947 karma · joined November 22, 2020
Where this breaks down though is that contributory infringement is a still a thing if you offer a service aids in copyright infringement and you don't do "enough" to stop it.
Ie, it would all be on the end user for folks that self host or rent hardware and run an LLM or Gen Art AI model themselves. But folks that offer a consumer level end to end service like ChatGPT or MidJourney could be on the hook.
And it isn't just businesses who carry this risk. If a business was depending on a large inflow to make payroll, and that inflow gets reversed, the people who are expecting payment for their labor also are subject to a payment reversal.
There's definitely a lot of benefits to reversibility, but it has very real costs and tradeoffs.
What this ruling does mean though is that the government can't prosecute a US person for using TC.
Well, in many places, traditional copper pots is dying faster then the fax machines people still want to use. Fax over VoIP can work, but it makes for a lot of headaches if it doesn't.
That's where zero knowledge proofs come in. If you know the root hash at state a, and the new root hash at state b is given along with a zk proof, that proof data can quickly prove that the state change from a to b was arrived at correctly. In this case, the benefit of doing this on ethereum (or other evm l1 blockchain) is that those proofs can be validated on chain.
> First, a derivative work still has to be “substantially similar” to the original in order to be infringing. If the original is transformed or abridged or adapted to such an extent that this is no longer true, then it’s not a derivative work. A 10-line summary of a 15,000-line epic isn’t a derivative work, and neither are most summaries of books that people make in order to describe those copyrighted works to others.
The statistics generated about the works entered as input, do not resemble the original works. Nor can those statistics on their own reproduce the original work. At most they are brief mathematical summaries of the work. And it's only after combining those stats with the stats of billions of other works (which is its own creative process to determine the best statistical methodologies to achieve that combination) that anything intelligble can be produced in the output stage.
Which is why when the user of the model prompts for something infringing, and is successful at getting close to verbatim output (because the prompt was too constraining, becuase the work is overrepresented in the training) it is that particular output that is infringing. And maybe that means that services operating that prompt/response software are guilty of contributory infringment if they can't adequetly prevent that kind of output.
But that doesn not mean that training the model was infringing. Nor does that mean distribution of the model is infringing. And if a user of the prompt/response software never prompts for anything infringing, and the software never spontaneously recreates anything infringing, there's no infringment happening.
There are lots of technologies out there that are highly capable of enabling infringment at a massive scale. And where the vast majority of their actual usage is absolutely infringing. But we don't completely shut down those technologies that on their own - are not infringing. Bittorrent clients are pefectly legal to develop. And distribute. And people use those clients to commit infringment at large scale. But they are still pefectly legal to write and distrubute.
Is this all terribly unfair to the people that published their work assuming this couldn't happen? Yes. But the response needs to be "lets come up with and pass better law" and not "lets twist and contort the current law to be something it's not."
Figuring out which is which while avoiding getting rekt is not easy, but can be done.
Where infringement arguably can happen is when that model is used in the generation of content - and if the user is prompting regenerate a protected work, then that is where the infringement happens. But not before. Maybe the various ai services can adequately guard against that illicit usage. Maybe not. And if not, its those live services that would need to be shut down.
But the creation and training of a model, and even distributing that model for people to use with their own computers in private does not engage in copyright infringement.
It's amazing how some folks will be ardently opposed to "defunding the police" ... except for the tax police.
The cynical part of me wonders if this isn't just a bit of PR to 'ground' the planes for 'inspections' without actually addressing some kind of root cause.
Where we might end up is in a situation where it is legal to train a model. Legal to produce software for using the model to generate content. Legal to distribute all of the above. But offering a standing service that does the above and is capable of creating infringing work is illegal. Great news for llama hobbyists. Bad news for ChatGPT.