Might is irrelevant and doesn't prevent any abuse, nor does it foster innovative environment. Both the EU and the US, need to pick a side. Either they should make it illegal and establish precedent, or just let go.
At that point we just wait for the next Chinese open source model.
Big Tech is the US' golden goose in the race against China. Deepseek shows China is at the doorstep, much closer and more capable than previously assumed. Any thoughts politically about how we can simultaneously crack down on Big Tech, while keeping China in check with sanctions, just went out the window.
"China's not going to respect those laws" is kinda beside the point. If they suddenly decided to cut everyone in the nation's pay in half - or double it - that would have no bearing on what is right for you or I to do.
They literally did exactly that relative to the salaries of the rest of the world, and everyone took them up on it.
In retrospect, keeping China a weak communist nation was so easy. There was even internal dissent in the late 80s. It simply required refusing to make trade deals. US and worldwide wages would have been higher, discontent would have continued fermenting, the party would have remained relatively weak, human rights would not have been so easily sold out to the lowest bidder, the US would probably not have lost 6 million manufacturing jobs in a decade (3x the number of jobs in SV), and we blew it.
This is extremely naive, and fallacious.
As policymaker, you do not know beforehand how countries are going to develop over a 40 year period (not even your own country :P). Thus the only realistic option would've been a catch-all sanction regime against... possible future geopolitical rivals? Non-democratic nations? States with different cultural values? No matter which you pick, sacrificing trade like that would've been extremely expensive and limiting for US growth (might've included India, Africa, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Europe, Russia, depending on what criteria you pick).
You might have seen other countries jumping at the opportunity, filling the gap and benefitting immensely in the process, like the EU, or India, Russia, Japan, some pan-African Union... The only certainty in the outcome is that the US in such a scenario would NOT be as wealthy as it is today.
"when you're used to privilege, the loss of it feels like oppression"
It will hurt to fix this, but I don't think it needs to hurt that much I think it would hurt a lot less if we were actually trying to make it happen rather than occasionally being dragged kicking and screaming in that direction.
(i do not have any meaningful ideas how to bring about this kind of change, (maybe a fake giant squid alien in manhattan? :P))
Now we have to pivot and focus on containment in Cold War II.
OpenAI is talking about spending half a trillion US dollars, they have the money to license data.
In music, there is compulsory licensing and companies that use recorded music are able to make the economics work.
It needs to be repeated that these are not simply "tokens", they are the product of millions of individual people that are being appropriated for the financial gain of a very few other people.
Can't. Even if someone has the money (I truly doubt), you can't contact millions of copyright owners (as you report).
I'm in support of them being able to do it, but the right avenue is by working and lobbying hard to change antiquated copyright laws. Being able to disregard copyright only if you have enough billions of dollars on hand is the worst outcome. It's literally laws that only apply to the poor.
I'm sure you already see the folly of that argument.
Anyhow, flowing on, the allegedly totally inefficient governments of this world routinely contact millions and millions of legal entities, and many of them are poorer than Microsoft, Google, or even OpenAI, yet they somehow manage. So it seems to be practical.
Of course, that does not answer the cost thing, we all know governments just print more fiat money...
So we have been told that IP is indeed property and the property owner has a right to compensation for use. Nobody ever told me that I just have to be blatant enough to be scot-free. And I guess Sony, Warner Bros., Atlantic et. al. didn't get the memo either, or why would they sue a single university student for 4.5 million dollars? [1] This seemed and was much too much for a single university student to pay. So "too expensive" is off the table, too. Weird world.
[1] the Tenenbaum case. Tenenbaum was lucky but still broke afterwards.
There is currently no law that states it is illegal to train a model on copyrighted work.
Contacting millions of people is something many businesses on earth do.
If these companies are already engaged in trying do do something that quite literally can't be done (again, as far as can be proven today), it's not out of line to ask them to at least try to do something that many other companies actually do in practice (pay lots of people).
It's important to be very clear that this is something that could be done, but that the AI companies do not want to even try to do.
- companies being allowed to spin fairy tales about their products' capabilities
- no real consequences to enabling scammers, copyright thieves, and misinformation factories
That stuff might be good for securing short-term investment - and it befits a society obsessed with cryptocurrency and sports gambling. But it doesn't seem good for building meaningfully smarter computers, just dumber computer users.