AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was
jasonwillems.com
jasonwillems.com
I don't see any kind of hypocritical stance here honestly. All this time the criticism of the enforcement of copyright law or now the lack of it just reflects the fact that some people are genuinely concerned that bad actors(big corps) are using the law to damage society in order to pursue their own interests.
"But you just said that an individual should be able to use copyrighted works. Therefore you should have no qualms with a legal individual (corp) utilizing every copyrighted work in the world to destroy society, as nothing they are doing is illegal under your rubric."
The reality is most humans operate from a more natural and intuitive sense. A single artist who made a song shouldn't be destroyed by the big corp that is stealing it for their own profit (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon). But its hard to interpret this in the strict legalist sense, because in the US, law is setup to make corps/people, money/speech, art/product, all hard to distinguish, and generally doesn't give much affordance to "what the law reasonably meant" when challenged by corporations (but it does seem to be applied quite conservatively for individuals).
For example, data protection laws tend to be applied quite loosely to corps with slaps on the wrist and stern words. For individuals, accessing data you shouldn't can mean the rest of your life in prison. People feel this is unfair, but the legalists will use a bunch of reasoning to excuse the clear immorality.
Its definitely "using the intellect and words to override correct human moral intuitions."
That's why big corporations can both use copyright against smaller companies and individual creators, while also ignoring the same copyright laws when it suits them.
I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy because it undermines the stability of the whole system upon which their wealth depends.
To be fair, I don't think "the big boys" are so actively malicious to be seeking "to cut off the middle class." I think they push for "ML, LLM, AI" because they've made investments and see dollar signs, and they just don't care about about who is harmed or what kind of damage they do. There might also be an element of seeing the bad outcome as inevitable, and selfishly focusing on ending up on top after all the disruption vs trying to prevent or mitigate it.
Don't get me wrong, that's a terrible attitude and those are awful people. They get no points for merely not being a cartoon villain. But I think it's important to understand the situation correctly if anything's to be done about it.
The fact to keep in mind is that, despite what the name might suggest, copyleft is not at odds with copyright! The core feature of copyright is having a degree of control over what you have authored, and copyleft is ingeniously using copyright to prevent corporations from just taking open code, volunteer contributions, and modifying and using it for profit without giving anything back to the community.
Death of copyright would be the death of copyleft.
There are just companies big enough to ignore those institutions for which copyright law was created, like Google, etc, and the fair use exceptions Google carved out empowered AI companies to make similar moves. To an extent.
What's hurting artists and smaller companies and various licensing schemes intended to push back is the fundamental structure of the laws.
All copyrights need to be nuked and replaced. If we want to support individuals and maximize protections of individuals, and we want to disincentivize data hoarders that do nothing but recycle old content and IP in perpetual rent-seeking schemes, we should implement a 5 year copyright system.
The first 5 years, you get total copyright, any commercial use has to be licensed explicitly, fair use remains largely as it is now. From year 6-10, fair use gets extended - you have to credit the creator, pay a 15% royalty direct to the creator, but otherwise you can use it for anything. Year 10-20, you must credit the creator, but otherwise the media is in the public domain.
We should be pushing for and incentivizing creative use of data, empowering as many people as possible to use it and riff on it and make the culture vibrant and active and free from centralizing, manipulative actors.
99% of commercial profits come from the first 5 years after any piece of media gets published - book, music, film, artwork, etc. Copyright should protect that, but after that 5 years, things open up so the price you pay in order to participate in the marketplace which the US fosters is that your content thereafter becomes available for use by anyone, and they have to pay a fair markup for the use. You don't get to deny anyone the use of the media. You'll get credited, paid, and then after 10 years, it's public domain + mandatory credits, kinda like an MIT license style. After 20 years, it's fully public domain.
Throw in things like "if you're not paid the royalty, you can sue for up to half of the total revenues generated by the offending work" or something appropriately scaled to prohibit casual abuses, but not totally explode someone's life over honest mistakes, and scale between the two extremes accordingly.
Things like Sony and Disney and Hollywood studios are evil. They're effectively data cartels and hoarders, rarely producing anything, gatekeeping access and socializing, imposing obscene contracts on naive artists and creators, exploiting everything and everyone they touch without returning concurrent value to society. They don't deserve consideration or protection under a sane copyright system, especially in a world with gigabit internet everywhere. Screw the MAFIAA and all the people responsible for things ending up like they have.
Until then, pirate everything. If you feel an ethical obligation to pay, then do the research and send some crypto or a $20 bill in the mail to the author or creator. All sorts of people have crypto wallets, these days.
Many songs make far more profits when they are featured in popular movies or TV shows decades or more after their first publication than they do in their first 5 years.
It is also not uncommon for songs released before a future big star becomes a big star to make much money (or even lose money), but when they become big people their early work sells.
Pop culture has to contend with two things that strongly work against its broad memetic power: social media bubbles, and the ease at which someone can scroll or flick up and not give even 1 full second of attention to something they are not immediately in the mood for.
Social media companies make billions per year, they aren't going anywhere. So nothing's going to change any time soon.
So this means trends don't stick the way they used to. The 10 or 20 year pop-culture nostalgia cycle isn't going to be a thing in the next generation.
Oh common. There are few songs like that. Not nearly "many". You are talking about super small subset of songs and humans profiting from these ... and the profiting humans are not even necessary the artists who created these.
Claim not supported. You haven't established that absolutely no one else could create the thing. People create things all the time under such liberal conditions as public domain, so having dictatorial power over a thing is not a necessary condition to create it.
> People create things all the time under such liberal conditions as public domain
And people are free to, even under the duress of copyright. What's the problem there?
What was the last movie you saw?
I assume a free society should operate with the least duress, because duress is "compulsion by threat or violence; coercion" which actively restricts activity as opposed to merely ignoring or not participating in it.
If someone would be free to create the thing without copyright duress, it is better even if delayed, because it was done with the least restriction of freedom.
The last movie I saw was Disney's Frozen which is based on a Hans Christen Andersen story currently in the public domain. It was good, but not "life of the author + 75 years" good.
>If someone would be free to create the thing without copyright duress, it is better even if delayed, because it was done with the least restriction of freedom.
Who said delayed? I didn't. The alternative isn't Mulholland drive coming out in 2011 instead of 2001, it's it not being made at all.
And it's trivial to opt out of copyright protection, giving your work up to the public domain. I wonder why more authors don't!
My use of duress was ironic and this conversation is not productive.
A lot of things that are copyrighted would have also been created anyway, often by multiple people, because there is an actual need for them to exist or an inherent human drive to create them. We have been creating things, both with practical applications or as art, long before we had copyright. And with the ability to effortlessly copy works at effectively no cost we do (or would) have an ever increasing library of them which reduces the need to encourage even more creation than what would happen anyway, especially when the cost of that encouragement is not only excessive but ends up impeding many creative endeavors.
That's not inherent to copyright, though copyright does grant the author the power to control distribution of its work. Nevertheless, it all eventually becomes public domain.
>A lot of things that are copyrighted would have also been created anyway, often by multiple people, because there is an actual need for them to exist or an inherent human drive to create them.
Such as?
> And with the ability to effortlessly copy works at effectively no cost we do (or would) have an ever increasing library of them which reduces the need to encourage even more creation than what would happen anyway, especially when the cost of that encouragement is not only excessive but ends up impeding many creative endeavors
That's a lot of words but nothing actual. Do you think you'd see David Lynch movies if there was no copyright? What do you think the world today would be like if there was no copyright? Some sort of magical world where authors create for free, without any regard for the finances required to do so? It's a bit ridiculous.
You'd really need to put some numbers on "many" for there to be a substantial observation here, because it could mean any figure in a huge range.
Her position is all artists copy
I do tend to vibe wjth Paley’s views on originality and creativity, though I haven’t kept up with her recently, good reminder!
Last but not least, generating csam and deep fakes porn on social medias and having to see it called free speech
Every day hundreds of links to archive.is are posted[1] to this website to get around paywalls. Technologists built file sharing tools to subvert copyright. It has never been one of the worst crimes imaginable in tech circles.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... (85 instances in the last week)
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ?
I've never met someone who wasn't on Aaron's side on that one.
This rather says something about the people by who you are surrounded. I know quite a lot of people who are on Aaron Swartz side here, for example people who are in academia or those who left academia but are still deeply interested in scientific topics.
This is rather the opinion of the copyright-industrial complex, as Spivak implied in his comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874194) by referring to Hollywood.
The attitude of the tech industry has always been much more vague (example: Google Books), and people from the hacker culture, who often work as programmers, are traditionally rather sceptical of at least the concrete manifestation of the copyright system ("information wants to be free", circumvention of paywalls, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, ...).
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals."
In the last few years, we had Google scanning books, Google threatening to shut down News in Canada rather than pay publishers, LLMs summarizing articles on social platforms, crawlers bypassing paywalls, and so on.
Each time, the industry frames it as their interpretation of the current law, which were usually not written with these specific future use cases in mind.
In my view the current discussion regarding Gen AI is similar.
Big Tech spinelessly folded when they should have just banned news links instead. Google has no obligation to index or link to extortionist news media at all. Watch Murdoch U-turn in ten seconds when no one can find his trash online.
In general, there's far too much compliance with protectionist mandates from corrupt foreign governments. One silver lining of the mostly dark cloud of deglobalisation is the fact that US businesses should no longer care what Australian or Turkish or Russian laws say at all, if they're not in those markets.
In the case of copyright, think of it as anti-current-implementation of copyright rather than anti-copyright. For example, you could oppose the current copyright term, but that doesn't mean you are anti-copyright. Quite the opposite, in fact.
(Not so ironclad that you're wrong not to use it, but I'm a fan of this term, so promulgating)
That's the charitable coloring. Owning concepts or ideas, and trying to police others' use of ideas you """own""" is absurd.
People hate it when copyright law is ignored by corporations to crush people.
This isn't particularly hard to grasp.
Personally I think creatives have an edge as I personally don’t think AI is great at exercising discretion in creativity or design. Which you can see in coding agents their discretion in design is often arbitrary and poor. So I think at least for now that’s still where humans tend to out perform AI
As the article has pointed out, it's not the principle that has changed, but the scale. Lots of things that are tolerable at small scale (e.g. lying, stealing) become disruptive to society at larger scale.
Copyright has been used in the past as a way for corporations to rent-seek and limit innovation. Now it may be the only legal means to stop them from doing that.
Both are copyright infringements, but only the latter is art theft.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."> Copyright Law Was Built for Human Scale
No where in the law it has this kinda scoped limits. It has a time limit and scale doesnt not matter. Scale matter in a way that its gets harder to enforces buts that not the fault of copyright law. If you steal at a big scale, its still stealing.
Yes, but they were found not liable for copying the books they purchased. They were found liable for the books they torrented.
The former is something publishers still want to address
St. Augustine: "an unjust law is no law at all."
John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison: "a law repugnant to the constitution is void."
This is actually a fairly well established principle in common law. So, yes.
Yes.
That is not how the separation of power is supposed to work. If a law is bad, politics (preferably a democratic process representing the people) replaces the law with a better one. Until the new law comes into effect, everyone is supposed to abide by the old law, even if it's bad.
As they say: democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone.
Laws usually don't describe the bigger societal context in which they were conceived.
I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy because it undermines the stability of the whole system upon which their wealth depends.
It claims that people using AI to create works that violate copyright is equivalent to individual artists painting pictures or people writing fan fiction. But that is not at all what is happening.
OpenAI and others are taking money from customers to generate copyrighted works. That's back-letter copyright infringement.
The states that it is unreasonable to go after all the individual customers. That's true, but that's not how copyright law has ever been enforced. If you have a company selling copyrighted works without permission, you go after that company not after their customers.
If even WWII-era documents are still under copyright, building a model respecting that would be impossible.
"We can't do this legally, so we should be allowed to ignore the law."
If you can't build a model while respecting licenses, don't build a model.
I don't want copyright to exist, at any duration, and I certainly think it should be much shorter than it is. However, as long as it exists, AI should not get any exception to it; such an exception inherently privileges massive entities over small entities or individuals.
I don't see how building such a model of historical documents would impact authors (which most of them are dead anyways).
Then change the law. For everyone, consistently, not just massive AI companies. Until then, deal with it.
> I don't see how building such a model of historical documents would impact the authors
It impacts the authors of new documents, who do not get to copy those historical documents, while an AI competing with them gets to. If you want those historical documents to be freely available, make copyright stop applying to them. For everyone, not just massive AI companies.
I have a feeling that they are going to fare better odds, the world runs on money.
You could create some great masterpiece at 18 and live off of it until you are 62 and starting to take social security payments.
That excess exists precisely because of the industry’s clout. For decades, rightsholders successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright term again and again. That process appears to have finally plateaued, which is why early Mickey Mouse has now entered the public domain.
And notably, since the rise of AI, the government has not been especially quick or eager to step in and defend rightsholders.
Hopefully, future legislation will cater less to publishers and copyright trolls. I'm not optimistic though. While certain kinds of publishers are indeed becoming less powerful, sports-related media conglomerates are successfully lobbying for more surveillance.
The general population will likely get the worst of both worlds, with copyright trolls getting to enforce unjust laws against regular people, while big tech gets to pay their way out.
At a human scale, those boundaries get clarified through litigation on a case by case basis once an infringement becomes large or obvious enough. But there has always been a gray area around when a derivative work crosses the line into infringement.
And AI didn’t create that ambiguity, it just pushed it to a more extreme scale
The way I see it, the original problem, which stands the test of time, is when copies are made and/or sold by somebody who is taking credit for the original work without giving credit to the actual creator.
Anything less needs to be much more realistically reflected as very minor by comparison.
Copyright was founded on similar principles to property rights, it encourages desirable economic by ensuring investment in RnD doesn’t have a free-rider disincentive. Whether it’s the right tool for the job and how enforcement carries out its a another matter. While these laws for property and IP aren’t without issues they do address actual problems.
Personally I would be more open to the idea of open AI flouting copy rights if they weren’t planning on taking a portion of the claim of other peoples creations used via the product while failing to properly compensate the sources of its training data.
The problem is that AIs don't have rights. So you literally can't treat it the same.
If I "make" something in a way I'm not allowed to (e.g. copying), the law will go after me. If AI makes something I'm not allowed to, I can just say "whoopsie doodle", blame the AI, and there are no repercussions for anyone.
"I twist the truth, i rule the world"...
Tell this to kids raided by BSA for downloading pirated Microsoft and Adobe programms.
It never made sense to me that just because you drew a shitty picture of a mouse, somehow I’m no longer allowed to do that.
Is this even true? It might violate a trademark, but I don't think it would violate copyright law unless it was a copy of an existing picture.
For example, if you rent a movie, you can watch it with your family. Nobody is going to sue you for distributing the movie with 5 people in your room. That's pure nonsense. Same with music, books, etc.
If you try to play the movie in an establishment with dozens of people, then it can become a problem, because you're essentially a theater now.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know what the law is on selling fan art on a convention or even privately commissioned fan artwork. But things aren't as draconian as people assume it is.
So if you draw sonic in your living room you are indeed creating an unauthorised derivative work. And someone can call it an unauthorised derivative work. And the only reaction that should induce is raising an eyebrow and replying “ok?”
Fixed that for you.
Money, money broke copyright.
Remember the DMCA?