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Comment by entropi | Hacker News Reader

>But the new AI training methods are currently, at least imho, not a violation of copyright - not any more than a human eye viewing it (which you've implicitly given permission to do so, by putting it up on the internet).

I don't understand how that matters. I thought that the whole idea of copyright and licences was that the holder of the rights can decide what is ok to do with the content and what is not. If the holder of the rights does not agree to a certain kind of use, what else is there to discuss?

It sure does not matter if I think that downloading a torrent is not any more pirating than borrowing a media from my friend.

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> If the holder of the rights does not agree to a certain kind of use, what else is there to discuss?

the holder of content does not automatically get to prescribe how i would use said content, as long as i comply with the copyrights.

The holder does not get to dictate anything beyond that - for example, i can learn from the content. Or i can berate it. Copyright is not a right that covers every single conceivable use - it is a limited set of uses that have been outlayed in the law.

So the current arguments center on the fact that it is unknown if existing copyright covers the use of said works in ML training.

yeah, it is called _copy_ right. The question is, if AI is making obfuscated copies or not.

interestingly in German it is not called copyright, but Urheberrecht "authors rights". So there the word itself implies more things.

BTW at least in Germany you can own image rights of your art piece or building that is placed in a public place.

Copyright means the holder does automatically get to prescribe how content can be copied. That's literally the definition of copyright.

A typical copyright notice for a book says something like (to paraphrase...) "not to be stored, transmitted, or used by or on any electronic device without explicit permission."

That clearly includes use for training, because you can't train without making a copy, even if the copy is subsequently thrown away.

Any argument about this is trying to redefine copyright as the right to extract the semantic or cultural value of a document. In reality the definition is already clear - no copying of a document by any means for any purpose without explicit permission.

This is even implicitly acknowledged in the CC definitions. CC would be meaningless and pointless without it.

This a particularly extreme interpretation of copyright, and not one that has seen that much support in the courts. You can put what you like in a copyright notice or license, but it doesn't mean it'll succeed, and the courts have generally taken a dim view of any argument which relied on the fact that electronic data is technically copied many times just to make it viewable to a user. Copyright is probably better understood as distribution rights.

(Not saying training will necessarily fall in the same boat, just saying that the view 'copying to a screen or over the internet is necessarily a copy for the purposes of copyright' is reductive to the point of being outright incorrect)

> That clearly includes use for training, because you can't train without making a copy, even if the copy is subsequently thrown away.

a copy for ingestion purposes - such as viewing in a browser, is not the same as a distribution copy that you make sending it to another person.

> the right to extract the semantic or cultural value of a document.

this right does not belong to the author - in fact, this is not an explicit right granted by the copyright act. Therefore, the extraction of information from a works is not something the author can (nor should) control. Otherwise, how would anyone learn off a textbook, music or art?

In the future, when the courts finally decide what the limits of ML training is, may be it will be a new right granted to authors. But it isn't one atm.

> Any argument about this is trying to redefine copyright as the right to extract the semantic or cultural value of a document. In reality the definition is already clear - no copying of a document by any means for any purpose without explicit permission.

I've studied copyright for over 20 years as an amateur, and I used to very much think this way.

And then I started reading court decisions about copyright, and suddenly it became extremely clear that it's a very nuanced discussion about whether or not the document can be copied without explicit permission. There are tons of cases where it's perfectly permissible, even if the copyright holder demands that you request permission.

I've covered this in other posts on Hacker News, but it is still my belief that we will ultimately find AI training to be fair use because it does not materially impact the market for the original work. Perhaps someone could bring a case that makes the case that it does, but courts have yet to see a claim that asserts this in a convincing way based on my reading of the cases over the past couple of years.

I assume the emphasis there is on training, whereas it's totally possible to infringe by running the model in certain ways later.

Agreed! My take is that usages still can infringe if the output produced would otherwise infringe. I would take the fact that you use AI as the particular tool to accomplish the infringement as incidental.

Not quite, it is (at least in the US) a limited privilege to control the copying and reproduction.

If you make a movie poster, and it goes out into the market, and then someone picks it up from a garage sale, copyright still applies, they can't just make tons of duplicates.

But you can't use copyright to force them to display it right side up instead of upside down, to not write on it, to not burn it, and to not make it into a bizarre pseudosexual shrine in their basement.

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