98
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
98 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
73944 readers
855 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
In theory, could you then just register as an AI company and pirate anything?
Well no, just the largest ones who can pay some fine or have nearly endless legal funds to discourage challenges to their practice, this bring a form of a pretend business moat. The average company won't be able to and will get shredded.
What fine? I thought this new law allows it. Or is it one of those instances where training your AI on copyrighted material and distributing it is fine but actually sourcing it isn‘t so you can‘t legally create a model but also nobody can do anything if you have and use it? That sounds legally very messy.
You're assuming most of the commentors here are familiar with the legal technicalities instead of just spouting whatever uninformed opinion they have.
You can already just pirate anything. In fact, downloading copyrighted content is not illegal in most countries just distributing is.
That would be hilarious if someone made a website showing how they are using pirated Nintendo games (complete with screenshots of the games, etc) to show how they are "training" their AI just to watch Nintendo freak out.
No, because training an AI is not "pirating."
If they are training the AI with copyrighted data that they aren't paying for, then yes, they are doing the same thing as traditional media piracy. While I think piracy laws have been grossly blown out of proportion by entities such as the RIAA and MPAA, these AI companies shouldn't get a pass for doing what Joe Schmoe would get fined thousands of dollars for on a smaller scale.
In fact when you think about the way organizations like RIAA and MPAA like to calculate damages based on lost potential sales they pull out of thin air training an AI that might make up entire songs that compete with their existing set of songs should be even worse. (not that I want to encourage more of that kind of bullshit potential sales argument)
The act of copying the data without paying for it (assuming it's something you need to pay for to get a copy of) is piracy, yes. But the training of an AI is not piracy because no copying takes place.
A lot of people have a very vague, nebulous concept of what copyright is all about. It isn't a generalized "you should be able to get money whenever anyone does anything with something you thought of" law. It's all about making and distributing copies of the data.
Where does the training data come from seems like the main issue, rather than the training itself. Copying has to take place somewhere for that data to exist. I'm no fan of the current IP regime but it seems like an obvious problem if you get caught making money with terabytes of content you don't have a license for.
A lot of the griping about AI training involves data that's been freely published. Stable Diffusion, for example, trained on public images available on the internet for anyone to view, but led to all manner of ill-informed public outrage. LLMs train on public forums and news sites. But people have this notion that copyright gives them some kind of absolute control over the stuff they "own" and they suddenly see a way to demand a pound of flesh for what they previously posted in public. It's just not so.
I have the right to analyze what I see. I strongly oppose any move to restrict that right.
It's also pretty clear they used a lot of books and other material they didn't pay for, and obtained via illegal downloads. The practice of which I'm fine with, I just want it legalised for everyone.
I'm wondering when i go to the library and read a book, does this mean i can never become an author as I'm tainted? Or am I only tainted if I stole the book?
To me this is only a theft case.
That's the whole problem with AI and artists complaining about theft. You can't draw a meaningful distinction between what people do and what the ai is doing.
i think that is a very important observation. people want to gloss over that when it might be the most important thing to talk about.
the slippery slope here is that you as an artist hear music on the radio, in movies and TV, commercials. All this hearing music is training your brain. If an AI company just plugged in an FM radio and learned from that music I'm sure that a lawsuit could start to make it that no one could listen to anyone's music without being tainted.
That feels categorically different unless AI has legal standing as a person. We're talking about training LLMs, there's not anything more than people using computers going on here.
So then anyone who uses a computer to make music would be in violation?
Or is it some amount of computer generated content? How many notes? If its not a sample of a song, how does one know how much of those notes are attributed to which artist being stolen from?
What if I have someone else listen to a song and they generate a few bars of a song for me? Is it different that a computer listened and then generated output?
To me it sounds like artists were open to some types of violations but not others. If an AI model listened to the radio most of these issues go away unless we are saying that humans who listen to music and write similar songs are OK but people who write music using computers who calculate the statistically most common song are breaking the law.
So streaming is fine but copying not
Streaming involves distributing copies so I don't see why it would be. The law has been well tested in this area.
Well how does the AI company consume the content?
Which company us "the AI company?"
Any AI company in question.
Well I agree in principle (I disagree that AI training is necessarily "stealing"), but downloading copyrighted material for which you do not own a license is textbook piracy, regardless of intent
It's exploiting copyrighted content without a licence, so, in short, it's pirating.
"Exploiting copyrighted content" is an incredibly vague concept that is not illegal. Copyright is about distributing copies of copyrighted content.
If I am given a copyrighted book, there are plenty of ways that I can exploit that book that are not against copyright. I could make paper airplanes out of its pages. I could burn it for heat. I could even read it and learn from its contents. The one thing I can't do is distribute copies of it.
It's not only about copying or distribution, but also use and reproduction. I can buy a legit DVD and play it in my own home and all is fine. Then I play it on my bar's tv, in front of 100 people, and now it's illegal. I can listen to a song however many times I want, but I can't use it for anything other than private listening. In theory you should pay even if you want to make a video montage to show at your wedding.
Right now most licenses for copyrighted material specify that you use said material only for personal consumption. To use it for profit you need a special license
It's about making copies, not just distributing them, otherwise I wouldn't be able to be bound by a software eula because I wouldn't need a license to copy the content to my computer ram to run it.
The enforceability of EULAs varies with jurisdiction and with the actual contents of the EULA. It's by no means a universally accepted thing.
It's funny how suddenly large chunks of the Internet are cheering on EULAs and copyright enforcement by giant megacorporations because they've become convinced that AI is Satan.
I'm absolutely against the idea of EULAs but the fact remains they are only enforceable because it's the copying that is the reserved right, not the distribution. If it was distribution then second hand sales would be prohibitable (though thanks to going digital only that loop hole is getting pulled shut slowly but surely).
Again, they are not universally enforceable. There are plenty of jurisdictions where they are not.
Copyright laws are not universally enforceable in general, so I fail to see your point. They are enforceable in the US where the big AI companies looking for a free lunch are operating though so let's focus on that shall we?
If I have to pay to use copyright material to train my own Actual Intelligence, I don't see why companies with massive development budgets should get to use vastly more material to train their "AI" models for free.