Comment by pzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pzs | Hacker News Reader

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Consider the thought experiment that you give your postal address to some business, because you want to subscribe to regular grocery deliveries. Then you notice that each delivered package contains a small transparent bag with some with powder in it.

Whoever treats others' information can only do so with a clear purpose and for a defined time period according to current EU laws.

If, however, you were referring to information that you published on the Internet for everyone's benefit then you would still need to consider intellectual property rights. In the open source software world we have the licenses that deal with this, and then there are copyright laws protecting content providers (not making a case here whether they are good or not).

I guess what makes a difference is if there is some business involved either in the production or in the consumption side of the equation and if we accept that "machine learning" is the same as "human learning".

EDIT: separated paragraphs, typo

Copyrights protect the copying of the original text, but models take gradients. Are gradients protected as well? Even when data is copyrighted it still has legitimate value for training, pure ideas don't get copyright protection, only expression.

Can the model use the text without making a copy (in memory) to process it?

technical copies are different, there are exemptions

Can a human?

Not relevant. What humans do isn't necessarily viewed the same way as what machines do.

Machines need to be prompted with the exact prefix to be able to retrieve any copyrighted fragment, and that doesn't work most of the times. So the intent for copyright circumvention is in the prompt. Temperature settings also matter.

That could be besides the point as for the training the machines will create a copy in their memory - or is that no longer the case?

I don't believe transient copies are the real issue here. Having a temporary copy stored locally in memory is more of a technical nuance than anything. That copy remains isolated and is not being distributed or shared. In contrast, using something like BitTorrent actively spreads copies across the internet.

There are also cases where loading copyrighted content is unavoidable in order to even view the license terms. For example, a website could deny the right to copy its content before you even see the licensing details. Temporary copies enabled through normal usage like this should be permissible.

I think this really comes down to the specifics of the situation.

For displaying/viewing any digital device needs to create an in memory 'copy'. If you would extend copyright to that extreme, it would become completely nonsensical imho.

Not a lawyer, but if you show a streamed movie to an audience without having any rights, how would that be covered? Only by considering the stream provider?

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