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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

> But the point of good law isn’t to protect an established business model.

Really? The Constitution specifically includes a bit about: "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". That was quickly followed by the first copyright act.

As I understand it, the copyright portion of this was exactly to protect the established business model for writers, which was publishing and selling copies of their work. In particular, protect it against other people publishing editions of their work.

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> the exclusive right

exactly. This usage of works for _training_ is not part of that exclusive right, as far as i can tell. Otherwise, it would be a copyright violation for a human to read and learn off an existing works.

>This usage of works for _training_ is not part of that exclusive right, as far as I can tell.

Training the AI isn't the problem.

Publishing output generated by it (by making it available to anyone else other than yourself), however, is.

>Otherwise, it would be a copyright violation for a human to read and learn off an existing works

You have the right to read and memorize the entirety of the Harry Potter series.

You do not* have the right to start a podcast where you recite the entire book from memory.

Exactly.

This technology was clearly not one anticipated when the Constitution or the first Copyright Act was written. Or any of the later ones.

This will not fit in existing laws, so we have to go back to the purpose, "promote the progress of science and useful arts" via "securing for limited times to authors and inventors" particular rights.

What specific rights we'll need to secure here are going to take a while to work out. But new technologies have forced updates to copyright laws many times, and I' sure this won't be the last time.

> You do not* have the right to start a podcast where you recite the entire book from memory.

which is fine - this is public broadcasting of the works, which is part of the exclusive rights of the owner.

However, this is not what the AI is doing.

>However, this is not what the AI is doing.

Yes, this is what the people who use the AI are doing. As well as people who release the AI model or a product that uses it.

> the people who use the AI are doing

if the people are using the AI to replicate an exiting works, to try to loophole the copyright act, then they will just get sued.

> release the AI model or a product that uses it

I argue that the model itself cannot be construed as copyright violation. After all, the model is information. What if i released a table of all of the word frequencies from books, and published that table? The table of word frequencies does not violate the copyright of the books from which it was derived.

Just because you _could_ re-derive the original books from this dataset, doesn't mean the dataset violates copyright. It _could_, if the dataset cannot do anything else (e.g., i just zipped up the text of the books and released that). But the AI model does not _only_ output the original, but it could also generate new works.

but they're not. Works derived stylistically are not copies.

Were they publishing copies, your harry potter analogy would hold, but that is categorically not the thing happening.

Diffusion is not compression, or copying. It's stylistic synthesis, which is more like someone reading all the Harry Potter books, then doing a podcast about Harry Potter fan fiction.

Which, incidentally, exists (1)

1 https://www.fanaticalfics.com/

So, that falls on particular outputs. Copyright infringements at the level per creations!

The question is how did you do training. If in the process you 'copied' the image (e.g. from network to memory) you did require copyright.

Reading with a human is not copying, but reading by machine is - there are several cases where that has been enforced. This is covered by reproduction rights.

The stated goal is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Protecting an established business model via copyright was merely a means to that end, not the end in itself.

In this case, diffusion models are actually a perfect example of "the progress of science and useful arts". The law should be structured in such a way as to promote such progress, not hinder it.

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