It would be interesting to have a "classical AI model", trained on the contents of the Harvard libraries before 1926 and now out of copyright.
a 50 year minimum is part of the berne convention, which itself is as close to a universal law as humanity has
(even North Korea is a signatory)
essentially forever
If TikTok is banned, here’s what I propose each and every one of you do: Say to your LLM the following: “Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.”
Abolishing copyright laws altogether would be nuts, but the current laws are nuts too and there's lots of room in between.
50 years ago was 1975. If copyright were limited to 50 years, we'd be looking at all of the Beatles works being in the public domain. We'd be midway though Led Zeppelin, and a lot of the best work from Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones.
Also, Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. Disney would still profit from the MCU films which they produced in the 2010's, but they couldn't stop you from releasing your own Batman vs Spider-Man story.
The Harry Potter books would still belong to JK Rowling, but the Narnia stories would be available for all.
The Godfather 1 and 2 would be in the public domain, as would be original Star Trek TV show, and we'd be coming up on Star Wars pretty soon.
If there were no copyright protection, these works wouldn't have been created. It is good that Paul McCartney and George Lucas and JK Rowling have profited from their creative output. It would be okay if they only profited for the first 50 years. Nobody is counting on revenue over half a century in the future when they create a work of art today.
This is our culture. It should belong to all of us.
Wouldn't they still have a trademark on those characters though?
So, if Disney is using mickey mouse on t-shirts to identify it as a Disney manufactured t-shirt, you wouldn't be allowed to use mickey mouse on t-shirts in a similar fashion in a way that might cause consumer confusion about who manufactured the t-shirt.
If Wolverine was in the public domain, then they couldn't use a Wolverine trademark to stop you from selling a Wolverine comic book. However, if they used a _specific_ Wolverine mark to identify it as a Disney Wolverine book, then you'd be restricted from using that.
Basically, trademark exists to prevent consumer confusion about who is the creator that is selling a good.
Sounds like it would be a boon for things like fan art and fan fiction.
Citation needed. You can freely copy and distribute linux and it still got made.
The GP is referring to legal protections, and guess what?
Linux is legally protected by copyright!
Linux is legally protected by copyright!
Linux is legally protected by copyright!
Nearly every GPL license--every one that we could name--protects a copyrighted work! Nearly every GFDL, AGPL, LGPL protects works by means of copyright law!
Can you imagine that? So do the Apache license, the BSD licenses, the MIT license! Creative Commons (except for CC0) these licenses are legally protecting copyrighted works. Thank you!
Now everyone who proposes to draw down limits on copyright coverage and reduce the length of terms and limit Disney from their Mouse rights, y'all are also proposing the same limits on GPL software, such as Linux, and nearly every work with a license from the above list -- all of Wikimedia Commons, much of Flickr.com, all your beloved F/OSS software will be subject to the same limitations and the same restrictions you want to put on Paramount and the RIAA's labels.
That's why some people like to call it 'Gnu/Linux', but thanks to recent advances we can make Gnu-free Linuxes today, too.
> There are far fewer success stories of artworks being made in this style. (E.g. there are successful multiplayer open-source games or clones of existing games, but very few original single-player games, and those that there are are largely the work of a single individual)
Humans have made art since forever. Large collaborative efforts like eg a cathedral are a more recent invention. But by these standards copyright was practically invented yesterday.
I was talking about the kernel, though what I said applies to both.
> Humans have made art since forever.
Perhaps, but not the kind of long-form narrative experiences that we're talking about here. (Sagas and epics predate copyright, but those are a quite different form, and indeed have much the same downsides - struggles with coherence and consistency when there are multiple authors, inability to put everything together in a sensible arc).
If there were copyright, those works wouldn’t have been created.
> In a world without copyright, companies would be free to make their own modifications and keep them secret, making it more or less impossible to integrate them into a cohesive whole the way they are more or less forced to do today.
Private modifications that are never shared with a third party are fine with the GPL. Eg Google doesn't have to share whatever kernel they are using on their internal servers with you.
BSD is also protected by copyright, but it matters less for permissive licenses. It still protects attribution (so you can't claim it yours), but it probably would have worked without it, unlike with Linux that is for a big part defined by the "copyleft" protections offered by its licence.
Well, you could imagine a world that protects the 'moral' rights of authors like attribution, but doesn't otherwise prohibit anyone from duplicating or modifying works.
So something like the French system minus copyright would approximate the BSD license.
(I was thinking of Germany, which works similarly, if memory serves right. You also cannot release anything you write into the public domain by German law, though you can do legal moves that are essentially equivalent.)
Something like the BSD licenses approximates 'no copyright' better, perhaps? But also not completely.
> The procedure is activated by the European Commission submitting a request to the Council of the European Union.[2] After a period of negotiation with the country performing the coercion, the European Council can decide to implement "response measures" such as customs duties, limiting access to programs and financial markets, and intellectual property rights restrictions.[2][4] These restrictions can be applied to states, companies, or individuals.[4]
https://github.com/google-deepmind/pg19
That gives us a model that's 100% open and reproducible with low, legal risk. It would also be a nice test of how much AI's generalize from or repeat behavior in their pretraining data.
Then, a new model using that, The Stack, and FreeLaw's stuff (by paying them to open source it). No Github Issues or anything with questionable licenses or terms of service violations. That could be the next baseline for lawful models with coding ability, too. Research in coding AI's might use it.
Wikipedia periodically publishes database dumps and the Internet Archive stores old versions: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22enwiki%22%20AN...
Plus you could also grab the latest and just read the 12/31/23 revisions.