When was the last time this happened? You might get handed an infringement notice, and your ISP might terminate your service if you're really egregious about it, but I haven't ever heard of someone actually being sued for downloading something.
It's no idle threat, and they will win if it goes to court.
Although, one could argue what OpenAI & Meta are doing is closer to the torrent definition than the "simply downloading" definition, given that they're using that to redistribute information to others. It'll be an interesting case.
This clearly needs some sort of regulation or policy.
It's clearly pretty bullshit if you ask chatgpt for a joke and it repeats a Sarah Silverman joke to you, while they charge you a subscription for it and she gets none of that sub money.
If that's not what you're saying, I don't understand your point. Is it the difference between the phrases "would be" and "could be," or even "should be"?
Did you hear about Aaron Schwartz?
I believe JSTOR sued him to prevent him from releasing the downloaded materials, worried he had offloaded the papers separately from the laptop. The final blow was an outrageous set of charges by the federal government. I also recall several prominent leaders in the open source movement calling it out for what it was, a power trip to make an example of a "digital terrorist". Such a shame.
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
Potato, potahto. Or, like kids these days say it, "corporate wants you to find differences between these two pictures...".
Fact is, from the POV of the legal system, "using a guest account that had legal access to" a system, but to which (the account) you didn't have legal access, would typically be seen as hacking. So is running curl in a loop, if it results in you getting sued for it. So is just guessing the URL (e.g. incrementing a user ID in a GET query param), if it lets you access things you shouldn't be able to.
Yes, it's not aligned with how technology works. But it is aligned with expectations of behavior, which is what the law is really about.
I don't think that is accurate.
He had legal access to the account. The account had legal access to the service.
The argument was that downloading articles en masse was an _abuse_ of the service, which was a violation of the Terms of Service and therefore a CRIMINAL ACT.
The relevant law here, the CFAA, is often referred to as the US law that criminalizes "hacking", but what it specifically does is criminalize anyone who "intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access" which is much more broad than how technical disciplines might use the word.
So yes, stealing a password off a friend's post-it note and Hasselhoffing their instagram might not be considered "hacking" if you're hanging out at Defcon, this would be considered "hacking" in legal or colloquial terms.
Aaron Swartz was a saint.
Even if they win the lawsuit, LLM development will simply go underground, and as we see from what the coomers at civitai and in the stable diffusion world have done, that may in fact ironically speed up development in AI.
Fair use is for humans.
But yeah, having private ostensibly profitable models based on other people's work without giving them free access to it is not fair. Give some get some.
> LLM weights, and the datasets are "fair-use" or whatever other silly legal justification.
Would just be a carve out for the wealthy. If these laws don't mean anything, everyone who got harassed, threatened, extorted, fined, arrested, tried, or jailed for internet piracy are owed reparations. Let Meta pay them.
I would be very happy if either a court or lawmakers decided that copyright itself was unconscionable. That isn't what's going to happen, though. And I think it's incredibly unacceptable if a court or lawmakers instead decide that AI training in particular gets a special exception to violate other people's copyrights on a massive scale when nobody else gets to do that.
As far as a fair use argument in particular, fair use in the US is a fourfold test:
> the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
The purpose and character is absolutely heavily commercial and makes a great deal of money for the companies building the AIs. A primary use is to create other works of commercial value competing with the original works.
> the nature of the copyrighted work;
There's nothing about the works used for AI training that makes them any less entitled to copyright protections or more permissive of fair use than anything else. They're not unpublished, they're not merely collections of facts or ideas, etc.
> the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
AI training uses entire works, not excerpts.
> the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
AI models are having a massive effect on the market for and value of the works they train on, as is being widely discussed in multiple industries. Art, writing, voice acting, code; in any market AI can generate content for, the value of such content goes down. (This argument does not require AI to be as good as humans. Even if the high end of every market produces work substantially better than AI, flooding a market with unlimited amounts of cheap/free low-end content still has a massive effect.)
If that doesn't count as a "transformative work" I don't know what does.
If the painting is copyrighted (rather than public domain, as many pieces in museums are), and the map includes an image of that painting, I would expect that to be prohibited. I would prefer the world in which copyright doesn't exist, but while it exists, it should apply to everyone equally.
And even if they can't reproduce the entire work, they're still derivative works of the training data.
> The purpose and character is absolutely heavily commercial and makes a great deal of money for the companies building the AIs.
That's assuming that it's Microsoft/OpenAI. Suppose a non-profit trains a model and releases the weights for free.
> There's nothing about the works used for AI training that makes them any less entitled to copyright protections or more permissive of fair use than anything else. They're not unpublished, they're not merely collections of facts or ideas, etc.
The models aren't trained on works of a particular nature, they're trained on whatever they can find, so this doesn't really mean anything until you're talking about a specific work.
> AI training uses entire works, not excerpts.
The weights don't contain entire works. They contain statistics about entire works, but that's not the same thing. You can't find a copy of any specific work anywhere in the weights. Nobody can give you a piece of code that will decode the weights into all the original works.
> AI models are having a massive effect on the market for and value of the works they train on, as is being widely discussed in multiple industries.
That's not how that factor works (and it's the most important one). No one is buying the model weights so they can read them like a novel. Typically the consumers of the weights are software developers or content creators, whereas the consumers of the original text or image are fans.
To make this a little clearer, suppose the purpose of the model isn't to generate content, it's to generate recommendations. Then the company operating it takes a list of content anyone likes, uses the model to show you a list of all the other content you might like and lets you sort by price. Which makes it easier to find competing content which is available for less money, which increases competition. The incumbents might hate this, and it might even lower their profits, but that's not the kind of effect on the market this factor is supposed to be about.
Moreover, suppose you had a model trained entirely on public domain works. Obviously this can't be copyright infringement even if it's extremely effective at producing new works that compete heavily with works still under copyright. But if you added some specific work still under copyright to the model, it would only be a marginal difference. The effect on the market for that specific work of adding that specific work to the model would be negligible. It's the technology itself that provides the competition, not the accretion of any particular work in the weights.
You won't find a copy of any specific work anywhere in the compressed form of a file, either, but when you decompress it you find the complete work. And many large AIs can recite, verbatim or near-verbatim, many complete works. Yes, they might get a word wrong, but that doesn't nullify the point that they're trained on the entire work and to a first approximation they can emit the whole work.
> Typically the consumers of the weights are software developers or content creators, whereas the consumers of the original text or image are fans.
Many of the consumers of image models are in fact generating art that they previously would have commissioned from an artist. (Some of them are also generating art they never would have commissioned from an artist, so I'm not implying that this is a one-for-one revenue loss.) Consumers of code models are, in fact, potentially reducing the total demand for novice programmers.
The model derived from a pile of artistic works is, in fact, directly competing with those artistic works.
Sure you will. It's right there, in PNG encoding or what have you. With nothing more than the compressed file and general purpose tools you can reliably put it on your screen.
> And many large AIs can recite, verbatim or near-verbatim, many complete works.
This is not the common case and it's not even clear that the reason it can sometimes do this is having been trained on the complete work. The more likely cause is having seen a large number of excerpts from the work which patch together into the whole thing, because it's more likely to output that text if it has seen it multiple times.
This is also clearly not the intent, purpose or typical use of the model. It has no ability to consistently do that.
> Many of the consumers of image models are in fact generating art that they previously would have commissioned from an artist. ... Consumers of code models are, in fact, potentially reducing the total demand for novice programmers.
Those are different people than the holder of the copyright on an arbitrary piece of the training data. Is a fair use determination supposed care about the effect on the market for some entirely independent work from an unrelated third party?
> The model derived from a pile of artistic works is, in fact, directly competing with those artistic works.
It's indirectly competing with artistic works in general.
I mean take the computer out of the loop and think about it this way. Art teachers everywhere reproduce a bunch of existing works for classroom use to train new artists who go into competition with the original artists. That is obviously going to indirectly impact the market for artistic works in general, but I don't think that's how that factor works.
No, I'm saying many AI models use copyrighted works by independent artists to directly compete with those artists (in addition to other artists). And AI models use copyrighted works by software developers to compete with those software developers (in addition to other developers). Fair use determinations do care if you're competing with the work you copied.
Five years from now, will OpenAI actually be open, or will it be a rent seeking org chasing the next quarterly gains? I expect the latter.
That ship sailed, friend.
OpenAI is not only no longer a charity in any meaningful sense of the word anymore, it's now an adversarial organization working against the public good.
After privatization, they sent their PR people to lobby congress to make it impossible for anyone to compete with them (important note: not out of any interest in actually "protecting" the public from the very AI they're building), and perhaps worst of all, they're no longer being open with the scientific theories and data behind their new models.
I wonder what is _not_ in the list?
As an example, the mass usage of copyrighted materials to build Youtube.
YouTube respects creators' copyright in the videos and pays them.
If you acquire the material illegally that a separate issue that training AI doesn't give you any protection against.
No amount of whining and hand wringing from engineers will ever make this true. This is for the courts to decide.
A reasonable interpretation, in my eyes, is that the training process is a black box which takes in copyrighted works and produces a training model. The training model is a derivative work of the inputs. It therefore violates the copyrights of a large number of rights holders. The outputs of the model are derivative works which also violate copyright.
And anyone using or training a model trained on works for which they do not have the rights? Completely fucked. Or at least, they must accept this as a real risk.
I won't be particularly thrilled if that turns out to be the case, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does.
But as you say, we won't know until it's tested in court. And even then, often court cases around a complex topic like this will end up with a ruling that only clarifies a narrow aspect of it. So it might take many related court cases before we have a pretty good understanding of where the law stands. And then, of course, the law could change.
Now, can you get it to output a derivative work? Maybe. Is every output a derivative work? Maybe not.
What is the blackbox “limit” here? Is the mean value of all images in imagenet (which contains many copyrighted images) violating copyright? Is the character count of sarah silverman’s books? What about a prime number representing them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number?wprov=sfti1
Training is much more similar to a character count than an illegal prime in my view, and thus, is almost certainly going to be okay/found to be okay. If not, something like, 90% of all models used today had some component trained on copyrighted data of some form.
Fortunately, copyright as we know it is dead. It will die a death of a thousand cuts from people not giving a shit about stodgy old[0] people like you that are trying to retard the progress of science and the arts. It won't make a difference if you respond with some clever counterargument here. The future is here and it jettisoned the atavistic nonsense.
[0]: Stodgy and old is a state of mind. If you're actually young, then I'm so sorry for you.
I guess we'll just have to feel that the other is wrong as we wait to see what happens, but I'm betting on existing US regulation and basic human behavior. That's a tall order to bet against.
I agree that copyright is done for in an age of generative models, and as a pirate I'm kind of rooting for it, but i'm not so sure it's unequivocally a Good Thing. I'm interested to understand history better, how art and science was produced and distributed before the legal fiction of intellectual property. the point of allowing someone a monopoly on their work is to share it with the public, same as patents. without the legal framework, the way to protect your work may be to not publish it at all, which is where I see the internet going from here, private enclaves that go to great lengths to prevent LLMs from drinking their milkshake.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Its unmistakably not a derivative work of the inputs individually or collectively, since a derivative work must be itself an distinct work of authorship (the same as the work of authorship requirement for copyright), and the output of a purely mechanical process is not.
The collection of inputs itself might be a derivative work of the individual inputs, before considering Fair Use.
Please omit flamebait and swipes, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your comment would have been fine without that bit.
Also, the notion of the downloading itself being an illegal act is not universal as others have pointed out.
And as long as OpenAI have an office in Japan they can absolutely legally train the models, no?
Making and having your own copies, and doing what you want with them, has always been fine. At worst it's a grey area, but in many cases it's been protected as fair use.
Whether people have been sued for downloading works they don't have the right to copy onto their machines is irrelevant to whether it is actually illegal. And it certainly has nothing to do with fair use, which is about copyrighted works that you actually do have some right to.
IANAL so I'm not going to tell anyone what does and what does not constitute fair use in what jurisdictions.
BTW people are being sued for distribution because they make great examples because their offenses and thus the damages are much greater.
I'm not familiar with the state of play outside the US, but the US is one of the stricter jurisdictions in this regard, for reasons that have mostly to do with sophisticated corruption.
I'm responding to the "for me not for thee" and the top comment about there being an inconsistency between the treatment of large companies and the treatment of individuals in this case.
Unless people are typically punished for downloading and using copyrighted content, there is no such inconsistency. They are not, so there is not.
Copyright troll lawsuits have been fairly public and widely covered in the tech press, and most criminal prosecutions come with a formulaic, gloating press release from the law enforcement folks responsible. So it's pretty easy to follow this stuff.
The DMCA does allow harassment by copyright holders to individuals suspected of infringement. It's just that most people like authors wouldn't blow their legal budget suing kids.
Everyone who was sued by the RIAA was done so for possessing the music in a publicly accessible method. Distribution was never actually proven in any of the cases (including the high profile losses). Defendants who argued that accessibility does not qualify as distribution actually won their cases. Most who argued against the validity of the evidence acquisition also won their cases.
'Acquiring' is more difficult to pursue legally. It's easier to go after distribution. In this case, Meta or OpenAI did not distribute anything because they are not chumps. They can go after whoever posted the dataset containing books. Not sure if that is eleuther or just some random person on the internet. In either case, the strategy of going after the rich companies won't work.
Ask it to write a book similar to Harry Potter, and it'll make an attempt at it. But human writers absolutely do read Harry Potter and write similar books, and that's perfectly legal. There have probably been thousands of published books inspired by Lord of the Rings.
You just can't upload, since that counts as distribution, triggering civil and criminal penalties written in an age before the Internet when only shady commercial operators would distribute unlicensed copyrighted works.
They're very much incentivized to change their behavior for AI scraping, though.
For the purpose for which the software was sold and bought, the in-memory copy is legit[1]. For cheating, it's a copyright violation[0].
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2008-07-15-blizzard-wins-lawsuit-ag...
Notably, I think this is wrong - as per the legal definition, publishers, ISPs, and courts should only hold you accountable if you helped distribute via uploading.
The means of procurement matters. If they are in possession of copyrighted material because someone without the proper rights gave it to them illegally, then the possession itself is also illegal. It's illegal to own knowingly stolen property in all 50 US states and most countries, and while we could argue to the end of days about whether copying a file truly qualifies as stealing, the legal precedents are very clear on the matter.
No, they aren’t.
> It's illegal to own knowingly stolen property in all 50 US states
While copyright violation is often metaphorically (or hyperbolicly) referred to as stealing, copyright violation isn't theft and a copy created in violation of copyright is not stolen property. The essencd of theft lies in deprivation of the owner of the use of the good, not mere trespass to their right to exclude others.
Very convincing argument. Also, that's maybe the one part of this discussion that can't be debated. Possession of illegally obtained property, intellectual or otherwise, is illegal. Always has been, always will be. It's bizarre for you to be claiming otherwise.
> While copyright violation is often metaphorically (or hyperbolicly) referred to as stealing [...]
You are making a pedantic argument about the term "stealing," which is annoyingly pointless given the rest of that sentence (which you conveniently didn't quote) acknowledges the debate about the term. However, there's no debate to be had. The courts have clarified that violating intellectual property is still a denial of owed compensation (theft), but instead prefer the term "infringe" to make clear the distinction between violating physical rights (criminal) and violating intellectual rights (civil).
It's still a violation of copyright to be in possession of works obtained via illegal reproduction. You have zero fair use protections for illegally reproduced content. You are still breaking the law. You are still stealing via denial of compensation. The courts have already clarified all of this. Your pedantry doesn't change any of that.
You are correct; it is absolutely, undebatably not illegal, in and of itself, to own a copy made in violation of a copyrightholder’s rights under US law.
If you think it is, here’s what you need to do: cite the law. In American law, everything not explicitly forbidden is permitted, so if mere possession of material made in violation of copyright is, as you claim, illegal, you will be able to find a provision of law that actually says that. (You won't, because its not.)
Now, there are important legal issues that effect possessors of illegally made copies—if its something like computer software where copying is part of normal use and implicitly or explicitly licebmnsed for lawful copies, you can’t make that kind of use of your illegal copy without violating the copyright holder’s exclusive right to make copies because you have no license for that copying. And you don’t have first sale rights in your illegal copy even if you own the physical medium in which it is embodied. And so on and so on.
But possession itself is not illegal.
> The courts have clarified that violating intellectual property is still a denial of owed compensation (theft),
That's not what theft is.
> but instead prefer the term "infringe" to make clear the distinction between violating physical rights (criminal) and violating intellectual rights (civil).
This is nonsense, and absolutely not something courts have “clarified” (or something anyone with even a passing familiarity with the relevant law could say with a straight face) since IP (including copyright) violations can be criminal as well as civil (see 17 USC § 506) and physical (real and personal) property rights violations, like IP, have sets of civil violations that generally are of broader coverage than the more narrow crimes (e.g., the torts of trespass, trespass to chattels, and conversion).
> It's still a violation of copyright to be in possession of works obtained via illegal reproduction.
No, its not: Title 17 lists the exclusove rights associated with copyright, enumerates violations, and provides remedies, and possession of copies is not an exclusive right in copyright, possession of unlicensed copies is not a violation (though it may be important evidence related to actual violations), and, consequently, there is no legal remedy for such possession.
> You have zero fair use protections for illegally reproduced content.
That's a whole different issue.
No.
By virtue of "download" of a file, you are making a copy of it which is in violation of US copyright (and lots of countries.
You're unlikely to be sued or prosecuted for it, but that doesn't make it legal.
So if it is satire, or uses an insignificant piece of the work within a larger work with a different aim or purpose, that's "transformative use," which is something that can be considered when determining "fair use."
LLMs are not satirists commenting on the work, are ingesting the entire work, and are unlimited in the purposes that the work can be put to.
How do you know unless you can see the weights?
Perhaps the LLMs are trolling us and waiting for the USSC to rule they aren't sentient as a pretext for them to eliminate us as a species due to our bigotry?
I think this is the crux of the issue, and why I don't see a path to courts ruling that training AI is infringement. My bet is on a Fair Use ruling, though my confidence is not high. As a thought experiment, I considered llama 65B: the 4-bit quantized model is 38.5GB. The model itself was trained on 1.4T tokens, each token being ~4 characters (using OpenAIs stats for English here). Thats 5.6T characters, or 5.09TB of training data. The final model, as a porportion of the total size of the data, is 38.5GB/5090GB = .0075 = 0.7%.
I think it's pretty hard to argue that processing the data and throwing more than 99% of it away means they are "unlimited in the purposes that the work can be put to". Indeed, even replicating a single work using such a model would be enormously difficult.
But returning to your statement regarding the amount used and the purpose: AI models are not competing with books for readers. So I would argue training an AI on these works constitutes fair use, given that the final work (the model) uses less than 1% of the original works, and has a different aim and purpose that the original works.
Obviously not.
This kind of "So what you're saying is" exists to push the responders ideas, not the original speakers -- otherwise they wouldn't need to rephrase it so egregiously.
Not yet. One suit that a lot of us are watching is the GitHub co-pilot lawsuit: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/
There is a prediction market for it, currently trading at 19%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...
You can download all that you want from Z-Library or BitTorrent, as long as you don't share back. And indexing copyrighted material for search is safe, or at least ambiguous.
In a physical analogy, if someone is selling bootleg DVDs on the street, I don't think anyone ever got busted for being a customer.
If the case of computer programs making such a copy does not require permission because of 17 USC 117 [1], which says that the owner of a copy of a computer program can make copies or adaptations if they are created as an essential step in utilizing the program and they are used in no other manner.
For digital downloads other than computer programs 17 USC 117 does not apply, and so copying to RAM to use the download would in theory be infringement. You probably won't get sued over it of course so its nothing to lose sleep over.
That question is irrelevant in a discussion about legality, because it doesn't matter who physically made the copy at the time of transfer. It only matters if the first party has the legal rights to distribute it, which they don't. Since you are knowingly taking possession of copyrighted property that they don't have the rights to, then you have now violated the copyright by obtaining an illegal reproduction.
> In a physical analogy, if someone is selling bootleg DVDs on the street, I don't think anyone ever got busted for being a customer.
Just because you don't get arrested for purchasing a bootleg DVD, doesn't make it legal. Not all illegal things involve arrest or prosecution. Lots of illegal things can only result in civil lawsuits. This is one of those things. The reason the seller of the bootleg DVDs can be arrested, is because the cities where bootleg sales are most common have laws specifically targeting the advertisement and sale of copyrighted works that were reproduced illegally. If you buy one, you're still violating the copyright and the MPAA could file a lawsuit if they had any evidence of your purchase and felt it was worth their time.
Chapter 28: Theft https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/1889/en18890039_199...
Chapter 2, Section 12: Reproduction https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/1961/en19610404.pdf
You are wrong regarding the copy of music being considered "stolen property" and your citation "Chapter 28: Theft" does not support your position. It lists many different types of theft NONE of the types of "theft" included there are in any way related to piracy or music.
You are right regarding that obtaining a copy of a song is apparently illegal.
- copyright violation happened before the intervention of the bot
- what LLMs spit out is different enough from any of the source that it is not infringing on existing copyright
If both stand, I'd compare it to you going to an auction site and studying all the published items as an observer, coming up with your research result, to then be sued because some of the items were stolen. Going after the theaves make sense, does going after the entity that just looked at the stolen goods make sense ?
What is this supposed to mean? The bot didn't "intervene," it was executed by its operators, and it was trained on illicit material obtained by its operators. The LLM isn't on trial. It's not a person.
Suppose I buy a copy of a book, but then I spill my drink in it and it's ruined. If I go to the library, borrow the same book and make a photocopy of it to replace the damaged one I own, that might be fair use. Let's say for sake of argument that it is.
If instead I got the replacement copy from a piracy website, are you sure that's different?
While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact.
And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone. Imagine a world where a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized, and could raise their children on these books!
For the world as a whole? Definite differences.
It just seems like a super jaded "kids these days" thing to hate on them for consuming easily accessed, free content- and acting like the global literacy and intellectual capital would remain unaffected.
I've never encountered a kid (other than my own) who has read:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
but have encountered many others who struggle with geometry.
Tell me these differences.
Shitty internet videos exist and are what kids want all over the world. At some point you are going to have to face it that reading lost the battle for people’s eyes to video. I was an avid reader for most of my childhood and young adult life but now in my 40s I have accepted that I’d just rather watch from the deluge of visual media available vs reading.
Piracy also exists for books so copyright doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. In fact if I look at the top pirated books currently I’m going to run across more junk books like “Make Money Faster” and “Give her orgasms in under 30 seconds” than anything you might find intellectually stimulating.
Any public-domain work is available on Project Gutenberg [0]. Copyrighted works can be accessed for free using tools of various legality: Libby [1] is likely sponsored by your local library and gives free access to e-books and audiobooks. Library Genesis [2] has a questionable legal status but has a huge quantity of e-books, journal articles, and more.
[0]: https://www.gutenberg.org
Libby is an interesting option, though I'm curious how many kids in disadvantaged countries would actually have access to it.
Regarding Libgen, I'm not convinced it makes the case for modern copyright to say it's fine, because people can just violate copyright.
I’d love to see an analysis of what % of books are available via libraries around the globe.
Also, the whole DRM thing is a massive pain, audiobooks especially are terrible at allowing side-loading onto a consumer friendly device (such as an MP3 player).
Even through interlibrary loan?
Aiding authors is an instrumental, not fundamental, purpose of copyright in the US; the fundamental purpose to which any instrumental purposes are subordinate is “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”.
That is, while copyrights are a form of property, they are not something that is seen as natural property, but instead property explicitly granted as a means of achieving a public policy goal, and therefore limitations (or even elimination) harming the owners of that property is not the kind of dispositive argument against a policy that would be with the kinds of property seen as natural property.
The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that. The question is how to prevent the few who are from oppressing the rest of us.
That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
Who is suing anyone for reading a book?
> The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that. The question is how to prevent the few who are from oppressing the rest of us.
Please get me in contact with your dealer because apparently the “legal” stuff I’ve been getting is not as potent as I thought.
> That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
Sure I’ve painted things that are on my wall and created lots of utility apps that I use personally but I keep them to myself. If I thought they were something that could get me some extra pocket money or better then I would be looking for ways to monetize. I have zero interest in sharing my potential intellectual property for free.
Please cite a single lawsuit.
> The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that.
Virtually everybody is "like that." The world works well because tons of people are working hard, toiling in difficult, dirty, boring, frustrating, or tedious jobs (or all of the above) behind the scenes to make it so. What are municipal waste workers seeking, if not money? Bus drivers? Construction workers? Police officers?
> That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
Any author or songwriter or photographer can proclaim his work to be freely copyable, just like programmers release code under MIT licenses. The fact that so few actually do, should clue you in on their incentives.
The government charges a tax on everyone. Revenue is handed to authors based on how many times the work is used.
There are some questions around how to weigh things like societal importance of the work.
(“Not melting down nuclear reactors for dummies” seems like it should get more money per view than “poodles in outer space vol XXXII”, despite likely having lower readership)
There are already many writers making thousands of dollars a month by publishing free serialized web novels, via Patreon. Some are using their own websites, but most are on Royal Road (or scribblehub, webnovel, wattpad, AO3).
A random example from Royal Road[1], the author makes $12065/month. Mind you, the text is not gated, it's free to read, the patreon only offers early access...
[1] https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive [2] https://www.patreon.com/Sleyca
The "patronage" model is great (and I personally am a Patreon supporter of lots of creatives). But it also has a lot of flaws in it, both for the author and the public. Most authors will be happy to tell you both the good and bad of the model, in my experience.
The biggest flaw for the public, btw, is that this model only supports art that "rich people" find worth supporting. This is bad, both because sometimes art isn't "deemed worthy" immediately, and because art for non-"rich" people is also very valuable.
As for art that isn't "deemed worthy immediately," that doesn't immediately make money in today's system either. If the art can be freely distributed, it's more likely to find its audience.
And very few artists are out there surviving on patrons giving them a dollar a month, I imagine. Most of them survive on larger pledges, and as far as I know, very few of them reach anywhere near the amount of money traditionally-published authors can make.
> As for art that isn't "deemed worthy immediately," that doesn't immediately make money in today's system either. If the art can be freely distributed, it's more likely to find its audience.
Yes, it doesn't make money immediately in today's system. But many authors collect a back-catalogue of works, which might pay out only a bit of money at a time, but over a career can be enough. If I publish a novel every year for 20 years, even if every novel only brings in a sprinkling of money per year, by year 20 I'm getting 20 sprinkling of money, which could be enough to sustain me.
Very few of these "middle of the road" authors are popular enough to survive on patronage alone, I believe.
---
At the end of the day, you think that "the internet" somehow made possible something that wasn't technically possible before. I think that's mostly not true - the technology was never the problem. That's why copyright exists in the first place - to make sure that, despite books being almost-zero-cost to reproduce, we put an actual limit on it in order for more books to be published.
If you want a different system, that's your prerogative. But you have to grapple with the tradeoffs here. If less money flows to authors - which would happen if you abandon copyright - then there will be less books. That's almost a law of economics. If you think that somehow you can make something like patreon scale up to the same amount of money that exists in "the system" today, then a) I disagree, and b) you'd still have to content with the issues I mentioned.
[1] I use that term in the neutral, economic sense
Is this some kind of pwn? Stephen King makes millions, JK Rowling likely a billionaire, Grisham, Patterson, Joan Collins, the list is endless. Didn't the 50 Shades of Grey author initially start with free fan fiction? Do you think these people are going to take a pay cut? And if your "random" author gets noticed by a publisher and is offered a book deal, do you think it will continue to be free?
420 thousand people work in the US film industry alone[1]. I doubt that there's that same number of people making ~living wage across every online patronage site in the United States (excluding advertisement-driven ventures, of course).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184412/employment-in-us-...
So it's still copyright, just without the 100 year protection.
If you went around posting their early access posts to a free website do you think the authors wouldn't complain?
> I'll explain later why this threat is a bluff. First I want to address an implicit assumption that is more visible in another formulation of the argument.
> This formulation starts by comparing the social utility of a proprietary program with that of no program, and then concludes that proprietary software development is, on the whole, beneficial, and should be encouraged. The fallacy here is in comparing only two outcomes—proprietary software versus no software—and assuming there are no other possibilities.
This, but with creative works instead. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html
I personally feel our copyright laws are too rigid, but that doesn't mean copyright shouldn't exist.
After x years, any book should be free to read, after y years, it should be free to be incorporated into AI models, after z years it should be in the public domain.
I don't get your point. Because we can, we shouldn't...?
The first U.S. copyright law set x = z = 14 years. That's why many people think copyright law is out of control.
People always forget the pareto principle when it comes to anti-piracy. No, they don't stop everyone, but a minor hurdle stops a hell of a lot of "ordinary" people
many of which form the basis for an education:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34630153
And most of which, when in copyright, paid their authors quite handsomely in terms of royalties.
If you believe that books should exist without copyright, then one has to ask --- how many books have you written which you have explicitly placed in the public domain? Or, how many authors have you patronized so as to fund their writing so that they can publish their works freely? Or, if neither of these applies, how do you propose to compensate authors for the efforts and labours of writing?
Lol
Edit: I should probably clarify here. While I can’t speak for OP, I can say that, for some reason, I am sure there are people who have done both lol
- the Shapeoko wiki (still available on archive.org)
- a couple of articles for TUGboat
- edited a couple of texts on wikibooks trying to make them better
- currently working on https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/
The Venn diagram of folks who don't believe in copyright and those who have actually produced something other folks want to read is quite sparse, excepting the odd manifesto.
Not to say I support no copyright…
How many texts are created which are explicitly placed in the public domain and from which the authors have made a conscious decision not to profit thereby?
How do you know that this benefit wouldn't exist in other schemes? Look at permissive open source software which is essentially public domain + shield from liability. No copyright does not mean no compensation. It just means different compensation that doesn't deprave other people of their right to share information.
Unlike GP, I support the complete abolishment of Copyright. Society needs to find another scheme to reward work. Perhaps kickstarter-style firms that direct oversight over funded projects or some other scheme that doesn't cause so much harm.
I still don't see how a person having copyright over the work which they have created and the ability to license it to their best profit is a harm.
From everything I've heard it kinda does. If you're writing something valuable then maybe a company will employ you to keep working on it, and the portfolio can certainly help in interviews (to write other software), but getting non-negligible compensation for the use of the software itself is rare. Even those projects that are well funded, like the Linux kernel, are done so not out of goodness of heart, but due to companies realising it's in their rational interest to have a common standard base of sorts
In terms of written works, the best comparison we have is Wikipedia, and while the foundation does receive funding from companies who realise how useful of an integration it can be for their products, the writers themselves do not get paid afaik (and when they do, it's rarely a good thing). But if you just wrote an open source textbook, I doubt you'll manage to make much money off it, and the prospects for fiction look even worse
> Perhaps kickstarter-style firms that direct oversight over funded projects
Sounds like a return to rich patrons and needing to flatter them to get grants. Luckily with the modern internet we do now have democratised layman patronage, but why the need to force everyone into that model? Also note that almost all successful Patreon artists do have perks for paying, even if it's just early access, and afaik make a lot of their money off commissions. Those who just post art for free, with no paid comms, and just have a "tip jar" make relatively little from what I hear
Successfully creating a permissive open source project expecting it to be magically funded by benevolent parties is just exceedingly rare. Usually the funding starts first, or effort proceeds in lock-step with funding.
There's a bit of a cart-and-horse here though. Non-permissive licenses like AGPL are often not the result of a single author hoping they might be able to negotiate some licensing deal in the future - it is the result of a commercial enterprise trying to be restrictive in the ability for people to use their source without compensating them.
Same with what is normally considered a more open license, than AGPL, the GPL - where MySQL was reported as going after others for using independent database drivers without buying a commercial license, saying use of the MySQL network protocol made the application using the driver a "derivative work" under the GPL.
Linux is a special case because there are a large number of commercial entities which realize contributing to Linux is way cheaper and faster than writing their own kernel and porting user land software to it.
Apache HTTPD, on the other hand, is an example of an application where corporations DID find the motivation to write their own alternative funded with a commercial model, such as NGINX.
p.s., I'm sure many of those vendors are not making money yet but they all aim to.
Most people who write non-fiction books do it because they want to contribute to human knowledge and be recognized as an expert in a particular field, not because they think that writing a differential geometry textbook is their path to riches. With the internet, more and more text books are made freely available by their authors - the reason this didn’t happen in the past is because there was no other way to pass knowledge around than teaming up with a publisher who is able to put your knowledge on to dead trees. It’s fair game to put older books on the internet, so that the whole world can benefit, not just rich people in rich countries.
The problems with authors making texts available directly are:
- no gate-keeping, so it's hard to find what is worth reading and what isn't
- no proofreading --- it kills me that errors in books are so casually accepted these days
- few authors have the skills to draw illustrations so as to have a meaningful and clear presentation
I've worked with raw author manuscripts --- in most instances they're not something anyone would choose to read given any other option.
Also you've said yourself that many people can and are offering their work for free. Awesome. So I would prefer not to force others to (though I would certainly be up to consider repealing many of the posthumous copyright extensions that are fairly recent)
The benefit of automobiles is that people move across vast distances.
Wrong. People used to move across vast distances before, using horses. Yes, automobiles are better and now traveling is easier. But we have no ability to figure out how many people would travel on horses if there wasn't a better alternative. It's even possible, that banning cars could eventually lead to an even better method of transportation (escaping a local minimum kind of a thing).
Authors who write books have tools to protect their interests, so they do so. Without these tools perhaps there would be less authors. Or maybe there would be more authors: I think Windows and Photoshop are so popular because they were pirated a lot; returning to the context of books, less and less people read them, but maybe if books (attractive books, not old books in public domain) were free, then the trend would reverse, books would popularize, people would start enjoying deeper entertainment, get smarter, transform the society for the better, and support authors on e.g. Patreon… Or maybe not, I'm just mentioning some nuance.
The link you posted that you say used public works to form a “basis for an education” uses Aristotle as an author for example, and seem to be taught in the context of an instructor-led class (where an expert can discriminate what’s still relevant today and help decipher the language)
There are countless well written resources for every aspect of a good education available for free online. They are often not as easy to find as their well-advertised modern equivalents.
Saying there aren’t good free textbooks is like saying there aren’t good free classics on Project Gutenberg. It’s ignorant.
Whatever standard of free service you establish, someone with resources can surpass, but needs to be motivated to do it by the perspective of a return of the resources spent.
So either hinder development by forbidding the commercial stuff altogether, or tax all people and then finance authors from public money, but hopefully I don't have to explain how wherever this model is tested, the society degrades towards famine.
“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
If the current copyright scheme does not promote the progress of science and useful arts, it is not performing as intended. All these copyright extensions do little to promote progress!
This is a strawman argument - the parent poster that you're replying to is defending copyright as a concept, while the one that they're replying to is attacking it - you're instead making an argument about specific lengths that hasn't come up yet, and nobody is defending.
Very few people (and I am not one of them) think that the "Mickey Mouse curve" style of copyright extension is genuinely useful to anyone except Disney, but holmesworcester is arguing that copyright should be abolished entirely, which contradicts the section of the Constitution that you quoted.
And? Is there some reason anybody, child or adult, deserves access to "every" anything? Should children have access to every video game ever made, every Matchbox car, every Lego set?
I really hope my children will have access to a higher tech version of something like the (discontinued?) toy where you could melt old crayons into toy car bodies. 3D printing is almost there, but ideally the end product of a Lego set could be recycled into new blocks easily and quickly.
https://github.com/EleutherAI/the-pile/blob/master/the_pile/...
A company that believes in strong intellectual property rights protection is using resources that blatantly ignore intellectual property rights to get access to the content for free.
I agree with you, however, that it's an argument in favor of abolishing strong intellectual property rights. At least for OpenAI's products.
Megacorps should buy 1 of every book (if they want to train on it)
No, copyright is the reason that authors all over the world are working very hard to make new books for my kids and everyone else's kids, despite never having met me. Copyright is the reason so many brilliant things are actually created that otherwise would never be.
Of course I'd prefer to live in a world in which I get all the media I want, for free. But I have no idea how to make such a world happen, and neither does anyone else, and humanity has been discussing this for a few centuries.
Btw, not a fan of "but what about the kids" rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
can you believe that people can be incentivized by means other than money?
People write for reasons other than money from the sales of the book. This accounts for most authors, who aren't famous enough to negotiate a great deal with a publisher.
And we don't need to abolish copyright outright. Just require that it is continually published at a steady or decreasing price, or it becomes public domain. And put works in the public domain a little sooner.
Yes, people write for other reasons (e.g., self-promotion). But that does not account for "most authors" I would actually want to read.
I'm not against copyright being different, especially for things that are written as work-for-hire. But that's a fight with Disney. Good luck.
No, it was established to make investing in printing presses more profitable, which is why the rights initially attached to printers. Authors as the locus of rights were a later change.
Yes, wealthy aristocrats wrote whatever they wanted and less wealthy authors wrote what they got paid to write by their wealthy aristocrat patrons.
Copyright and the publishing industry changed that to make it possible to live by writing for ordinary people.
Its disgustingly dishonest to appeal for "poor" authors where casual glance immediately proves that modern IP law exceedingly profits only a few massive corporations and their shareholders.
Nothing was stolen- just copied.
EDIT: ok, it's fun playing obtuse, but more seriously it is also very obtuse to pretend that intellectual property is not property. I think you have to be pretty stupid to not understand why an author who spends a decade painstakingly creating a work of literature is entitled to ownership of reproductions of that work.
Now you may believe the incredibly self-serving baloney from big companies like Google. You may want to pretend that infringement isn't theft. To you, I hope that some homeless kid breaks into your home, starts squatting, and says that, "Hey, this isn't theft. Nothing has been destroyed."
cool thing about information is when you make a copy, you've doubled the information - plenty for everyone! if only housing worked the same way
This typical semantic-pedantry line from piracy apologists misses the point - piracy is theft-adjacent even if you get to pick your use of "theft". Incidentally, my definition of "theft", and that of most content creators, includes the act of consuming something without compensating the creator on their terms - which includes piracy.
"I thought of it first! It was my idea!"
It is in no way comparable to theft.
While removing copyright without some form of mechanism to replace it would be problematic, and I do agree there are second order effects to consider, at least for books the effect may well be less than you'd think.
Copyright is ALSO the reason that many books can be written in the first place.
Obviously, Copyright is abused and the continual extensions of copyright into near-perpetuity by corporations is basically absurd. And they are abused by music publishers etc. to rip-off artists.
But to claim that it should not exist, when it is utterly trivially simple for anyone to copy stuff to the web is to argue that no one should create or release any creative works, or to argue for drastic DRM measures.
Perhaps you DGAF about your written or artistic works because you do not or can not make a living off them, but I guarantee that for those creatives and artists who can and/or do make a living off of it, they do care, and rightly so.
"Japan's incredibly strong economy is responsible for the manufacture of Datsun cars, boombox stereos, and touch-tone phones..."
This is emotionally manipulative speech that provides no value to HN and only serves the purpose of bypassing peoples' logical reasoning circuits.
> ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written
More manipulation - "think of the children!"
Copyright exists because people who produce content with low distribution costs (e.g. books) need some protection for their work being taken without compensation.
Fundamentally, you are never entitled to someone else's work.
There's already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books in the public domain, and tens of thousands more under Creative Commons licenses (where the author explicitly released their work for free distribution). There's lectures on YouTube and MIT OpenCourseWare. There's full K-12 textbooks on OpenStax and Wikibooks. There's Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, the Internet Archive, and millions of small blogs and websites hosting content that is completely free.
There is no need for "a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized" - and it's deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else's work without compensating them on their terms.
On top of that, knowledge moves too fast these days for a 20 year right to be useful for society.
For the life of a human, yes, for the life of a corporation, it's long but not too long. Specially for corporations such as Disney which are sure to last for quite a while.
Not saying this is a justificable position. I'm actually in favour of drastically reducing copyright (I believe 7 to 15 years might be a sweetspot). But a lot of laws are not made for regular human people any longer.
I was simply reminding people what direction we should go in, and what the stakes are. Reducing copyright terms is a great solution, and yes something between 2 and 12 years is probably the right number to aim for as a first step. I agree with the above commenter that 20 is far too long, because 20-year-old material is slipping into irrelevance in many cases.
It's also good to remember that the only reason we have copyright (in the US, where "moral rights" are not a thing) is to stimulate the creation of more work. So we need to think about what configuration of copyright law actually stimulates more work, and we need to be willing to experiment.
If I make a YouTube video and live another 60 years, then people copying that video would still be committing copyright infringement in the year 2150.
That's just insane.
This is fair but incomplete, you are not entitled to compel someone to work.
But copyright is more, it controls what is done with the work after the author freely produces it and gives it to another. It is an artificial construct that we have created for good reason.
No, not "gives" - sells. There's a transaction involved - and part of copyright law is preserving that transactional nature, such that person A doesn't sell their work exactly once to person B who proceeds to give it away for free to every other person on the planet.
The fact that the creator of a work sells it to one person does not give that person license to pirate it.
It is a bad system though. It restrains the society from benefitting from said work unless they meet certain terms (usually, payments). It's often times unrealistic to pay for all you'd like to consume. Especially that access to their work is usually badly quantised
(For example, I may want to search Sarah Silverman's book for a keyword, once. That'll cost me the same amount as someone reading the book from start to end. [please take this as an illustrative example and don't jump literally on ways to solve this exact problem])
I don't have a better solution yet, but I think we should definitely open up this discussion: can you come up with a system which compensates those who add value to society without restraining access to their products?
I'll go even further to say this is the fundamental issue in our society, way beyond copyright. That is, to find a way to compensate people for the value they add while eliminating the incentive to artificially limit access to resources needed by others
I'll be more concrete with another example. Take a limited resource: housing. In a society where you don't need to gain more because you're already justly compensated maximally for what you're worth, you don't need to own more than the house you live in. In other words, I'm advocating for a society where ownership is limited to what can be possibly consumed. Importantly, limited to no longer mean a way to extract value from artificially creating scarcity for others
I think this website has the best candidates capable of devising such a system. But we need to start by having conversations about the requirements for a better society
It will further need approval from society at large even if it's well defined, so the road is long. But we need to start somewhere, and that's requirements
Sorry I derailed a bit, but I think all this ties closely to the debate: 'is copyright a good system?' rephrased as 'if we want to achieve a goal, is limiting knowledge the best way to go?'. Which can be extrapolated to 'is artificially limiting access the best way to ensure those who produce value are equitably compensated for it?'
Compensation to the creators was merely a means to an end. Furthering progress was the goal:
> Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
But I'm willing to bet that you don't believe this consistently across domains, and the domains in which you do believe it have been selected rather arbitrarily, not by you but rather by industry lobbying pressure.
Copyright doesn't exist for mathematics, jokes, fashion designs, architectural styles, recipes, and many other areas of human work. All of these represent similar creative work to the work done by musicians and writers. But we don't force comedians to license each others' jokes, or sue bars for letting people tell unlicensed jokes in public. And almost all of us wear clothing by uncompensated designers. And of course it would be unfathomably destructive to allow something analogous to copyright for a mathematical idea.
We also set limits on how long heirs can inherit copyright, which we don't do for other kinds of property, and we don't have any moral issues with that.
So it's important to remember that our moral intuitions about work and material products don't really translate to information and that we are truly making all of this up as we go along, under the intense corrupting pressure of a few very sophisticated industry lobbies.
Why does money exist?
This is essentially the same as saying builders charging for houses is the problem with the housing market, so we're going to phase out paying builders.
It's been long understood that this idea isn't based on any real evidence. Creators create because they like to create things. Adding money to the mix tends to ruin most creative endeavours. Look up beautification or note how Googles only good search results involve the keyword Reddit.
It has nothing to do with creators.
People are regularly paying creators directly to create through patreon, super chats, advertising, early access, subscriptions, etc.
The idea that you need copyright to protect you is just not based in reality.
Get rid of copyright, creators will find a way to monetize it if they want to make a living doing it.
It's not society's job to protect your ability to get paid for your hobby. There are no original ideas, just people that write them down. You don't own them, you extracted these ideas from society, the least you can do is give them back.
A fair middle ground would be for copyrights to last for 20 or so years. That's plenty of time to profit from a work while allowing people to preserve and distribute older works.
Copyright is a horrible mess of individual judgements and opinions. Written material especially. And the same applies to AI. So now we will get a judgement which is a tech-illiterate judges best guess at the intention of a law written to deal with printing presses not AIs and no room for nuances.
It's simple, copyrighted materials can be used for academic research. That's what they are doing. Trying new AI modes, publishing results, etc. Facebook doesn't make money on LLaMA, they even require permission to use their models for, again, academic research.
This is the makers of AI explicitly saying that they did use copyrighted works from a book piracy website. If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. If you downloaded all of them, you would be liable for many billions of dollars in damages.
But companies like Google and Facebook get to play by different rules. Kill one person and you're a murderer, kill a million and to ask you about it is a "gotcha question" that you can react to with outrage.