Technology

Maybe if you would pay for training data they would let you use copyright data or something?

The ingredient thing is a bit amusing, because that's basically how one of the major fast food chains got to be so big (I can't remember which one it was ATM though; just that it wasn't McDonald's). They cut out the middle-man and just bought their own farm to start growing the vegetables and later on expanded to raising the animals used for the meat as well.

I personally am down for this punch-up between Alphabet and Sony. Microsoft v. Disney.

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Let's engage in a little fantasy. Someone invents a magic machine that is able to duplicate apartments, condos, houses, ... You want to live in New York? You can copy yourself a penthouse overlooking the Central Park for just a few cents. It's magic. You don't need space. It's all in a pocket dimension like the Tardis or whatever. Awesome, right? Of course, not everyone would like that. The owner of that penthouse, for one. Their multi-million dollar investment is suddenly almost worthless. They would certainly demand that you must not copy their property without consent. And so would a lot of people. And what about the poor construction workers, ask the owners of constructions companies? And who will pay to have any new house built?

So in this fantasy story, the government goes and bans the magic copy machine. Taxes are raised to create a big new police bureau to monitor the country and to make sure that no one use such a machine without a license.

That's turned from magical wish fulfillment into a dystopian story. A society that rejects living in a rent-free wonderland but instead chooses to make itself poor. People work to ensure poverty, not to create wealth.

You get that I'm talking about data, information, knowledge. The first magic machine was the printing press. Now we have computers and the Internet.

I'm not talking about a utopian vision here. Facts, scientific theories, mathematical theorems, ... All such is free for all. Inventors can get patents, but only for 20 years and only if they publish them. They can keep their invention secret and take their chances. But if they want a government enforced monopoly, they must publish their inventions so that others may learn from it.

In the US, that's how the Constitution demands it. The copyright clause: [The United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Cutting down on Fair Use makes everyone poorer and only a very few, very rich people richer. Have you ever thought about where the money goes if AI training requires a license?

For example, to Reddit, because Reddit has rights to all those posts. So do Facebook and Xitter. Of course, there's also old money, like the NYT or Getty. The NYT has the rights to all their old issue about a century back. If AI training requires a license, they can sell all their old newspapers again. That's pure profit. Do you think they will their employees raises out of the pure goodness of their heart if they win their lawsuits? They have no legal or economics reason to do so. The belief that this would happen is trickle-down economics.

So if I watch all Star Wars movies, and then get a crew together to make a couple of identical movies that were inspired by my earlier watching, and then sell the movies, then this is actually completely legal.

It doesn't matter if they stole the source material. They are selling a machine that can create copyright infringements at a click of a button, and that's a problem.

This is not the same as an artist looking at every single piece of art in the world and being able to replicate it to hang it in the living room. This is an army of artists that are enslaved by a single company to sell any copy of any artwork they want. That army works as long as you feed it electricity and free labor of actual artists.

Theft actually seems like a great word for what these scammers are doing.

If you run some open source model on your own machine, that's a different story.

I rather think the point is being missed here. Copyright is already causing huge issues, such as the troubles faced by the internet archive, and the fact academics get nothing from their work.

Surely the argument here is that copyright law needs to change, as it acts as a barrier to education and human expression. Not, however, just for AI, but as a whole.

Copyright law needs to move with the times, as all laws do.

The issue here is that the cheese gets consumed for the sandwitch. Knowledge does not lost when it gets passed. Cheese does.