So when’s the ruling against OpenAI and the like using the same copyrighted material to train their models
But OpenAI not being allowed to use the content for free means they are being prevented from making a profit, whereas the Internet Archive is giving away the stuff for free and taking away the right of the authors to profit. /s
Disclaimer: this is the argument that OpenAI is using currently, not my opinion.
Ah, I see you got that all wrong.
Open
IAAI uses that content to generate billions in profit on the backs of The People. The Internet Archive just does it for the good of The People.We can’t have that. “Good for The People” is not how the economy works, pal. We need profit and exploitation for the world to work…
OpenAI is burning billions of dollars not making profit.
Sounds like they are operating the same as all the other big tech companies then
Burn a ton a cash to become the only major player in the market and the proceed to enshitify as no one else has anywhere to go.
Eh? That article says nothing about their profit margins. Today they have something like $3.5B in ARR (not really, that’s annualized from their latest peak, in Feb they had like $2B ARR). Meanwhile they have operating costs over $7B. Meaning they are losing money hand over fist and not making a profit.
I’m not suggesting anything else, just that they are not profitable and personally I don’t see a road to profitability beyond subsidizing themselves with investment.
It’s in the first bloody paragraph. 😮💨
OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it’s supposedly “impossible” for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar business — without them.
And if you follow the link the title of the article says it all:
#OpenAI is set to see its valuation at $80 billion—making it the third most valuable startup in the world
Just because the company has a high valuation, doesn’t mean they’re making a profit. They’re indeed losing a lot of money and will go bankrupt if they don’t get new investment and/or increase their ARR soon. Right now, they’ve only got 12 months left before they’re out of money. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/openai-could-be-on-the-brink-of-bankruptcy-in-under-12-months-with-projections-of-dollar5-billion-in-losses
The valuation is based on the expectation of the company to make massive profits. And if you think investor money is not profit for the people running Open AI, you’re crazy. We could only hope that they run out of money and go out of business. But that’ll never happen now with the amount of faith these corporations are putting in “AI” research.
I take it you don’t understand how startups work?
OpenAI is not making any profit and is losing money hand over fist today. Valuation and raising investment rounds isn’t profit.
“Good for the people”? You mean COMMUNISM?
I think you accidentally swapped OpenAI and Open IA which happens to initialize Internet Archive, a little confusing.
I didn’t even realise. Thank you for pointing it out, I fixed it.
It’s two different things happening. One is redistribution, which isn’t allowed and the other is fair use, which is allowed. You can’t ban someone from writing a detailed synopsis of your book. That’s all an llm is doing. It’s no different than a human reading the material and then using that to write something similar.
the other is fair use
That’s very much up for debate still.
(I am personally still undecided)
The difference is that the llm has the ability to consume and remember all available information whereas a human would have difficulty remembering everything in detail. We still see humans unintentionally remaking things they’ve heard before. Comedians have unintentionally stolen jokes they’ve heard. Every songwriter has unintentionally “discovered” a catchy tune which is actually someone else’s. We have fanfiction and parody. Most people’s personalities are just an amalgamation of everyone and everything they’ve ever seen, not unlike an llm themselves.
I agree with you for the most part, but when the “person” in charge of the LLM is a big corporation, it just exaggerates many of the issues we have with current copyright law. All the current lawsuits going around signal to me that society as a whole is not so happy with how it’s being used, regardless of how it fits in to current law.
AI is causing humanity to have to answer a lot of questions most people have been ignoring since the dawn of philosophy. Personally I find it rather concerning how blurry some lines are getting, and I’ve already had to reevaluate how I think about certain things, like what moral responsibilities we’ll have when AIs truely start to become sentient. Is turning them off and deleting them a form of murder? Maybe…
OpenAI losing their case is how we ensure that the only people who can legally be in charge of an LLM are massive corporations with enough money to license sufficient source material for training, so I’m forced to begrudgingly take their side here
Agreed. I keep waffling on my feelings about it. It definitely doesn’t feel like our laws properly handle the scale that LLMs can take advantage of ‘fair use’. It also feels like yet another way to centralize and consolidate wealth, this time not money, but rather art and literary wealth in the hands of a few.
I already see artists that used to get commissions now replaced by endless AI pictures generated via a Lora specifically aping their style. If it was a human copying you, they’d still be limited by the amount they could produce. But an AI can spit out millions of images all in the style you perfected. Which feels wrong.
Is “intent” what makes all the difference? I think doing something bad unintentionally does not make it good, right?
Otherwise, all I need to do something bad is have no bad intentions. I’m sure you can find good intentions for almost any action, but generally, the end does not justify the means.
I’m not saying that those who act unintentionally should be given the same kind of punishment as those who do it with premeditation… what I’m saying is that if something is bad we should try to prevent it in the same level, as opposed to simply allowing it or sometimes even encourage it. And this can be done in the same way regardless of what tools are used. I think we just need to define more clearly what separates “bad” from “good” specifically based on the action taken (as opposed to the tools the actor used).
You’re anthropomorphizing LLMs.
There’s a philosophical and neuroscuence concept called “Qualia,” which helps define the human experience. LLMs have no Qualia.
You’re anthropomorphizing LLMs.
No, they’re taking the argument to it’s logical end.
I think that’s the difference right there.
One is up for debate, the other one is already heavily regulated currently. Libraries are generally required to have consent if they are making straight copies of copyrighted works. Whether we like it or not.
What AI does is not really a straight up copy, which is why it’s fuzzy, and much harder to regulate without stepping in our own toes, specially as tech advances and the difference between a human reading something and a machine doing it becomes harder and harder to detect.
The matter is not LLMs reproducing what they have learned, it is that they didn’t pay for the books they read, like people are supposed to do legally.
This is not about free use, this is about free access, which at the scale of an individual reading books is marketed as “piracy”…at the scale of reading all books known to man…it’s onmipiracy?
We need some kind of deal where commercial LLMs have to pay a rent to a fund that distributes that among creators or remain nonprofit, which is never gonnna happen, because it’ll be a bummer for all the grifters rushing into that industry.
I think we need to re-examine what copyright should be. There’s nothing inherently immoral about “piracy” when the original creator gets almost nothing for their work after the initial release.
it is that they didn’t pay for the books they read, like people are supposed to do legally.
If I can read a book from a library, why shouldn’t OpenAI or anybody else?
…but yes from what I’ve heard they (or whoever, don’t remember) actually trained on libgen. OpenAI can be scummy without the general process of feeding AI books you only have read access to being scummy.
Meta is defending because they trained on books3 which contained all of Bibliotik. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pile_(dataset)
This is not like reading a book from a library…unless you want to force the LLM to only train one book per day and keep no copies after that day.
They don’t keep copies and learning speed? Why one day? Does it count if I skim through a book?
deleted by creator
stop asking questions and go back to work
If OpenAI can get away with going through copy-righted material, then the answer to piracy is simple: round up a bunch of talented Devs from the internet who are writing and training AI models, and let’s make a fantastic model trained on what the internet archive has. Tell you what, let Mistral’s engineers lead that charge, and put an AGPL license on the project so that companies can’t fuck us over.
I refuse to believe that nobody has thought of this yet
An AI trained on old Internet material would be like a synthetic Grandpa Simpson:
“In my day we said ‘all your base’ and laughed all day long, because it took all day to download the video.”
This stupid thing just keeps saying “I can Haz Cheeseburger”. What the hell does that even mean?
What do you think Mistral trains its models on? Public domain stuff?
Better yet! Train an AI to re-write the books into brand new books and let us read, review the content, add notes etc so that the AI can refresh the books if we find errors.
Kick the private collections to the curb! Teeth in like in American History X.
“AI write Hamlet” AI writes Idiocracy.
We get it, y’all hate LLMs and the companies who make them.
This comparison is disingenuous and I have to think you’re smart enough to know that, making this disinformation.
If/when an LLM like ChatGPT spits out a full copy of training text, that’s considered a bug and is remediated fairly quickly. It’s not a feature.
What IA was doing was sharing the full text as a feature.
As far as I know, there are some court cases pending regarding determining if companies like Open AI are guilty of copyright infringement but I haven’t seen any convictions yet (happy to be corrected here).
All that said, I love IA and have a Warrior container scheduled to run nightly to help contribute.
Hmm, true. IA wouldn’t be as supported if we couldn’t get the full text of the source.
Can you tell me more about the “warrior container”?
It’s mentioned in the OP but it’s this:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Basically, distributed collection.
have a Warrior container
This is an ArchiveTeam project, which is a totally separate effort to the Internet Archive. As far as I know, they’re not related other than the fact that ArchiveTeam use The Internet Archive for storage.
Ahh my mistake.
Might be time to financially contribute to IA.
Another sad day for pro-preservation advocates
A sad day for intellects
Fuck Copyright.
A system for distributing information and rewarding it’s creators should not be one based on scarcity, given that it costs nothing to copy and distribute information.
It was fine when the limited duration was a reasonable number of years. Anything over 30 years max before being in the public domain is too long.
Thanks, Disney.
Things I’ve never heard said before
Huh. That made me realise I probably never heard or read “Fuck you, Obama”. Don’t live in the USA though.
That was fine then, but it makes zero sense today.
If a book is on sale widely to the public, and it costs nothing to copy and distribute that book to everyone, why shouldn’t we?
The fundamental problem with copyright is it is a system that rewards creators by imposing artificial scarcity where there is no need for one. Capitalism is a system designed around things having value when they’re scarce, but information in a world of computers and the internet is inherently unscarce the instant it’s digitized. Copyright just means that we build all these giant DRM systems to impose scarcity on something that doesn’t need it so that we can still get creators paid a living.
But a better system would for paying creators would be one of attribution and reward, where everyone can read whatever they want or stream whatever they want, and artists would be paid based on their number of views.
But a better system would for paying creators would be one of attribution and reward, where everyone can read whatever they want or stream whatever they want, and artists would be paid based on their number of views.
Which would be enforced through copyright…
If you’re referring to copyright as the actual effective title as owner of the works then yes. If you’re referring to copyright as in our system if copyright == monopoly, then no.
So if I own it… as the sole writer of some work. But don’t have a monopoly over how it’s used…
What the fuck logic is that? Can you care to explain how I, as the owner of the work cannot impose whatever limits I want to it?
This involves trying to imagine a system other than the one we currently use.
The concept of exclusive ownership makes sense for material goods because if I have an object, you cannot have that object. If I want a copy of that object, it takes the same amount of resources as it took to make the original object. It’s a fundamental property of matter and energy, but information does not have the same properties. Information can be stored infinitely smally, and replicated for virtually nothing, as many times as you want.
In the digital age, where every single person now has an incredibly powerful information processing machine that is networked to every single other one, it means that once information is digitized, it costs us virtually nothing to distribute it to everyone on earth who wants it.
Copyright only exists, because once we started to be able to do this with early technologies like the printing press, vinyls, VHS, etc, it showed that you could rapidly drive the value of that work down to zero dollars, because in capitalism, thing only have value if they are scarce. Air is a necessity for everyone to live but it costs nothing because it’s all around us. It suddenly gets valuable in places where it’s scarce, but as long as it’s abundant, it has no value according capitalism. So continuing to allow the free copying of works meant that the original creators would never get rewarded. This made some sense at a time when it took months and a ton of resources to chop down trees, make paper, print a book, and ship it across the world and then get a response back regarding it.
But now, in the digital age, we have all the tools we need to build a middle man free service that would allow everyone to watch or read anything, and reward the creators based on how much their works are used or viewed or remixed. It’s basically how music streaming services and the behind the scenes remix/sampling licensing deals work already, they just have a ton of corporate middle men taking profits at every step.
In print media, advertising driven models are hamfisted work arounds that do the same thing of providing the information to everyone, but again, with middle men that fuck the authors and ruin the experience for readers.
Spotify, Apple Music, etc could all still exist, they’d just all have access to the same content catalog and you’d be picking and paying solely based on the quality of the interface and service they provide.
It’s also not a crazy idea that once you create an idea you don’t get to exclusively own it. For the vast majority of human history, copyright did not exist, and the only way that stories and songs and ideas were passed on was through chains of people copying and retelling them.
This involves trying to imagine a system other than the one we currently use.
No it doesn’t. Just because the work I created was done in paint or word doesn’t make it any less mine. Just because I could distribute it freely doesn’t make me obligated to. I am justified in asking for compensation and proposing limits on how it’s shared.
This is no different to printing the physical version of these works. I could print 10 copies of the book and tell my friends they cannot distribute it. Just the same I could send them an email with the works and say the same thing.
There is no difference here.
But now, in the digital age, we have all the tools we need to build a middle man free service that would allow everyone to watch or read anything, and reward the creators based on how much their works are used or viewed or remixed.
This has no logical basis in your response though. You’re saying that creators of works would have no say in how much a digital work is copied/transferred. How do you prove how much a work is even used/viewed? That would require heaps and loads of DRM management and to go after those who circumvent those measures… which takes money/infrastructure… and GASP That’s exactly what the publishers are doing now! Look at that!
Sure, you don’t actually own it. The words you strung together are not actually yours nor is the grammar you strung it together with. The knowledge you used to create it is also not yours.
The only way to ensure no one reads, borrows, or “steals” your work is to never share it with anyone and certainly never put it on the Internet.
The only way to ensure it is truly yours is to never have participated in society, invent your own language, and of course hide it from ever being discovered.
This is the only real way. You need to create in a vacuum and lock it up so no one will ever find it. Then and only then can it truly be yours.
Yeah. In a better world where the US court system doesn’t get weaponized and rulings aren’t delayed for years or decades, I would argue 8 to 15 years is the reasonable number, depending on the type of information being copyrighted.
I personally like the idea that Copyright should be on par with design patent law. An initial filing 10-15yrs plus two additional opportunities to renew and extend it for 10 years if the creator can make supplementary creations that were dependent on and based off of the original works. -In the case of novels, that would equate to new sequels or prequels.
deleted by creator
Artificial scarcity at its finest. Imagine recording a song digitally, then pretending there are a limited amount of copies of that song in existence. Then you sell an agreement to another person that says they have to pretend there is only a certain made up number of copies that they bought, and if they allow more than that number of people to listen to those copies at rhe same time, they will get sued for “stealing” additional pretend copies?
I hope everybody can see how this is the insane and pathetic result of Capitalism’s unrelenting drive to commodify everything it possibly can in the pursuit of profit.
As always, the solution is sailing the high seas. Throughout history, those who created or saved illegal copies/translations of literature and art were important to preserving and furthering human knowledge.
Many incredibly powerful people, empires, and countries have tried very hard to suppress that, but they keep failing. You cannot suppress the human drive for curiosity and knowledge.
True, and the fleet is big and strong. There are many people seeding hundreds of terabytes of books/research papers/etc. The knowledge will not be lost. Yarr, can’t catch me in the high seas…
Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.
Ah, I see we’re burning the Library of Alexandria again… Just as with last time, the survival of texts will rely upon copies.
Oh sure I want to read copyright books it’s an issue, but OpenAI does it and it’s vital to their business so they can keep going.
We live in a capitalist society. You can do whatever you want as long as you have money or promise lots of money to powerful people.
Still doesnt make any sense whatsoever
My understanding is that the IA had implemented a digital library, where they had (whether paid or not) some number of licenses for a selection of books. This implementation had DRM of some variety that meant you could only read the book while it was checked out. In theory, this means if the IA has 10 licenses of a book, only 10 people have a usable copy they borrowed from the IA at a time.
And then the IA disabled the DRM system, somehow, and started limitlessly lending the books they had copies of to anyone that asked.
I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously
wrongagainst the agreement they entered into. Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.ETA: updated my wording. I don’t believe what the IA did was morally wrong, per se, but rather against the agreement I presume they entered into with the owners of the books they lent.
They disabled drm during lockdown so people had something to do
Which was nice of them, but that doesn’t mean they should’ve done that, especially in the eyes of the law. (Also, if you’re after free ebooks, why are you pirating them on archive.org instead of libgen?)
Removed by mod
Where did I say that find it good that they got sued or lost their appeal? I just said that the reason why they lost the appeal is because according to the law they’re bound to, what they did was wrong. And maybe they should’ve left that to a platform that enjoys a little more immunity from said law, because there are plenty of those. It was stupid of them. They painted an unnecessary target on their back that doesn’t help their cause and I‘d prefer them not to have to shut down at some point because I’m all for the Internet archive archiving anything and everything. They should’ve stayed a legitimate library and everything would have been fine and would have served their cause sufficiently well.
Removed by mod
Ah, so you‘re one of those people that would be well at home at lemmygrad. And what fate are you talking about? Not getting sued?
I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong.
The publisher-plaintiffs did not prove the “obvious wrong” in this case, however US-based courts have a curious standard when it comes to the application of Fair Use doctrine. This case ultimately rested on the fourth, most significantly-weighted Fair Use standard in US-based courts: whether IA’s digital lending harmed publisher sales during the 3-month period of unlimited digital lending.
Unfortunately, when it comes to this standard, the publisher-plaintiffs are not required to prove harm, rather only assert that harm has occurred. If they were required to prove harm they’d have to reveal sales figures for the 27 works under consideration–publishers will do anything to conceal this information and US-based courts defer to them. Therefore, IA was required to prove a negative claim–that digital lending did not hurt sales–without access to the empirical data (which in other legal contexts is shared during the discovery phase) required to prove this claim. IA offered the next best argument (see pp. 44-62 of the case document to check for yourself), but the data was deemed insufficient by the court.
In other words, on the most important test of Fair Use doctrine, which this entire case ultimately pivoted upon, IA was expected to defend itself with one arm tied behind its back. That’s not ‘fair’ and the publishers did not prove ‘obvious’ harm, but the US-based courts are increasingly uninterested in these things.
edited: page numbers on linked court document.
The decision is that even lending out ebooks against owned copies is illegal
What the IA may be illegal but is certainly not wrong.
Wrong? No.
Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.
Actions also protected by laws exempting nonprofits and archives from copyright restrictions? Also supposed to be yes.
Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.
To be fair, this is what I meant when I said wrong. Enough people have taken umbrage with my wording that I think I should update it, though. Thank you for your reply.
Removed by mod
Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.
That’s how it works in the rest of the world.
What part of the rest of the world are you in?
Some university library probably.
No it isn’t.
Easy solution. Update the web-scraper they use to include an LLM. Then its for “training”
As long as they have a tech billionaire in charge they should be fine.
They could also rename the project to: “The AI Archive” and add lots of buttons with multicolor gradients.
Need to give it a quirky name.
The AIkive
Direct link to the court document: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988.306.1.pdf
Side note: court listener’s RECAP is often quite disliked by the legal system. They do not like it when people put stuff from PACER fee waved sources on there like Aaron Schwartz did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Law_Project
Woah, I wish I had known about this sooner. Thanks!
They need to rename themselves “Intelligent Archive” then claim they’re an AI service that can just happen to regenerate whole books.
Really unfortunate. I wonder why nobody foresaw this when they started the stupid NEL thing.
Edit: NEL is the thing where the Archive removed all borrowing restrictions except 10 books per account and some sort of basic verification that you were in the US
Yeah they flew too close to the sun
But I’m training my organic LLM, can’t I?
