counterpoint: what if we just make an exception for tech companies and double fuck consumers?

This is the correct answer. Never forget that US copyright law originally allowed for a 14 year (renewable for 14 more years) term. Now copyright holders are able to:

• reach consumers more quickly and easily using the internet
• market on more fronts (merch didn’t exist in 1710)
• form other business types to better hold/manage IP

So much in the modern world exists to enable copyright holders, but terms are longer than ever. It’s insane.

gosh Ed Zitron is such an anodyne voice to hear, I felt like I was losing my mind until I listened to some of his stuff

Fartsniffer 🤣

It seems like their message was written specifically for the biases the current administration holds. Calling China PRC is an obvious example. So it was written by idiots for idiots apparently.

That’s fair, but OpenAI isn’t fighting to reform copyright law for everyone. OpenAI wants you to be subject to the same restrictions you currently face, and them to be exempt. This isn’t really an “enemy of my enemy” situation.

yes, screw them both. let altman scrape all the copyright material and choke on it

Sam Altman hasn’t complained surprisingly, he just said there’s competition and it will be harder for OpenAI to compete with open source. I think their small lead is essentially gone, and their plan is now to suckle Microsoft’s teet.

This has been the legal basis of all AI training sets since they began collecting datasets. The US copyright office heard these arguments in 2023: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/listening-sessions.html

MR. LEVEY: Hi there. I’m Curt Levey, President of the Committee for Justice. We’re a nonprofit that focuses on a variety of legal and policy issues, including intellectual property, AI, tech policy. There certainly are a number of very interesting questions about AI and copyright. I’d like to focus on one of them, which is the intersection of AI and copyright infringement, which some of the other panelists have already alluded to.

That issue is at the forefront given recent high-profile lawsuits claiming that generative AI, such as DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, are infringing by training their AI models on a set of copyrighted images, such as those owned by Getty Images, one of the plaintiffs in these suits. And I must admit there’s some tension in what I think about the issue at the heart of these lawsuits. I and the Committee for Justice favor strong protection for creatives because that’s the best way to encourage creativity and innovation.

But, at the same time, I was an AI scientist long ago in the 1990s before I was an attorney, and I have a lot of experience in how AI, that is, the neural networks at the heart of AI, learn from very large numbers of examples, and at a deep level, it’s analogous to how human creators learn from a lifetime of examples. And we don’t call that infringement when a human does it, so it’s hard for me to conclude that it’s infringement when done by AI.

Now some might say, why should we analogize to humans? And I would say, for one, we should be intellectually consistent about how we analyze copyright. And number two, I think it’s better to borrow from precedents we know that assumed human authorship than to invent the wheel over again for AI. And, look, neither human nor machine learning depends on retaining specific examples that they learn from.

So the lawsuits that I’m alluding to argue that infringement springs from temporary copies made during learning. And I think my number one takeaway would be, like it or not, a distinction between man and machine based on temporary storage will ultimately fail maybe not now but in the near future. Not only are there relatively weak legal arguments in terms of temporary copies, the precedent on that, more importantly, temporary storage of training examples is the easiest way to train an AI model, but it’s not fundamentally required and it’s not fundamentally different from what humans do, and I’ll get into that more later if time permits.

The “temporary storage” idea is pretty central for visual models like Midjourney or DALL-E, whose training sets are full of copyrighted works lol. There is a legal basis for temporary storage too:

The “Ephemeral Copy” Exception (17 U.S.C. § 112 & § 117)

U.S. copyright law recognizes temporary, incidental, and transitory copies as necessary for technological processes.
Section 117 allows temporary copies for software operation.
Section 112 permits temporary copies for broadcasting and streaming.

I don’t think it’s actually such a bad argument because to reject it you basically have to say that style should fall under copyright protections, at least conditionally, which is absurd and has obvious dystopian implications. This isn’t what copyright was meant for. People want AI banned or inhibited for separate reasons and hope the copyright argument is a path to that, but even if successful wouldn’t actually change much except to make the other large corporations that own most copyright stakeholders of AI systems. That’s not actually a better circumstance.

Of course it is if you copy to monetise which is what they do.