Google fined €250M in France for breaching intellectual property deal

I think the point is that others are using this data as well, but not a target given there's no gigantic piggy bank to extract $ from.

Is there any evidence that OpenAI is not using the same data? They're just not big enough for the regulators to aim at yet.

>Developing AI with news articles. It doesn't stop you from e.g. licensing reddit data and training on that.

Good luck competing with AI that were able to train on all data instead of just a small subset.

Japan has already codified it into law, I expect if other countries pile in on calling it a violation of copyright, many will set up an entity there.

A few large media companies own the copyright on the majority of news articles. AI companies can just pay to license the content (or give an equity stake in exchange).

In France. So the AI winners won’t come from France, although some participants will certainly be French contributing their talents abroad.

I doubt they'll be able to survive in the long term to be honest.

They'll either be forced to cooperate with the slow IT movers megacorps like Orange or Capgemini or buried in the legal framework by the copyright mafias. (Or a mix of both)

I'd love to be proven wrong of course but I know too much how it works there to be optimistic.

How do you define a copy? Is the data sent over HDMI to your monitors memory a copy?

In some EU countries, like Austria for example, there are royalties to pay on non-volatile storage memory[1], who's funds go to the local mafia...errr I mean music/movie rights holders association, because get this, storage can be used for storing reproductions of copyrighted content, so if you buy anything from external HDDs to phones with flash memory, then you're automatically a potential pirate and you owe them money upfront to compensate them for the piracy induced losses.

It's a tax that started from the 1980's first on audio and VHS cassettes, and kept getting updated over the years to include MP3 players, flash memory, smart phones and smart watches.

I expect the exact same thing will happen to LLM bots. The juggernauts like Ringier or Axel Springer will lobby in their respective countries or at EU level to get their pound of flesh whenever people use something like ChatGPT, because they'll claim it was trained on their copyrighted data and so they deserve to get their cut, otherwise the service will have to be banned in the EU.

[1] https://www-wko-at.translate.goog/oe/handel/maschinen-techno...

  | Integrated memory in mobile phones:                                                            EUR 2.50 |
  | Integrated storage in tablets:                                                                 EUR 3.75 |
  | Integrated memory in PC, desktop computer, notebook, subnotebook, ultrabook, netbook, laptop:  EUR 5.00 |
  | Hard drives as individual storage media:                                                       EUR 4.50 |
  | External memory cards:                                                                         EUR 0.35 |
  | Digital picture frames:                                                                        EUR 2.00 |
  | Smartwatches:                                                                                  EUR 1.00 |

This seems unironically the best answer.

There are a lot of laws that are seemingly universal like patents, copyright, privacy (right to your own likeness etc) but the details can vary widely internationally and even between EU countries.

As an example: it's infamously prohibited to commercially publish photographs taken of the Eiffel tower at night because the light installation from 1990 onward is protected by copyright law as a work of art (as is the glass pyramid of the Louvre btw). HOWEVER it's legal to take and use pictures of permanetly publicly displayed works of art in some European countries like Austria, Germany and Switzerland ("Panoramafreiheit"). So you could sell post cards of unlicensed photographs of the Eiffel tower lights in those countries but not France. But if you commercially use them on a Germany-based website available in French you might still get sued from France.

Here's a German map of this specific law across Europe to illustrate the point. You don't have to speak German to understand that the laws vary wildly despite all being based in copyright: https://www.parismalanders.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Pa...

It's easy to see how one could argue that using copyrighted data as "training material" for a commercial LLM is commercial use. It's also easy to see how one could argue that this is not "reproduction" of significant portions of the copyrighted work and therefore copyright law does not apply. But it's also easy to see how one could argue that this still qualifies as "citation" the way Google regurgitates snippets from news sites and is thus covered by the "citation" provision for protecting newspapers. But it's also easy to see how one could argue that's not the case. Different jurisdictions will interpret these things differently.

Or that we already train humans on copyrighted data and then employ that human intelligence for commercial use.

You can argue that AI is a categorically different scale that requires special regulation to protect our societal values (and I think I do) but that is a different claim and implementation than copyright enforcement.

the list specifically excludes EU countries

as always, it helps to maintain an identity in several geopolitical 'blocks', this time Montenegro worked :)

So you could still use it, you just had to lie about where you where?

that's not that sad, especially when talking abt gdpr. I mean gdpr can be better by enforcing respecting some request headers but other than that, gdpr is good, just like punishing unauthorized use of other's work

I'd say that's a gray area. Several of these schemes have been found in violation (Heise's implementation of it got them sued for example and they had to modify it). The bigger point here is that ONLY European websites have been going that route whereas American websites mostly just try to circumvent the GDPR by being clever (e.g. abusing the legal term "legitimate interest" to add a tedious layer of opt-outs), which hilariously backfires because it demonstrates that the violation is intentional.

Note that the point with the compliant "accept or pay" ones is that they still can't coerce you to "accept all" - they still have to only bundle the minimum necessary and justify it, and they then have to opt out paying users from those. Keep in mind that the ePrivacy Directive explicitly requires having an "refuse all" (or in this case "accept minimum necessary") button with equal weight and visibility as an "accept all" if the latter exists. Most consent dialogs are still in violation of this as they didn't update since the GDPR initially came into effect.

If they harvest massive amounts of copyrighted and suspect data and send the worst parts of it to strangers over the Internet, everyone calls it "ML" and "training" and investors give them billions in funding but when I do it they call me a pirate and a pervert and throw me in jail.

> Do list the names of famous bureaucrats that got famous because they fined rich companies.

Thierry Breton is another name that comes to mind.

Couldn’t one argue that the current system is expressly in the interest of the US government? We are entering a new technological age with the US at the forefront and the EU falling further behind while busily erecting more obstacles. Economically, at least.

If it’s not US companies, it will just be Chinese ones. Homegrown isn’t an option the EU places much value on.