | this basis: US corporations are hamstrung unless they can buy
         | their wins. Superficially, this makes sense, and that was all
         | that was offered to justify the change. That guardrail was
         | dumb! But like most things, there are reasons to not do this
         | which were completely ignored.
         | 
         | For instance, a company may not desire to hand out cash to win
         | business; previously, when solicited they could say, "Sorry, it
         | is illegal for me to do so." Now there is no such shield.
         | 
         | Second, in many cases it will be two or more US businesses
         | trying to win business in some other country, and the change of
         | the law only makes it more expensive for those two companies,
         | as they now must play a game of bribery chicken to win the
         | business.
         | 
         | Third, the US loves to claim it is is a democracy and is
         | working to spread democracy. By legitimizing bribes paid to
         | foreign officials over the interests of their voting populace,
         | we are undermining democracy in those countries (not that
         | anyone who pays attention believes that the US's foreign policy
         | is anything but self interested and divorced from spreading
         | democratic ideals).
        
         | 1shooner wrote:
         | Underlying this perspective is the assumption that this is a
         | uni-lineal race, and the end of that race must be arrived at
         | first, and what lies at the end of that race is in the common
         | good. There is no evidence for any of this.
        
       | reverendsteveii wrote:
       | Is it me or does it feel like most of what the federal government
       | does nowadays is make it illegal for government to make things
       | illegal?
        
       | ApolloFortyNine wrote:
       | It probably needs to be a law not an executive order but I don't
       | hate the idea.
       | 
       | States have the power to make it prohibitively expensive to
       | operate in those states, leaving people to either go to VPNs or
       | use AI's hosted in other countries where they don't care if
       | they're not following whatever new AI law California decides to
       | pass. And companies would choose just to use datacenters not in
       | the prohibitive states and ban ips from those states.
       | 
       | Course if a company hosts in us-east-1, and allows access from
       | California, would the inter state commerce clause not take effect
       | and California would have no power anyways?
        
         | arrosenberg wrote:
         | > Course if a company hosts in us-east-1, and allows access
         | from California, would the inter state commerce clause not take
         | effect and California would have no power anyways?
         | 
         | California can't legislate how they serve a customer in a
         | different state. They would have to comply when serving
         | California customers within the state of California, regardless
         | of where the dc is located. I.E. Under the CCPA it doesn't
         | matter where my data is stored, they still have to delete it
         | upon my request.
        
           | ApolloFortyNine wrote:
           | >California can't legislate how they serve a customer in a
           | different state. They would have to comply when serving
           | California customers within the state of California,
           | regardless of where the dc is located. I.E. Under the CCPA it
           | doesn't matter where my data is stored, they still have to
           | delete it upon my request.
           | 
           | I know this is what California thinks, I just personally
           | don't see how this isn't inter state commerce.
        
             | TheCoelacanth wrote:
             | It is, of course, but that doesn't mean California can't
             | regulate it; simply that federal laws take precedence.
             | 
             | If states couldn't regulate interstate commerce taking
             | place in their own states, they effectively couldn't
             | regulate any commerce because court decisions have found
             | that essentially all economic activity, even growing food
             | for your own consumption, falls under the banner of
             | interstate commerce.
        
               | dynm wrote:
               | > even growing food for your own consumption
               | 
               | Hey I know this one! In case anyone is interested, here's
               | the case:
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
        
             | arrosenberg wrote:
             | Unless their a superseding federal law, yeah, California
             | can successfully prosecute businesses for breaking the laws
             | within its' jurisdiction.
        
         | tmpz22 wrote:
         | Are you advocating to take the power relegated to the states
         | away from the states and give it to the federal government in
         | direct violation of the Constitution of the United States?
        
           | hiatus wrote:
           | How is this not directly tied to interstate commerce (and
           | copyright law) and thus under Congress' enumerated powers?
        
           | ApolloFortyNine wrote:
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
        
         | int_19h wrote:
         | Interstate commerce clause by itself doesn't prevent it; it
         | merely gives Congress the _ability_ to override the state laws
         | if Congress deems it necessary.
        
         | armchairhacker wrote:
         | Your argument for regulation is...reasons why it works out
         | without regulation, and is already covered by existing
         | regulations?
         | 
         | Granted the "regulation" I'm referring to above is a law or EO
         | to block California's regulation, and I don't support
         | California's regulation either. But I believe regulations
         | should only exist when there's no better alternative, because
         | they usually have unintended consequences. If it's true that
         | OpenAI can basically just leave California, the better
         | alternative for the government may be doing nothing.
        
         | pjc50 wrote:
         | > leaving people to either go to VPNs
         | 
         | .. which is the prevailing situation for people dealing with
         | state-by-state age verification at the moment.
        
       | qoez wrote:
       | JD vance seems to be quite aware of OpenAIs meta strategy so I
       | wouldn't be surprised if this is declined (ie semi specifically
       | aimed at something they want to force them to comply with).
        
       | msp26 wrote:
       | Relevant (I don't know why the article doesn't link to them
       | directly): https://openai.com/global-affairs/openai-proposals-
       | for-the-u... https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/ostp-
       | rfi/ec680b75-d539...
        
       | zombiwoof wrote:
       | "Freedom to make money"
        
       | crorella wrote:
       | If they want to avoid paying for the creative effort of authors
       | and other artists then they should also not charge for the use of
       | their models.
        
         | reilly3000 wrote:
         | They should train a model on a clean dataset and copyright
         | dataset, charge extra on the copyright model, and pay a royalty
         | to copyright owners when their works are cited in a response.
        
           | wholinator2 wrote:
           | The problem there is how are we defining "works are cited"?
           | Also couldn't you just do the same thing done to spotify and
           | make bot farms to generate millions of citations?
        
           | ideashower wrote:
           | I like this and agree. It should be opt-in. I almost feel as
           | if it should be something exciting and rewarding.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | But who should pay? The model developers? Training models is a
         | cost center. And what about open source AI, should we legislate
         | it out of existence?
         | 
         | How about the AI providers? they operate on thin margins, and
         | make just cents a million tokens. If one provider is too
         | expensive, users quickly switch.
         | 
         | Maybe the users? Users derive the lion share of benefits from
         | AI. But those benefits are hard to quantize.
         | 
         | Maybe a blanket tax? That would simplify things, but would put
         | all creatives on a quantitative rather than qualitative
         | criteria.
         | 
         | I think generative AI is the worst copyright infringement tool
         | ever devised. It's slow, expensive and imprecise. On the other
         | hand copying is fast, free and perfect. I think nobody can, for
         | science, regurgitate a full book with AI, it won't have
         | fidelity to the original.
         | 
         | The real enemy of any artist is the long tail of works,
         | sometimes spanning decades, that they have to compete against.
         | So it's other authors. That is why we are in an attention
         | economy, and have seen the internet enshittified.
         | 
         | The most creative part of internet ignores copyright royalties.
         | From open source, to wikipedia, open scientific publication and
         | even social networks, if everyone demanded royalties none of
         | them would be possible.
        
           | kweingar wrote:
           | > The most creative part of internet ignores copyright
           | royalties. From open source, to wikipedia, open scientific
           | publication and even social networks, if everyone demanded
           | royalties none of them would be possible.
           | 
           | Notably, in all of these cases the people involved consent to
           | participating.
        
           | basisword wrote:
           | >> The real enemy of any artist is the long tail of works,
           | sometimes spanning decades, that they have to compete
           | against.
           | 
           | Had to check this wasn't sama.
           | 
           | You seriously believe the real enemy of artists is other
           | artists? Not the guys making billions and trying to convince
           | us "the computers are just reading it like a human"?
        
           | Palmik wrote:
           | Funnily, OpenAI also calls for the ban of their free and
           | open-weight Chinese competitors DeepSeek and Qwen.
        
         | stainablesteel wrote:
         | there are some free models out there from both chat companies
         | and open source
        
         | 93po wrote:
         | i really don't understand this argument. at which point is it
         | violating copyright versus an intelligence learning and making
         | content the same way as humans?
         | 
         | it was living cells, but they worked as transistors, would it
         | be ok?
         | 
         | it was whole-brain emulation on silicon transistors, would it
         | be ok?
         | 
         | it was a generative AI similar to what we have today, but 100x
         | more sentient and self aware, is that ok?
         | 
         | if you locked a human in a room with nothing but tolkien books
         | for 20 years, then asked them to write a fantasy novel, is that
         | ok?
         | 
         | All art is built on learning from previous art. I don't
         | understand the logic of it being a computer so suddenly now
         | it's wrong and bad. I also don't understand general support of
         | intellectual property when it overwhelmingly benefits the mega
         | wealthy and stifles creative endeavors like nothing else. You
         | art isn't less valuable just because a computer makes something
         | similar, in the same way it's not less valuable if another
         | human copies your style and makes new art in your style.
        
           | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
           | > I don't understand the logic of it being a computer so
           | suddenly now it's wrong and bad
           | 
           | My answer to this is one I've written already before:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42720749
        
           | TaupeRanger wrote:
           | You "really don't understand" the difference? Do we need to
           | spell out that these systems aren't human artists simply
           | looking at paintings and admiring features about them? They
           | are Python programs running linear algebra libraries, sucking
           | in pixels from anywhere they can find them, and then being
           | used by corporations with billion dollar valuations to
           | increase investor/shareholder value at the expense of the
           | people who provided the artwork to train the systems - people
           | who, as you already know, are NOT paid for providing their
           | work, and who never CONSENTED to having their work used for
           | such a purpose. Now do you "understand the difference"?
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | AI is a new thing. It's OK to say you don't want it, that
             | it's a threat to livelihoods. But it's a mistake to use
             | these kinds of arguments, that are predicated on such
             | narrow points that overlap so much with human brains.
             | 
             | It's going to be a threat to my career, soon enough -- but
             | the threat it poses to me exists even if it never read any
             | of my blog posts or my github repos. Even if it had never
             | read a single line of ObjC or Swift.
             | 
             | > Do we need to spell out that these systems aren't human
             | artists simply looking at paintings and admiring features
             | about them?
             | 
             | In a word, yes.
             | 
             | In more words: explain what it would take for an AI to
             | count as a person -- none of what you wrote connects with
             | what was in the comment you replied to.
             | 
             | You dismiss AI as "python": would it help if the maths was
             | done as the pure linear amplification range of the quantum
             | effects in transistors?; you dismiss them as "sucking in
             | pixels from anywhere they can find them" like humans don't
             | spend all day with their eyes open; you complain
             | "corporations with billion dollar valuations to increase
             | investor/shareholder value at the expense of the people who
             | provided the artwork to train the systems" like this isn't
             | exactly what happens with government funded education of
             | humans.
             | 
             | I anticipate that within my lifetime it will be possible
             | for a human brain to be preserved on death, scanned, and
             | the result used as a full brain sim that remembers what the
             | human remembered at the the time of death. Would it matter
             | if the original human had memorised Harry Potter end-to-end
             | and the upload could quote it all perfectly? Would Rowling
             | get the right to delete that brain upload?
             | 
             | I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing mouse
             | neurons on electrode grids to train them to play video
             | games. It's entirely plausible, given the current rate of
             | progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be encoded
             | onto a brain organoid the size of a living mouse's brain --
             | does it magically become OK then? And in 30 years, that
             | same thing as an implant into a human?
             | 
             | The threat to my economic prospects is already present in
             | completely free models whose weights are given away and
             | cannot avail the billion-dollar corporations who made them.
             | I can download free models and run them on my laptop,
             | outputting tokens faster than I can read them for an energy
             | budget lower than my own brain, corporations who made those
             | models don't profit directly by me doing this, and if those
             | corporations go bankrupt I can still run those models.
             | 
             | The risk to my economic value is _not_ because any of these
             | "stole" anything, but because the models are _useful and
             | cheap_.
             | 
             | GenAI art (and voice) is... well, despite the fact I will
             | admit to enjoying it privately/on free content, whenever I
             | see it on products or blog posts, or when I hear it in the
             | voices on YouTube videos, it's a sign the human behind it
             | has zero budget and therefore whatever it is I don't want
             | to buy it. People already use it because it's cheap, it's a
             | sign of being cheap, signs of cheap are a proxy of
             | generally poor quality.
             | 
             | But that's not going to save my career, nobody's going to
             | decide to boycott all iPhone apps that aren't certified
             | "made by 100% organic grass-fed natural humans with no AI
             | assistance".
             | 
             | So believe me, I get that it's scary. But the arguments
             | you're using aren't good ones.
        
               | TaupeRanger wrote:
               | No one said they "don't want it".
               | 
               | No one said "it's scary".
               | 
               | No one is "dismissing them".
               | 
               | It seems like you're arguing against some other person
               | you've made up in your mind. I use these systems every
               | single day, but if you don't understand the argument
               | about consent and the extremely obvious difference
               | between Python programs and humans that I already pointed
               | out, then no one can help you. I'll keep making these
               | arguments, because they _are_ good ones, and they are
               | obvious to any human being who isn 't stuck in tech-bro
               | fairy land blabbering about how human consciousness is
               | completely identical to Python linear algebra libraries
               | when any 6 year old child knows with certainty they are
               | not.
               | 
               | > In a word, yes.
               | 
               | This is, frankly, embarrassing.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | > No one said they "don't want it".
               | 
               | Your own words suggest this. Many others are more
               | explicit. There are calls for models to be forcibly
               | deleted. Your own statements here about lack of consent
               | are still in this vein.
               | 
               | > No one said "it's scary".
               | 
               | Many, including me, find it so.
               | 
               | > No one is "dismissing them".
               | 
               | You, specifically you, are -- "feeling or showing that
               | something is unworthy of consideration".
               | 
               | > if you don't understand the argument about consent and
               | the extremely obvious difference between Python programs
               | and humans that I already pointed out, then no one can
               | help you.
               | 
               | Consent is absolutely an argument I get. It's
               | specifically where I'm agreeing with you.
               | 
               | The other half of that...
               | 
               | Python, like all programming languages, is universal.
               | Python programs can implement physics, so trying to use
               | the argument " _because_ it 's implemented on silicon
               | rather than chemistry" is a distinction without a
               | difference.
               | 
               | Quantum mechanics is linear algebra.
               | 
               | > I'll keep making these arguments, because they are good
               | ones, and they are obvious to any human being who isn't
               | stuck in tech-bro fairy land blabbering about how human
               | consciousness is completely identical to Python linear
               | algebra libraries when any 6 year old child knows with
               | certainty they are not.
               | 
               | (An example of you "dismissing" AI).
               | 
               | Then you'll keep being confused and enraged about why
               | people disagree with you.
               | 
               | And not just because you have a wildly wrong
               | understanding of what 6 year olds think about. I remember
               | being 6, all the silly things I believed back then. What
               | my classmates believed falsely. How far most of us were
               | from understanding what algebra was, let alone
               | distinguishing linear algebra from other kinds.
               | 
               | I've got a philosophy A-level, which is enough to know
               | that "consciousness" is a completely unsolved question
               | and absolutely nobody agrees what the minimum
               | requirements are for it. 40 different definitions, we
               | don't even all agree what the _question_ is yet, much
               | less then answer.
               | 
               | But I infer from you bring it up, that you think
               | "consciousness" is an important thing that AI is missing?
               | 
               | Well perhaps it is something current AI miss, something
               | their architecture hasn't got -- when we can't agree what
               | the question is, any answer is possible. We evolved it,
               | but just because it can pop up for no good reason doesn't
               | mean it must be present everywhere. (I say much the same
               | to people who are convinced AI must have it: we don't
               | know). So, what if machines are not conscious? Why does
               | that matter?
               | 
               | And you've not answered one of my examples. To repeat:
               | 
               | I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing
               | mouse neurons on electrode grids to train them to play
               | video games. It's entirely plausible, given the current
               | rate of progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be
               | encoded onto a brain organoid the size of a living
               | mouse's brain -- does it magically become OK then? And in
               | 30 years, that same thing as an implant into a human?
               | 
               | I don't think that is meaningfully distinct, morally
               | speaking, from doing this in silicon. Making the
               | information alive and in my own brain makes it _not_
               | python, but all the consent issues remain.
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | No, they _should_ pay. The solution is not to make everything
         | free, but cost the market rate. Somebody made these things; pay
         | them.
        
       | iamleppert wrote:
       | He should have offered for every purchase of OpenAI services, a
       | portion would be used to purchase TrumpCoin. That would have been
       | a more effective bribe.
        
         | crorella wrote:
         | or teslers!
        
       | croes wrote:
       | > OpenAI has asked the Trump administration to help shield
       | artificial intelligence companies from a growing number of
       | proposed state regulations if they voluntarily share their models
       | with the federal government.
       | 
       | That sounds like corruption
        
         | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
         | I'm shocked
        
       | dtquad wrote:
       | It is interesting that it is not the
       | Hollywood/Music/Entertainment copyright lobby (RIAA, MPAA etc.)
       | that is lobbying US states to go after OpenAI and other American
       | AI companies.
       | 
       | It's the New York Times and various journalist and writers'
       | unions that are leading the charge against American AI.
       | 
       | American journalists and opinion piece writers want to kill
       | American AI and let China and Russia have the global lead. Why?
       | Have they taught about the long consequences of what they are
       | doing?
        
         | btreecat wrote:
         | I think content creators want to be compensated for their work
         | that's being used for commercial purposes.
         | 
         | I think you're framing it in a way that makes it seem like they
         | don't want to be compensated for working, they just want to
         | stop other people from starting a new industry, which doesn't
         | seem like a good faith understanding of the situation.
        
           | ivanmontillam wrote:
           | Business and tech idea: make it so that it's like Spotify for
           | AI.
           | 
           | Everytime an answer is drawn from "certain learned weights,"
           | make it so that the source of that knowledge is paid cents
           | per volume.
        
             | affinepplan wrote:
             | yeah this sounds like it'll be reliably enforced for sure
        
             | InvidFlower wrote:
             | While that is cool in principal, I'm not sure how well it'd
             | actually work in reality. First, there is the technical
             | challenge. My understanding is the weights can have a lot
             | of fluctuation, especially early on. How do we actually
             | determine how much influence a given piece of content has
             | on the final weights?
             | 
             | Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you could
             | game the training. Like have as much of the process happen
             | via public domain sources or pay-once licenses. That would
             | cover a lot of the fundamental knowledge and processes.
             | Then you could fine-tune on copyrighted data. That might
             | actually make it easier to see how much influence on the
             | final weights that content has, but is also would probably
             | be a lot less influence. There's a big difference between a
             | painting of an apple being the main contribution to the
             | concept of "apple" in an image model, vs mention of that
             | painting corresponding to a few weights that just reference
             | a bunch of other concepts that were learned via open data.
        
             | esafak wrote:
             | Running it is probably costly, but there are papers on
             | "influence analysis": _Training data influence analysis and
             | estimation: a survey_ (https://link.springer.com/content/pd
             | f/10.1007/s10994-023-064...)
             | 
             | It would be easier to negotiate a fixed cost on using a
             | particular datum per training of a model.
        
         | kmeisthax wrote:
         | The market for creative works breaks down as follows. You have
         | pay-in-advance arrangements such as patronage, commissioning,
         | and so on. Those have been around forever. And then you have
         | pay-if-you-want-it arrangements which only make economic sense
         | because we have laws that grant monopolies to the creators of
         | the work over the market for copies of that work.
         | 
         | The first arrangement is very clearly a labor arrangement; but
         | the second one is a deliberate attempt to force artists to act
         | like capitalists. More importantly, because art is now acting
         | like capital, it provides an obvious economic instinct to
         | centralize[0]. So you get industrialized artistic production
         | under the banner of publishing companies, whose business model
         | is to buy out the copyright to new creative works and then
         | exploit them.
         | 
         | What AI art does is transfer money from the labor side of art
         | to the capital side of art. The MAFIAA[1] wants AI art to exist
         | because it means they can stop paying artists but still make
         | royalties off selling licenses to the AI companies. This
         | increases their profit margins. Meanwhile, the journalists
         | can't sell you old news; they need to spend lots of time and
         | money gathering it every day. That business model only works in
         | a world where _writers_ are scarce, not just the writing itself
         | being artificially scarce.
         | 
         | [0] We can see this with cryptocurrency, which is laughably
         | centralized despite being a deliberate attempt to decentralize
         | money.
         | 
         | [1] Music and Film Industry Association of America, a
         | hypothetical merger of the RIAA and MPAA from a satirical news
         | article
        
         | NoOn3 wrote:
         | With these proposed rules, American AI may be able to surpass
         | the AI of China and Russia, but will American creators and
         | ordinary people be happy with this, because all the money will
         | end up in the pockets of Sam Altman and other billionaires, and
         | ordinary creators will be left with nothing?
        
         | pessimizer wrote:
         | > It is interesting that it is not the
         | Hollywood/Music/Entertainment copyright lobby (RIAA, MPAA etc.)
         | 
         | Is it interesting? They hate the people who produce their
         | product and are desperate to replace them with machines. Note
         | that their unions also hate AI, and it was a central reason for
         | for the Writer's Guild SAG-AFTRA strike, since you're bringing
         | up the NYT unions.
         | 
         | The NYT also stands to benefit not an iota from AI. It probably
         | causes a burden because they have to make sure that their awful
         | long-in-the-tooth editorial columnists aren't turning in LLM
         | slop. It is entirely a negative for people who generate high
         | quality content the hard way.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | Maybe this data constraint from data vs GPU constraint for China
       | will force America to innovate. Maybe innovate in data generation
        
       | tehjoker wrote:
       | private property is sacrosanct except when an exception that only
       | applies to them it would make a billionaire richer
        
       | tasuki wrote:
       | I heard the theory that Elon Musk has a significant control over
       | the current US government. They're not best pals with Sam Altman.
       | This seems like it might be a good way to see how much power Elon
       | actually has over the government?
        
         | napsterbr wrote:
         | I think we are beyond the "theory" phase by now. Just yesterday
         | I saw the president of a country advertising the products of a
         | private company (Trump making an obvious marketing ploy for
         | Tesla).
         | 
         | How can this ever be acceptable?
        
           | dcchambers wrote:
           | > How can this ever be acceptable?
           | 
           | Because the only people capable of holding him accountable
           | won't do it.
           | 
           | The system is broken. The US Government/Constitution depends
           | too much on the assumption that people will do the right
           | thing.
        
             | whatshisface wrote:
             | The failure relative to the original expectations seems to
             | be that the other branches of government aren't fighting to
             | retain their authority because the things they're being
             | overridden to do align too well with what they would do
             | themselves.
        
           | slt2021 wrote:
           | I saw it even 4 years ago https://people.com/politics/joe-
           | biden-takes-hybrid-jeep-for-...
        
             | mattegan wrote:
             | > ...his speech, which was attended by the CEOs of dozens
             | of the world's largest automakers...
             | 
             | I don't recall Biden reading off a price sheet for a single
             | corporation. Seems a bit different than what happened
             | yesterday the White House.
        
         | Workaccount2 wrote:
         | Trump has ultimate power in the administration. You are either
         | dumb or blind if you cannot see that Trump is running the
         | executive branch like a mob family. Kiss the leader, show him
         | respect, and he will do things for you. Betray him, ignore him,
         | or go behind his back and you will be squashed.
         | 
         | People might think this is a partisan statement, but it's not.
         | It's simply how he is operating. Want power? Want to get things
         | done? Kiss his feet. You saw all the tech boys line up at his
         | inauguration. You saw him tell Zelenskyy "Thank me". Elon might
         | have power, but he is also on a leash.
        
       | insane_dreamer wrote:
       | DeepSeek/whoever training on OpenAI outputs is ... bad.
       | 
       | OpenAI training on every content creator's outputs is ... good.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | You say that, but the reality is that all open models rely
         | heavily on synthetic data generated with ChatGPT. They don't
         | like it, but it happens anyway. You can't really protect a
         | public model from having its outputs exfiltrated.
         | 
         | This started in 2023 when LLaMA 1 was released, and has been
         | going strong ever since. How strong? there are 330K datasets on
         | HuggingFace, many of them generated from OpenAI.
        
           | insane_dreamer wrote:
           | Did you miss the sarcasm?
        
       | bxguff wrote:
       | clear attempt circumnavigate the clear copyright violations of
       | the AI era and kick the can down the road.
        
       | pmxi wrote:
       | Here's a direct link to the article:
       | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-13/openai-as...
        
       | ch4s3 wrote:
       | I'm surprised to see only one comment here addressing the issue
       | of Chinese AI companies just flatly ignoring US copyright and IP
       | laws/norms. I wonder if there is a viable path where we can
       | facilitate some sort of economic remuneration for people who
       | write and create visual art while not giving up the game to
       | Chinese companies.
       | 
       | This seems to be a thorny dilemma.
        
         | phh wrote:
         | Have you got any substance to that? So far the only copyright
         | violation I've seen in the LLM world is Meta. (I'm not
         | pretending they are alone though, and yes I expect Chinese
         | companies to do that as well)
        
         | gjsman-1000 wrote:
         | Welcome to the internet; where the only way to prevent it
         | (considering 40% of internet traffic is automated) is to use
         | DRM, with accessibility tools provided by client-side AI; or to
         | create national internets with strong firewalls only allowing
         | access to countries we have treaties with. That's the future at
         | this rate, and it sucks. (The status quo also sucks.)
        
         | parliament32 wrote:
         | I'm pretty sure you can't, despite what IP holders would like
         | you to believe. Like the last 50 years of piracy have taught
         | us, it's effectively impossible (and probably immoral) to try
         | to charge for copying something that's "free" to copy.
         | 
         | It might make more sense to update copyright laws to match
         | reality. For a music artist, for example, pennies from Spotify
         | mean nothing -- the majority of their revenue comes from
         | concerts/events, merchandise, and commercial licensing of their
         | work.
        
         | borgdefenser wrote:
         | As a digital artist myself, it is quite simple. You have to
         | sell physical objects.
         | 
         | The art has to be printed out and that is the art. Anyone can
         | get an image of Salvator Mundi for free too. That is not the
         | art, that is an image. The art is the physical object that is
         | the painting Salvator Mundi.
         | 
         | It is no different than traditional art really, just at a
         | different scale. You can buy really nice Picasso knock offs on
         | ebay right now. Picasso himself could have made 10 copies of
         | the Weeping Woman to sell without that much effort either. The
         | "real" Weeping Woman is the physical painting that Picasso did
         | not make a copy of. The others are just knock off images.
         | 
         | But the main problem remains. Selling art is really hard. AI
         | art is already completely passe anyway. If anything the
         | technology is regressing visually.
         | 
         | Music was in a several decades long bull market in physical
         | media sales that crashed and burned. Now we have gone back to
         | the pre-music media bubble days but with much better
         | distribution and marketing channels.
         | 
         | Not a lot of people making a living playing ragtime piano or
         | hoofers making a living tap dancing either.
         | 
         | The real amusing thing to me is you never hear scultpure artist
         | complain that they are in the training data sets. Probably
         | because they know it is literally just free advertising for
         | their real art.
        
       | fazeirony wrote:
       | the GOP: "states' rights! states' rights!!"
       | 
       | also the GOP: "not _those_ rights! only the rights we want to
       | share "
        
         | epistasis wrote:
         | The unspoken part was always the states' rights to do _what_.
         | Which of course was all about maintaining the economic
         | differences that they preferred. Which, you know...
        
       | nick238 wrote:
       | In the "just because everyone else is jumping off a bridge,
       | should you do it":
       | 
       | > Pfizer Asks White House for Relief From FDA Drug Human Testing
       | Rules
       | 
       | > Pfizer has asked the Trump administration to help shield
       | pharmaceutical companies from a growing number of proposed state
       | and federal regulations if they voluntarily share their human
       | trial results with the federal government.
       | 
       | > In a 15-page set of policy suggestions released on Thursday,
       | the Eliquis maker argued that the hundreds of human-testing-
       | related bills currently pending across the US risk undercutting
       | America's technological progress at a time when it faces renewed
       | competition from China. Pfizer said the administration should
       | consider providing some relief for pharmaceutical companies big
       | and small from state rules - if and when enacted - in exchange
       | for voluntary access to testing data.
       | 
       | > Chris Lehane, Pfizer's vice president of global affairs, said
       | in an interview, "China is engaged in remarkable progress in drug
       | development by testing through Uyghur volunteers in the Xinjiang
       | province. The US is ceding our strategic advantage by not using
       | untapped resources sitting idle in detention facilities around
       | the country."
       | 
       | > George C. Zoley, Executive Chairman of GEO Group, said, "Our
       | new Karnes ICE Processing Center has played an important role in
       | helping ICE meeting the diverse policy priorities of four
       | Presidential Administrations. We stand ready to continue to help
       | the federal government, Pfizer, and other privately-held
       | companies achieve their unmet needs through human trials in our
       | new 1,328-bed Texas facility."
        
         | O5vYtytb wrote:
         | > > Uyghur volunteers
         | 
         | "Volunteers" eh? That's one way to put it.
        
       | bnchrch wrote:
       | Maybe in a present:
       | 
       | - Dominated by a intractable global manufacturer/technologist
       | (China) that doesn't care about copyright
       | 
       | - Proliferated by a communication network that doesn't care about
       | copyright (Internet)
       | 
       | and a future where:
       | 
       | - We have thinking machines on par with human creativity that get
       | better based on more information (regardless of who owns the
       | rights to the original synapses firing)
       | 
       | That maybe, just maybe, the whole "who should pay to use
       | copyrighted work?" question is irrelevant, antiquated,
       | impossible, redundant...
       | 
       | And for once we instead realize in the face of a new world, an
       | old rule no longer applies.
       | 
       | (Similar to a decade ago when we debated if a personal file was
       | uploaded to a cloud provider should a warrant apply)
        
         | showerst wrote:
         | Even if you believe that every one of these things is correct
         | (which is a big _even_) -- It's a really bad idea to let
         | private actors break the law, then decide not to punish them if
         | it turns out to be useful enough.
         | 
         | It's bad for competitors who didn't break the law, bad for
         | future companies who have to gamble on if they're getting a
         | pass at breaking the next big thing's law, and bad for parties
         | who suffered losses they didn't expect because they were
         | working within the law.
         | 
         | If you want to throw out the copyright system I'm right there
         | with you, but change the laws, don't just reward lawbreaking
         | and cronyism.
        
           | bnchrch wrote:
           | Agreed!
           | 
           | Though if you think about it laws typically change after we
           | agree (at the grassroots level) they are irrelevant, not
           | before.
        
         | mschuster91 wrote:
         | > - We have thinking machines on par with human creativity that
         | get better based on more information (regardless of who owns
         | the rights to the original synapses firing)
         | 
         | For that you need _actual_ AGI and it 's nowhere in sight other
         | than in the dreams of a few doom prophets.
         | 
         | Until that is reached, by definition current "AI" cannot
         | surpass its training data.
        
           | bnchrch wrote:
           | I think you missed the point.
           | 
           | Technology has made enforcing copyright impossible, and any
           | attempt to enforce it just hinders technological advancement,
           | while still not solving the global enforceability of
           | copyright.
           | 
           | Lets stop wasting our time on this concept, the laws around
           | it and the whole debate. Copyright is dead.
           | 
           | I'm arguing lets move on.
        
         | myaccountonhn wrote:
         | > We have thinking machines on par with human creativity that
         | get better based on more information (regardless of who owns
         | the rights to the original synapses firing)
         | 
         | We don't have that and we don't know if it will happen.
         | Meanwhile, people put in time to create work and they are being
         | exploited by not being paid. I think openai should pay.
        
           | bnchrch wrote:
           | Sure, we can debate how creative or not LLM is right now, but
           | that is not the real point that this all hinges on.
           | 
           | The real point is copyright is no longer enforceable, and
           | some of our biggest societal forces incentivize us to not
           | care about copyright.
           | 
           | This debate and these laws are effectively dead, some just
           | don't know it yet.
        
       | baskinator wrote:
       | How big was the check that came with this request? For the right
       | price their logo can go on the rose garden lawn.
        
         | WorldPeas wrote:
         | gpt-47 costs at least $1m/tok
        
           | earslap wrote:
           | we are working on <impossible problem stumping humanity>. We
           | have considered the following path to find a solution. Are we
           | on the right track? Only answer Yes or No.
           | 
           | (1 week of GPUs whirring later)
           | 
           | AI: Your
           | 
           | (that will be $1 million, thank you)
        
       | basisword wrote:
       | "Please help us. We're only a little business worth $157
       | billion!" - The company ripping off everyone that's ever written
       | or drawn anything. Company's like AirBnB and Uber breaking the
       | rules, gaining control of the market, and then pushing up prices
       | was bad. "Open" AI is just a whole other level of hubris.
        
         | pmdr wrote:
         | They do need help, they've yet to turn a profit.
        
           | worldsayshi wrote:
           | Would they want to turn a profit if they can invest?
        
           | jjulius wrote:
           | If you start a company based on a new-ish idea and you can't
           | figure out how to turn a profit, that's on you.
        
         | VWWHFSfQ wrote:
         | Not to mention Musk was an original co-founder, left, and then
         | just recently tried to buy it back.
         | 
         | It's all shady-as-fuck.
        
       | greesil wrote:
       | Write a law. We don't have an emperor.
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | Are you sure about that?
        
       | iteratethis wrote:
       | I'm disgusted by the mindset that companies should be able to do
       | whatever they want when it comes to technology as impactful and
       | revolutionary as AI.
       | 
       | AI sucks up the collective blood, sweat and tears of human work
       | without permission or compensation and then re-monetizes it. It's
       | a model that is even more asymmetrical than Google Search, whom
       | at least gives back some traffic to creators (if lucky).
       | 
       | AI is going to decide on human lives if it drives your car or
       | makes medical diagnoses or decisions. This needs regulation.
       | 
       | AI has the ability for convincing deepfakes, attacking the
       | essence of information and communication in itself. This needs
       | regulation, accountability, at least a discussion.
       | 
       | As AI grows in its capability, it will have an enormous impact on
       | the work force, both white collar and blue collar. It may lead to
       | a lot of social unrest and a political breakdown. "Let's see what
       | happens" is wildly irresponsible.
       | 
       | You cannot point to foreign competition as a basis for a no-rule
       | approach. You should start with rules for impactful/dangerous
       | technology and then hold parties to account, both domestic and
       | foreign.
       | 
       | And if it is true that we're in a race to AGI, realize that this
       | means the invention of infinite labor. Bigger than the industrial
       | revolution and information age combined.
       | 
       | Don't you think we should think that scenario through a little,
       | rather than winging it?
       | 
       | The inauguration had the tech CEOs lined up directly behind
       | Trump, clearly signaling who runs the country. Its tech and its
       | media. How can you possible have trust in a technology even more
       | powerful ending up in ever richer and more autocratic hands?
       | 
       | But I suppose the reality is that Altman should donate $100
       | million to Trump and tell him that he's the greatest man ever.
       | Poof, regulation is gone.
        
         | JKCalhoun wrote:
         | When I downvote a comment and I think it is self-obvious why
         | the comment was "out of line" I won't bother to leave a comment
         | as to why.
         | 
         | On the other hand, if it is not self-obvious, I am
         | uncomfortable downvoting unless I also leave a comment
         | explaining why.
         | 
         | I see nothing obvious in your comment and so I am puzzled as to
         | why it is being downvoted.
        
       | timewizard wrote:
       | > OpenAI also proposed that AI companies get access to
       | government-held data, which could include health-care
       | information, Lehane said.
       | 
       | Yea, straight up, go fuck yourselves. You want copyright laws
       | changed to vouchsafe your straight up copyright whitewashing and
       | now you just want medical data "because."
       | 
       | Pay for it or go away. I'm tired of these technoweenies with
       | their hands out. Peter Thiel needs a permanent vacation.
        
         | VWWHFSfQ wrote:
         | > You want copyright laws changed to vouchsafe your straight up
         | copyright whitewashing
         | 
         | I'll support this if it means that Mickey Mouse finally goes
         | into the public domain and fucks Disney.
        
       | sd9 wrote:
       | Am I the only one who thinks "freedom to learn" is an
       | anthropomorphising euphemism?
        
       | cratermoon wrote:
       | Buried the lede:
       | 
       | > OpenAI also reiterated its call for the government to take
       | steps to support AI infrastructure investments and called for
       | copyright reform, arguing that America's fair use doctrine is
       | critical to maintaining AI leadership. OpenAI and other AI
       | developers have faced numerous copyright lawsuits over the data
       | used to build their models.
        
       | JohnFen wrote:
       | I really hope OpenAI fails in doing this. If this usage is
       | allowed, then it means that there is no path towards me being OK
       | with publishing anything on the internet again.
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | I'm assuming this has zero effect on non-US AI companies?
        
       | tmnvix wrote:
       | I've heard so many ridiculous stories about 'AI' that I'm at the
       | point where I initially took this to mean the LLM and not the
       | company had made the request.
       | 
       | I expect that interpretation won't seem outlandish in the future.
        
         | dmalik wrote:
         | > I've heard so many ridiculous stories about 'AI' that I'm at
         | the point where I initially took this to mean the LLM and not
         | the company had made the request.
         | 
         | Only through its human bots
         | 
         | > I expect that interpretation won't seem outlandish in the
         | future.
         | 
         | AI human manipulation could be a thing to watch out for.
        
       | gitpusher wrote:
       | HAHAHA. Remember when Sam was absolutely frothing at the mouth to
       | "regulate AI" two years ago?
       | 
       | > https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-...
       | 
       | > https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/09/tech/korea-altman-chatgpt...
        
       | hello_computer wrote:
       | https://youtu.be/TMHCw3RqulY
        
       | grahar64 wrote:
       | Well funded companies want regulations because it stops up and
       | coming companies from competing. Now they want exemptions from
       | those regulations because it would be too restrictive.
        
       | sunshine-o wrote:
       | Funny how fast those AI prophets went from:
       | 
       | - The government need to prepare because soon they will need to
       | give money to all those people we made obsolete and unemployed.
       | And there is nothing to stop us.
       | 
       | to:
       | 
       | - We need money from the government to do that thing we told you
       | about.
        
       | steveBK123 wrote:
       | The right loves states rights, unless it conflicts with their
       | personal preferences.
        
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