The entire premise is stupid. No theft occurred at any point, the original authors still have their creations.
In which case, the following is not theft:
- Pirating anything that is digital video
- Pirating anything that is digital audio
- Pirating anything that is digital text
- Pirating any software
etc.
EDIT: For the proponents of "it is not theft", what's your stance on personal data being stolen ("accessed")? If someone can access your medical records, are you fine with that? They can do whatever they want with that?
The author is a photojournalist, not a lawyer, and not qualified to comment on copyright law beyond simply giving his personal opinion.
Otherwise, we maybe can agree that people who make something should be eligible for some kind of compensation to encourage them to continue making, for our shared benefit.
You can argue that Beyoncé and George Clooney and Stephen King are so rich already they don’t need the money anyway, but that omits how even these people had to make a career from the bottom up on the sole premise that their focus on their art (regardless of your opinion on it) will pay the bills.
So just saying piracy isn’t theft and thus isn’t a problem is a wholly undercooked answer to a difficult problem.
The end result however is that someone gets something for free that they otherwise would have to pay for, similar to sneaking on a train or into a concert. In these cases, I don’t think many people would argue that what you’re doing isn’t wrong, or meaningfully different from theft; safe for lawyers of course, but I fail to see why the quibbling is relevant for normal people.
Plus, open source code gets mostly written by people with a stable and well-paid day job. Take that away, and I doubt there’s much open source code left.
Open source only looks better here because it has a different cultural context. But to a person trying to make money in the field, I'm not sure why that should matter.
Right. It's the debunked, bad-faith argument that "piracy is theft" because the pirates would have bought a movie were it not for The Pirate Bay, to justify calculating monetary damages that are completely unmoored from reality. We shouldn’t let people revive this nonsense, even in the context of AI.
It would be nice if the world used clinical terms to describe what's actually going on instead of using emotional terms to equate "copying" to "stealing" or "pirating", but people would rather confuse the issue than argue it logically in good faith.
Because that’s what you’re saying and it’s certainly…a point of view.
No, because you did not use any of their intellectual property in doing so.
You are conveniently ignoring the fact that A is taking something for which B did actual work.
A song is IP. A car is not technically IP but merchandise is involved so I’d say that counts. A movie is IP. A game is most certainly IP.
By your opinion, observing that game before making my own “infringes” their IP. And same for the song. And by that test, watching a movie at a friend’s is piracy, and borrowing a friends car is robbing the car manufacturer of profits.
It really seems to fall apart if you simply place a black box over the “who” of creating something completely different, seemingly based solely on our biological memory not being digital.
It is, actually, more of a problem than theft of physical items. The latter you can just buy again while the former robs you of intangible values that among other things may grant you the ability to just buy physical property. The latter doesn’t scale and is generally more difficult because it’s more visible, while the former can be (and is being, in fact) done at population scale without people realizing it until it’s too late. Also, expectation of ownership claim is a meta level of why people want to make more original things, including new and cool physical items.
What happens is you just copy and/or modify something. Kinda like duplicating money, it's not theft since you don't steal from anybody, no ownership or similar changes.
Imagine we discovered a way to generate almost unlimited energy for very cheap, then we told poor people if they want any they have to pay it at the same price per kilowatt hour as current energy or it's stealing. It would be morally wrong. Digital content is the same, current copyright laws are unethical.
I can see where you’re coming from on a philosophical level. On a practical level that’s just asking for malware, especially for software that’s been cracked. I would tell people the opposite.
England has a whole bunch of legislation to prohibit activities that are not theft because it turns out that sometimes we care about other things. TWOC is an example, "Taking Without Owners Consent", because it turns out that it's also very annoying to have people take your car and then drive it somewhere and abandon it for a laugh ("Joy riding"), compared to them say, stealing it to ship abroad, break into parts or just to set it on fire.
Insisting that it's all theft gets us in the same muddle as when we decide that holding up a protest sign is terrorism, or that a billion dollar bribe is speech.
Actually, IP theft is more of a problem than theft of physical property. The latter you can just buy again while the former robs you of intangible values that among other things may grant you the ability to just buy physical property. The latter doesn’t scale and is generally more difficult because it’s more visible, while the former can be (and is being, in fact) done at population scale without people realizing it until it’s too late.
Do you remember when there was smoking on aeroplanes? The little glowing sigil telling you not to smoke would go out at cruise altitude and then you could fill the already inadequate and stale air with smoke. Who thought that was a good idea? Well, a lot of the same people who thought Copyright was great. Maybe all the lead damaged their brains?
Does any of this somehow mean what the LLM companies are doing is good? No. But we can't understand what's happening if we insist on giving it the wrong name. Russia is not in Ukraine to undo nazification, the babies Israel is starving aren't terrorists. "But I want to use this word" doesn't make it the correct word.
Now you’re getting it. Keep going, you’re almost there.
Yes. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”
If I steal your ID card, then nothing really happens at all. I can spend years watching it, draw something on it, cut it in pieces, whatever.
The moment I start trying to impersonate you, then it becomes a problem for you.
If Bobby the metalhead downloads a copy of Enter the Sandman, then Metallica and brand doesn’t lose anything at all. If you were to make it industrial, then maybe we can talk about it.
The difference is subtle, but potentially important. If the bank unfortunately gives money to someone else, that's their problem: I can say to the bank, I'm sorry you were the victim of fraud, but you still owe me my money. If I unfortunately "have my identity stolen", then that makes it seem like it's my problem -- the bank may say, we're sorry you "had your identity stolen" and thus lost your money, but that's not really our problem.
This should be called "identity validation failure".
When scammers impersonate a company to steal your money it's no longer called identity theft.
(Mitchell & Webb Sound - Identity Theft)
What?! How would that even happen? Unless you limit your definition of art to performing at salon events, that doesn't make much sense. Typically art is released into the world and at best the authors can get a bit of rent from the people who consume it (typically via a publisher), but they don't have any control over who the consumers would be.
I decide if I am going to go with a publisher, which publisher and what platforms.
What you label as "typically" has only been the case for the past ≈15 years.
Staying with your example of music or book authors - a musician or author might choose which distribution platforms they work with, but they don't have the ability to tell a particular shop to not resell their record/book, let alone to tell a particular "consumer" not to listen to it / read it.
That word "illegally" is carrying some weight there. You only get to have those rules in law because the rest of us agreed to them in some sense. And in this particular case, the laws were created by powerful and wealthy media industries bribing politicians.
There's not some universal truth about fairness here. It's just a set of conventions where people with guns show up and lock you in prison if you bypass someone else seeking rent.
If you spend months crafting something unique with your livelihood being based on then selling access to that creation ( whether it be music, software or prose ) and somebody copies it in a way that deprives you of a livelihood ( and replaces it with a revenue to the entity that copied it's ) - it's that theft of your income stream?
It's the difference between you writing a piece of competing software and taking my market share, versus you stealing my software and selling it as your own.
Or you attempting to write a competing best seller versus copying mine wholesale and selling under your own name on Amazon.
One activity is ultimately creative destruction that pushes society forward - the other is simply destructive free riding.
ie theft involves no creation of value.
Now the situation with tech companies is that there is theft, but also value add ( like somebody stealing your book and putting a better cover on it online ).
Just because there is some value add doesn't forgive the theft.
Regardless, you really should learn the difference between "theft", "copyright violation", and "training", because they are different things.
If I read a bunch of books, learn from the authors' use of word phrasing, then pick one of Vonnegut's 8 Story Shapes, and make a book in some author's style, it's not illegal. I don't see why I can't have a computer do that for me.
None of this really matters. If you feel strongly about it, you should go bribe congress to make a law. Because the existing laws about theft and copyright don't cover "learning from billions of examples and interpolating or extrapolating from them".
In terms of the substance - bottom line they have taken something without permission and sold it on. Sure - they have added value in the process - but if I steal your car and mash it up with another one before selling it on - it's still theft.
The original post was implying there was no harm as a result because it's just copying - the original owner was not deprived of anything.
My point was they are potentially being deprived of a living - and that's through stuff being taken without permission - not through fair competition.
What matters here is not the semnatics of theft or copyright or whatever - what matters is fairness - and I accept that's a judgement.
I don't see a problem with these companies having to either pay to incorporate material into their models or/and the authors having the right to refuse to license.
Note - that's not to stand in the way of the development of these tools, but to ensure that the effort that went in to creating them ( which includes the generation of the source material ) is properly rewarded.
If OpenAI etc al think creation is a trivial part and it doesn't need rewarding - they are free to bootstrap their models by creating all the inputs from scratch.
They haven't lost anything - just took a copy.....
Are they going to stand in the way of me making the output of chatgpt more widely available through my cheaper pricing?????
And note I'm selling access to the output - which is different everytime ( I use a different random number seed from them ) - so I'm not selling the copy of model per se...... perfectly fair use....
There are laws about copyright and trade secret.
> They haven't lost anything - just took a copy.....
Correct. This is why it's a copyright violation and not a theft.
> [...] fair use....
Fair use is also a legal term, and it has some (reasonably) specific meanings. It's noteworthy that the large copyright protection industries don't respect those terms and have automated DMCA takedowns to abuse people for things which age legal:
"the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
But is it? Copying the OpenAI model is only potentially copyright - as you have to prove it's not exempt via fair use etc. Note I'm not selling it on - I'm just selling the output - which isn't soley determined by the model - it's determined by the model plus random numbers plus context - what I'm selling is only partly determined by the source model I copied.
Now if I copied it and used it to undercut your original buisness - then clearly that's not fair use - but that's rather my point no?
These companies have clearly copied source material without permission on a huge scale - but because it's copying and the people haven't lost the original - there is in effect another test - do the original people lose out as result etc.
It's quite clear - say in the news industry which might be supported by advertising - that copying content and then presenting a summary version so that people never visit the source material is clearly damaging the underlying copyright holders.
I think you might have added the copying bit, and that changed its meaning if not the whole topic. Then you claim I'm confusing competition with theft instead of addressing the "right to a living" part. That's kind of insincere and dishonest on your part, but fine, this other topic is interesting to me too.
I have no idea whether OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, or any other company got valid licenses for all of the books they trained on. If they didn't, they likely broke some specific laws. Go after them for that if you want. This is copyright violation, not theft.
But if I legally obtain a hundred books and pay a really smart kid to read them all to learn their style, then I pay that kid to write a new book using the style he's learned, that all seems fair and legal to me. It's the way things have been for a very long time.
For any argument you're going to make about this, please imagine a really smart kid doing it instead of a computer. And if you think there should be different laws for computers vs really smart kids, go get it into legislature.
Ad hominem attack - great.
> This is copyright violation, not theft.
I'm arguing it's copyright violation because it's theft of revenue. If it didn't result in any loss of revenue then it would hard to argue it wasn't fair use.
Note I'm not using theft in any special legal sense - just in the common sense English sense.
If 'learning their style' included incoporating large recognisable chunks - that smart kid would fail his English degree on plagarism grounds.....
The point about LLM's is they an do everything - from an unrecognisable 'original' mashup - to what are quite clearly regurgations of the input. Note also that the kid didn't steal the books he learnt from.....
The question is what's happening fair and good for society, not what is convenient for some very well funded companies in a hurry who see existing laws as annoying things getting in their way, rather than something to respect.
No, it was not. You moved the goal posts from artists deserving a livelihood to copyright issues, and I called you out for that.
> Note also that the kid didn't steal the books he learnt from.....
I should note this? I explicitly stated it as part of the hypothetical.
As I said above, there are already laws about copying. If you're sure they broke those laws, maybe you should criticize the powers that be for not enforcing them.
> The question is what's happening fair and good for society
I think this is a good question.
Personally, I think the benefit from having automated tutors that are attentive and patient and can answer questions about almost any topic known to man dwarfs the benefit from defending intellectual property. I hope they get cheap enough to be accessible to every person who can't afford a traditional education and accurate enough that we trust them more than typical teachers (not a high bar, unfortunately).
I donated to Wikipedia for years specifically because of its educational value while being freely available. Watching people I know learn from LLMs, and do useful interesting things with what they learned, I think the potential is much higher.
Nope. I never said artistic's deserve a living - I said that people deserve protection from their living being stolen via copyright violation. You are confusing what I said, to what you mistakenly understood. I don't understand why your original misunderstanding is somehow a character flaw of mine.
Why is it one or the other? Your argument is like saying we shouldn't pay nurses a fair wage because it get's in the way of great care for everyone.
It's not an either/or situation - it's how you allocate rewards for the different contributions to the new tech. Currently tech companies are saying there is zero value in that training data - that's clearly not the case.
I think I finally understand your misunderstanding - I'm not arguing AI should be banned as it destroys a musicians job because in the future all music will be AI generated. That's not my concern - I'm not saying anyone deserves a job in perpetuity.
My point is simply that in building the models they have to respect the current laws - and that means respecting the content owners rights and either paying what they ask or not using it.
Because that's how it works in reality. Once the copyright holders get their teeth in something, it gets paywalled. For instance, poor people don't have (free/legal/easy) access to lots of research papers/articles which were paid for with government grants. And copyright industry associations (MPAA, RIAA, CCC, AAP, ...) lobby to extend the laws so that creative works take lifetimes to enter the public domain.
You think you're arguing in favor of the little guy who made a series of blog posts or digital art? That's naive.
> My point is simply that in building the models they have to respect the current laws
So go enforce those laws. The rent seekers will thank you.
Seems you have bought into the idea idea that companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft are the poor little guys. Wow.
What we are talking about here is certain companies trying to gain a defacto monopoly on the sum of human knowledge - without paying any of those people who built it in the first place.
This is the real story.
Now it may well be their moat isn't as big as they thought it was and the greedy investors trying to do this heist will fail - but that's what they are attempting - and you are cheer leading for it.
This argument strategy, where you make a strained analogy/metaphor, and then apply it back to the original topic - it's fragile and depends on how comparable the two ideas are. If you're just interested in winning discussions, it's a bad tactic because it opens up a whole new avenue for your opponent to attack.
Can I COPY nurses into equally valuable robots? Because if I can, then yeah - the world would be a MUCH better place with abundant and affordable nurse robots, and the human nurses can go find other jobs. I have some friends who are nurses, and after watching them fight with the medical system for their own health issues, I'm pretty sure they'd agree.
Admit it - you misunderstood my original point and accused me of then changing the argument.
Bottom line - the original poster was implying there was no harm because simple copying doesn't create a loss. I was pointing out that a key test ( in considering copyright issues ) is whether such an action causing harm - and in this case there are many very good cases to be made about resulting loss of revenue.
Let's be clear, I think LLMs etc are a huge technical advance - I just think it's wrong to try and ignore the law because it get's in the way of large companies attempts to make money.
I've tried (and occasionally failed) to avoid the parts of what you wrote which were just the typical flame war bait. And of course I'm guilty of trying to antagonize you in a few places. The topic is interesting, but our conversation about it was not.
I appreciate the link to the UK law, but the rest of this comment thread is mostly two people talking past each other.
Here are the UK exceptions to copyright.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright
Note how there is an exception for automatic processing - but only for non-commerial use and note the researchers still have to pay for access.
There is also a 'fair dealing' clause.
The key clause here is:
"does using the work affect the market for the original work?"
Content creators are strongly asserting that what these tech companies is doing does.
Also "s the amount of the work taken reasonable and appropriate? Was it necessary to use the amount that was taken? Usually only part of a work may be used"
Obviously the entire works are being consumed.
> Because the existing laws about theft and copyright don't cover "learning from billions of examples and interpolating or extrapolating from them".
Laws are written in a way where they attempt to predict the future - they are written from a first pirnciples approach - such as the fair dealing clause above - so your claim that it doesn't explicitly ban it is a red herring.
I assumed you were in the US, where companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are located. If they're breaking UK laws, you should appeal to your government to enforce those laws in your territory, or ban access to them, or whatever you think is relevant.
> [...] so your claim that it doesn't explicitly ban it is a red herring.
Why should I care about your laws any more than any other country I don't live in?
ie what matters - both in interpreting todays laws and if they are insufficiently clear, drafting future amendments - is why the law was created in the first place.
The UK law is well drafted and makes it very clear that the aim of copyright is not to stop you copying something per se - but to copying something for commercial gain that is simultaneously damages the copyright owner. I suspect those principals are the same the world over - whatever the exact drafting.
So the question you have to address is do the actions of the AI companies fit these critieria.
Are they copying copyright material without permission - tick.
Are they making money as a result ( it's a commercial operation ) - tick.
Are they damaging the original copyright holders in the process - this is the only one remotely in doubt - but I'd argue it's pretty clearly a tick in many areas - bit bit less clear in others.
In terms of lobbying - it's the big tech companies that are currently trying to get the law changed in the UK - to make what they have done legal ( while stil arguing they haven't done anything wrong..... as laws are not typically changed retrospectively ).
From what I read, I agree. However, UK law isn't very relevant to the matter. It's a small market among many that doesn't create the models or much of the content to train them.
By the way, once the UK ruled large part of the world - including the US - but that empire wasn't sustainable for a small country as the other countries caught up in terms of development.
The US is currently facing that issue, and I have to say, not dealing with it very well. The US is going to need friends on the way down and right now all it's doing is making enemies.
However, the UK might be more relevant if you hadn't withdrawn from the EU. From the outside it sure looks like you guys decided it was more important to keep out the poor people (or other ethnic backgrounds) than to be part of something with actual collective bargaining power.
I see the same forces driving the US now as it undermines international organisations.
[1] and sure xenophobia played a depressingly large part.
I think they're all wrong, but there's no fixing it. Assuming there are no civil or world wars in the near future that radically change the trajectory, China will rise and the US will end up lower on the ladder.
> nostalgia for when Britain was indeed Great
I'm sure you didn't intend it, but that capital G sure sounds a lot like the slogan for a US political party.
Several reasons:
1) The cat is out of the bag, AI is a thing now. It's not going back in the bag. So, artists are going to have to adapt to that. And are already adapting.
2) AI affecting artists is not any different than photography wiping out the market for portrait painters. Or records wiping out the market for selling music in paper form so that professional musicians might reproduce that for an audience. Those things happened a long time ago of course and any copyright issues around that were resolved over time. Copyright law hasn't really changed much since before that happened. These are the same kind of questions that exists for AIs being obviously inspired by but not really perfectly copying songs, images, text, etc. And they have answers in many decades of case law. Judges are going to take all of that into account and are historically reluctant to introduce new interpretations.
3) AI companies are big enough to outright buy the larger copyright holders. That doesn't mean they will; but it suggests they might reach some settlement that doesn't involve pleading guilty in a court. In the end this is about money, not about principles. At least not for the parties paying the lawyers.
4) If a settlement doesn't happen, judges will be forced to look at existing cases to assess what is and isn't an infringement. And if you remove all the outrage and moralism from the equation (which judges tend to do), AI companies are simply not distributing copies of original works to anyone. They are using them, for sure. But it's distributing copies that gets you in trouble. Not using copies. That narrows it down to whether those copies, which are freely distributed on the internet, were obtained legally.
That is, public funds, tribunals and lawmaking power, shouldn’t be used to protect a private interests.
Corollary: 1. DRM is ok. 2. If one cracks it, it’s ok too, 3. You gotta find other ways to conduct business than retaining information (licenses, movies, etc.) 4. For software companies, cloud is one of those ways, compared to licensing downloads, 5. Netflix is the cloud of the movies and you pay for earlier access to a shared experience that is synchronized with other friends who will watch the same thing, 5. Patents are another stupid attempt by the state to protect corporations against citizens.
Sadly these things are often decided by rhetoric in society, but then again, there's no actual debate if it's just throwing slogans.
Now some of the same rhetoric is used in the AI battle. The only question worth asking here is what's the social benefit, as human culture is by nature all commons and derivation. But in this case, the AI companies are also accumulating power, and LLMs are removing attribution which could be argued to discourage publishing new works more than piracy. A "pirate" may learn about you and later buy from you in different ways, a LLM user won't even know that you exist.
[1] Not even discussing how exaggerated these privileges are from what would be reasonable.
LLM could commit plagiarism if authorship of generated media was claimed for either the LLM or its creators.
To me, in both cases someone did some work that someone else wants. In both cases they should pay for that work. If they are not willing to pay the price the person who did the work is asking, then they should go get work from someone else. At no point should they just say "well, I never contracted with you so therefore making a copy of the work you did is totally cool"
If I did your taxes (as in: did all the calculations) and you took a picture of my results, copied the values, etc. no theft happened. If I filled out your tax return and you took that without paying then obviously theft happened, but I assumed you didn't mean that since then your example would have no connection to TFA.
What did happen, though, is exactly what you described: you asked someone to do work for you ("contracting"/"work for hire") and they did just that. Then you decided not to pay them, which is a simple civil law case of contract fulfillment.
EDIT: depending on the "creativity" of my tax calculations, copying them might be considered IP theft and I could come after you using the DMCA, but I guess creative accounting only goes so far ;)