Is it just me or is that really the main and most consequential claim? Title feels misleading.
If we are to believe the much used arguments against piracy that we’ve been fed over the last 30+ years (mainly by deep pocketed media companies) then piracy is stealing and if you take stolen material and use it to produce a profitable commercial service then surely that’s a clear cut case in favour of the copyright owners?
Otherwise WTF have we been prosecuting individuals for all these years for pirating movies and music etc?
And here’s the injury: the authors did not get paid for their copyrighted work. Whether you agree with the law or not, OpenAI at the very least should have bought a copy of every book they trained on - and that doesn’t even get into the question of whether they even had the right to train on that material even if they had paid for it. They didn’t do that. They used stolen copies instead.
I don’t understand how it could go any other way. I do get the judge’s reluctance to decide that every bit of output of ChatGPT constitutes copyright infringement - that’s much harder to argue.
I’m not passionately against OpenAI - I pay them money - but I am concerned about this “training material” sourcing issue just being swept under the rug.
AI advancements clearly do impact artists, authors and other creators of works… they’ll be even more screwed if we just throw copyright law completely out of the window at the same time.
They have absolutely no say in how I use the book they sold to me. Only if I reproduce that book, the actual physical reproduced work is of concern to copyright law, nothing else (my use of the book I bought from you is of no concern).
I find it naive to simply assume that publishers won't play tit-for-tat with those that are trying to indirectly monetize their output. I had hope that a return to First Sale sanity may win the day, but as of late I have a dread we're briskly walking down the path where no one is going to be "selling" in the conventional sense anymore. Not with the stakes at hand.
I've assumed for a while that avoiding the nightmare of all those different agreements was one of the main reasons they chose to pirate the works instead.
Also, “learning” here isn’t the same thing as what college students do. For one thing, you can’t copy-paste a college student’s whole brain. You can’t own and sell their brains (well, ah, you know what I mean—not the organ trade). For another… it’s simply not the same thing. It might be, we suppose, similar to some parts of how human learning work, but it’s plainly not identical and may not be especially close. We use the same word for what LLMs do because it’s a convenient and useful-enough analogy, but that doesn’t mean we can prove anything else simply based on our having re-used the word “learn” here.
“That’s learning, this is learning, so all things that apply to one apply to the other”—no, that doesn’t follow, it takes more than that.
Copyright protection does not extend to ideas, procedures, processes, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles, or discoveries. Copyright protects only the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
If the complaint is with the second action, as it should be, the learning part is irrelevant.
The same way that they should pay for using news articles and people’s images/comics.
1. Pay retail price for one copy then train on it.
2. Pay a recurring license fee that probably amounts to the majority of your revenue (Spotify-style).
AI companies can't really afford #2.
We don't. Nobody got prosecuted for downloading movies. Because that isn't illegal.
Whats illegal is distributing copies to other people.
Its OK though. Its a common misconception that internet piracy is illegal.
Only the distribution part has ever been successfully prosecuted.
> They didn’t do that. They used stolen copies instead.
Using stolen copies isn't illegal. It is completely legal to use other people's work without their permission. Distributing copies is the only part that is illegal.
> if we just throw copyright law completely out of the window at the same time.
Nothing is being throw out the window. The facts that I have described have always been true.
I take your point that prosecutions are focused more on the sharers than individual downloaders, but OpenAI still infringed copyright by making unauthorised reproductions of the authors’ works (by downloading pirated copies of them).
I am not aware of a single example in the history of US copyright law where someone has been successfully prosecuted for the downloading part.
If such an example does not exist, then I think it is safe to say that it is not illegal.
But feel free to show me this an example. Because I have so far never heard of such a case.
There isn't any difference between these two things.
If something has never and will never be enforced then it is just words on a piece of paper.
The only way that words on a piece of paper turn into something that actually matters is through enforcement. So the point stands.
It doesn't matter what your interpretation of the words on a piece of paper are if no judge or jury has ever agreed with you and will never agree with you, as evidenced by a successful case.
Ok got it.
Well then you can reinterprete everything that I said previously to instead be "nobody has either been prosecuted or sued successfully by either the state or civility for the downloading part".
I didn't realize that the problem that you had with my post was not with the clear substance of it, and was instead with the dictionary definition and usage of one single word.
But if that one singular word was the issue then I am happy to give this multi sentence clarification even though I think my point was clear and obvious from the beginning.
So my original point stands once I have corrected the slightly incorrect usage of one single word.
But feel free to show an example of a single person ever being successfully sued for just the "downloading" part.
(civilly! Not by the state instead by a company! Important clarification here. I don't want you to misinterpret. Because apparently that one word was a big deal and huge misunderstanding.)
So then not a single instance of an actual judge ruling that the downloading part was civilly illegal or requires payment civilly?
If no, then my point stands.
Anyone can make a threat and get money out of someone.
I could threaten you right now with horrible legal consequences for the completely bogus "civil crime" of being wrong on hacker news!
But you giving in to me, and giving me money, isn't a ruling or precedent that action X (in this case "being wrong on hacker news") is illegal.
So then you could have instead just said. "I agree with you completely, 100%, that there has not been a singular case in the history of the USA copyright law where a judge has ruled against someone who only did the downloading part".
I am glad after half a dozen posts I was finally able to get you to agree to this.
You could have just said that from the beginning really. I am happy that you agree with me on my main point!
A concrete example of this is Google Images. Image search is fair use, even though they index shittons of infringing images.
The judge isn't going to touch the "output is infringing" argument mainly because the authors didn't actually connect the dots between their work and a specific output. That's an argument that would stick if you were suing a user of OpenAI's services, not OpenAI themselves. "Output is infringing" is going to be part of the fair use analysis anyway (specifically, the market substitution factor), so this extra claim is superfluous.
I don't actually think it will be ruled fair use, at least not in all cases.