I believe copyright terms in the US are too long and should be more like 20 years, but I do not believe everything should be a free for all where any person or any program can immediately reuse any idea.
Length of time for copyright right now is life of the author plus 70. Which seems insane to me.
Length of time for a patent is 20 years now.
If someone is using my IP for personal enjoyment or learning that's great but if they're using it to make megabucks like openAI and others intend to do then I want my cut.
If someone comes up with a new machine, why publish it if it's legal for every factory and large company to start producing them without compensating the inventor? Why sell it yourself if any big company can immediately clone it and undercut your price?
As for "works", I also disagree. Consider music: two artists may have unique performances of a piece, but the composition exists separate from either.
Because you want to make money? There will always be a period in which you exclusively are manufacturing and marketing your machine, before your hypothetical evil omni-corp manages to clone it. Reverse engineering takes time, and (fair, enforced) competition on manufacturing means that we converge on the true cost to manufacture a good faster.
New fashion trends have clones in online stores in days. Unofficial accessories and cases are available before product launches. Crowdfunded campaigns for hardware have clones on Alibaba before the funding campaign is over.
Sure, this is the goal of the patent system. You'll note that patents are intended for inventions, for ideas of practical value. Artworks without practical value are explicitly not protected by the patent system, nor are ideas without the necessary design components.
How would extending this system to ideas of pure form, rather than function, benefit society?
I don't want to change this! Let's not use "AI" as an excuse to tighten copyright even further. Last thing I want is more "Blurred Lines" style lawsuits[0].
[0] https://www.berklee.edu/berklee-today/summer-2015/coda/richa...
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023...
Do you think a small scale artist can get their style placed in the naughty list or just people with enough money and clout to sue?
Interestingly "Disney" and "Disney's Frozen" styles passed on.
https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-...
When I watch a painting in a gallery and after a few weeks I paint something inspired by what I saw, am I breaking the copyright law?
If I sell such a painting, am I breaking the copyright law?
I guess it also depends on how much the painting is similar. Is it an outright copy? Is it lure plagiarism? Is it just inspired by?
Does it matter whether I paid the museum or bought the book where I saw the picture?
The algorithm leaks 1:1 personal details of people, which means that they didn't care to sanitize the data, which is an obvious oversight, you're not really doing a great job of being the devils advocate if you ask me.
Which would usually require prompting about certain people or about certain bodies of personal information. What does this have to do with copyright? Claiming that a model as a whole infringes (infringes on which works?) is separate from claiming that a particular model output infringes on a particular work. Under current copyright law I think that the question of infringement doesn't apply to models. How do you compare an apple tree to a pear? Copyright is about actual similarity between new works and actual existing works first, method of creation (including theoretical reproduction of style, style not being an actual work) second.
Pasting what I wrote in a different comment:
My argument is that similarity of new works (including AI model outputs) to actual works (not to non-existing works, existing styles, or theoretical aggregations of multiple works) is a prerequisite to infringement. From an article about the substantial similarity test in the US [1]:
> To win a claim of copyright infringement in civil or criminal court, a plaintiff must show he or she owns a valid copyright, the defendant actually copied the work, and the level of copying amounts to misappropriation.[1][3]
In order to get an infringing output, the user usually has to include a reference to an existing author or an existing work in the prompt. Sometimes that's not the case (which I've worried about with respect to Copilot), but in order to damn the model as a whole, you would have to establish that in over some percentage of cases the model produces infringing outputs for prompts which don't reference a particular author (whether individual or collective), a particular work, or a style strongly associated with a single or a few authors.
It couldn't possibly be that there's a more nuanced position in the middle, where people are justifiably angry at IP laws being abused by big companies to abuse and disenfranchise smaller creators, but are also justifiably angry at generative ML projects (run by big companies) hoovering up everyone's work in order to profit off reproducing it ad infinitum—thus abusing and disenfranchising smaller creators.
No, it must be that people are just that fickle.
This argument implies that AI scientists have replicated the human mind. Despite the hype, they have not. The two processes are not the same, nor is the nature of the "training data" both entities have been trained on.
> This argument implies that AI scientists have replicated the human mind.
No, MightyBuzzard was not necessarily making an argument about the way the human mind is. Suppose that an AI model is prompted to make an image in X artist's style, and a human is commissioned to make an image in the same X artist's style. The result from the AI model cannot be ex-ante assumed to be more of a reproduction of X artist's actual works than is the result from the human. What matters first is the actual similarity of the new works to one or more old works. The method of creation of the new work comes second. If the style of the new work is similar to the style of the old work but the new work is not actually substantially similar to any of the old works, then the method of creation doesn't matter.
From an article about the substantial similarity test in the US [1]:
> To win a claim of copyright infringement in civil or criminal court, a plaintiff must show he or she owns a valid copyright, the defendant actually copied the work, and the level of copying amounts to misappropriation.[1][3]
The key phrase is "the work". An actual work, not a style.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity#Substan...
Artists, writers, and coders are rightly angered when I can simply say "make a painting of XYZ in the style of Foo", and have a painting rendered that is nearly an exact copy of an item in the training set. Similar analogy for writing or code.
I see now that when trying to specify an image of an impossible object with ChatGPT4+DALL-E, it will balk if I say "like an Escher object". I have to be more verbose, and it will not render his signature style.
As long as particular artistic or writing or coding styles aren't specify-able and generate-able, this seems like a reasonable fair use solution, and does not require us to suddenly become copyright maximalists. (Without such prohibitions on generation of similar works, we must become copyright maximalists.)
“We should allow AI to have unilateral access to licensed works for free cause then we will have to restrict human artists otherwise”
We already have separated digital and human artist laws and the law has, thus far, not had too much trouble accidentally thinking that humans are CPUs and vice versa.
The nightmare scenario I see is, if this principle is established for AIs, it will not just be restricted to AIs. Human artists too will eventually be required to only create new commercial works under license, based on the artistic works they have been exposed to. The result will that it be impossible to be create art commercially except by working for a large content company with a large existing IP library and cross-licensing agreements with other rights holders.
And if you think this is an impossible scenario, ask yourself when lawyers, lobbyists and politicians have ever shrank from expanding legal rights for corporations at the expense of individuals, even when the vast majority of people would not agree to the expansion. Today's absurdity is tomorrow's legal reality, and the chance to fully control creative expression will be far too tempting to turn down.