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Comment by throw646577 | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to pre-register copyright in any Berne Convention countries. Your copyright exists from the moment you create something.

(ETA: This paragraph below is diametrically wrong. Sorry.)

AFAIK in the USA, registered copyright is necessary if you want to bring a lawsuit and get more than statutory damages, which are capped low enough that corporations do pre-register work.

Not the case in all Berne countries; you don't need this in the UK for example, but then the payouts are typically a lot lower in the UK. Statutory copyright payouts in the USA can be enough to make a difference to an individual author/artist.

As I understand it, OpenAI could still be on the hook for up to $150K per article if it can be demonstrated it is wilful copyright violation. It's hard to see how they can argue with a straight face that it is accidental. But then OpenAI is, like several other tech unicorns, a bad faith manufacturing device.

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You seem to know more about this than me. I have a family member who "invented" some electronics things. He hasn't done anything with the inventions (I'm pretty sure they're quackery).

But to ensure his patent, he mailed himself a sealed copy of the plans. He claims the postage date stamp will hold up in court if he ever needs it.

Is that a thing? Or is it just more tinfoil business? It's hard to tell with him.

Honestly I don't know whether that actually is a meaningful thing to do anymore; it may be with patents.

It certainly used to be a legal device people used.

Essentially it is low-budget notarisation. If your family member believes they have something which is timely and valuable, it might be better to seek out proper legal notarisation, though -- you'd consult a Notary Public:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notary_public

It won't hold up in court, and given that the post-office will mail/deliver unsealed letters (which may then be sealed after the fact), will be viewed rather dimly.

Buy your family member a copy of:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58734571-patent-it-yours...

Surely the NSA will retain a copy which can be checked

Even if they did, it in fact cannot be checked. There is precedent that you cannot subpoena NSA for their intercepts, because exactly what has been intercepted and stored is privileged information.

> There is precedent that you cannot subpoena NSA for their intercepts

I know it's tangential to this thread but could you link to further reading?

but only in a real democracy

The USmoved to first to file years ago. Whoever files first gets it, except if he publishes it publicly there is a 1-year inventor's grace period (it would not apply to a self mail or private mail to other people).

This is patent, not copyright.

Mailing yourself using registered mail is a very old tactic to establish a date for your documents using an official government entity, so this can be meaningful in court. However this may not provide the protection he needs. Copyright law differs from patent law and he should seek legal advice

Even if the date is verifiable, what would it even prove? If it's not public then I don't believe it can count as prior art to begin with.

presumably the intention is to prove the existence of the specific plans at a specific time?

I guess the modern version would be to sha256 the plans and shove it into a bitcoin transaction

good luck explaining that to a judge

Right, you can register before you bring a lawsuit. Pre-registration makes your claim stronger, as does notice of copyright.

That's what I thought too, but why does the article say:

> Infringement suits require that relevant works were first registered with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO).

OK so it turns out I am wrong here! Cool.

I have it upside down/diametrically wrong, however you see fit. Right that structures exist, exactly wrong on how they apply.

It is registration that guarantees access to statutory damages:

https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/copyright/infri...

Without registration you still have your natural copyright, but you would have to try to recover the profits made by the infringer.

Which does sound like more of an uphill struggle for The Intercept, because OpenAI could maybe just say "anything we earn from this is de minimis considering how much errr similar material is errrr in the training set"

Oh man it's going to take a long time for me to get my brain to accept this truth over what I'd always understood.

You have to register to sue, but you have the copyright automatically at the moment the work is created.

You can go register after an infringement and still sue, but you then won't be able to get statutory damages or attorney's fees.

Statutory damages are a big deal in general but especially here where proving how much of OpenAI's revenue is due to your specific articles is probably impossible. Which is why they're suing under this DMCA provision: it's not an infringement suit so the registration requirement doesn't apply, and there's a separate statutory damages provision for it.

> It's hard to see how they can argue with a straight face that it is accidental

It's another instance of "move fast, break things" (i.e. "keep your eyes shut while breaking the law at scale")

Yes, because all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.

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