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Threads' New Terms & Conditions Affects the Fediverse
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Technology
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The only permission needed is to look at it.
That's a public performance, which is a form of redistribution. That's not relevant to AI training.
[citation needed]
The goalposts just swung wildly. Who's posting medical records on the Fediverse?
Except for being banned from using public data that non-American AIs are able to use.
Also, the undefined "ethical" term is a new goalpost just brought into this discussion as well. I've found its use to be unhelpful, it always boils down to meaning whatever the person who's using it wants it to mean.
Copyright law defines whether or not you can make a copy of a work. The person who owns the copyright can deny permission to make any copies, or grant you to make a permission to make a copy only under certain conditions. Those conditions are completely up to the copyright holder. They might prohibit public performance, but by no means is public performance the only thing that the copyright holder can prohibit. It's simply a very common prohibition.
You are trying to trying to generalize from a specific right, viewing the content on a browser, to a general right to "look" at the content, to the right to train an AI. But legally those are not the same at all. You may be granted some, all, or none of those rights.
Suppose you are in a modern art gallery. You have been given the right to "look" at someone's art. You can nevertheless be prohibited from making a photograph of the art, even if the camera is also "looking" at it. The owner of the art can attach whatever conditions they want to your photo, including how long you can keep it and exactly what you do with it.
For example you could be allowed to photograph the art for home use but not for wider distribution. You could be allowed to photograph the art for classroom use, but not for AI training. If you are not willing to follow all of the conditions, then you can't make a photo of the art at all.
The same is true of text. Websites give permission to make a copy of their text for use on your browser. And they can set whatever rules they like for how else your copy may be used.
Sure. Of course, America could also ban those non-American AIs from being used in the US. Just as America bans other products that infringe patents/IP.
Copyright holders are not kings, there are limits to the sorts of things they can prohibit. And in the specific case we're discussing they have already given permission for their posts to be viewed by the public. You're getting lost in irrelevancies. If you want to get pedantic, set up a camera facing a browser and let the AI train that way.
If the use of AI is banned within the US I don't think Hollywood will be happy about that, or all the other big content producers that America is known for. The business will move elsewhere.
Copyright holders can prohibit all use of their work. If they can prohibit all use, then they can prohibit any specific use.
And they rarely give a wide-ranging "permission for their posts to be viewed by the public." That's like saying "I can do whatever I want with this source code, the developer gave permission for the code to be viewed by the public." The legal language is often far more specific. There may be prohibitions on commercial usage, requirement for attribution, or even requirements that future code be licensed in a similar manner. There is almost always fine print when content appears to be "free".
Of course, it's possible that you could find a creative way around the legalese. Pointing a camera at a browser may work, until the fine print changes to prohibit that too. But anyway, that's not what AI developers have done in the past. So one way or another, they may be forced to change their ways.
Hollywood and other big businesses will still find a way to train AI as usual. They are already used to paying musicians when a song is used in a movie. They can easily pay copyright holders for a license to use content as training data. It's far safer - and more efficient - to pay up than try to get around the rules with a camera pointed at a screen. As a bonus, content creators who contribute training data may benefit from royalties.
Nevertheless, I think it will become more difficult for people who think they can easily get "free" training data from the web, just like 20 years ago when people thought they could easily get "free" music from Napster.
No, as I said, copyright holders aren't kings. You're not well versed in the details of copyright law. There are a lot of things that a copyright holder can't prohibit you from doing with their work once it's been published, the only way they can prohibit all use of their work is to never publish it in the first place.
Again, you're getting lost in irrelevancies. We're talking about information people have posted to the Fediverse. That's a system that's inherently designed to display that information to any computer that asks for it and to mirror it around to other computers to store and likewise display on request. If you didn't want all that to happen you should never have posted it in the first place.
There are situations where permission is not required to use copyrighted material, mainly "fair use". But AI training often does not qualify as fair use.
Otherwise, intellectual property is treated similarly to other types of property. For example, the person who owns a car can give you permission to use it. That doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it. The owner gets to set the rules. They aren't "kings", but as owners they do have near complete control over what you can do with their car.
When you upload something to social media, you (the content owner) give the host permission to display your content. That does not mean users who view your content have permission to do whatever they want with it.
There is plenty of open source code posted into repositories that are extensively mirrored, yet the code has lengthy conditions attached to it. If you use it in violation of the stated license, you could find yourself on the losing end of a lawsuit.
There are plenty of photographs posted onto Instagram, which is also designed to display them to anyone who asks. If a professional photographer finds that you've used one of their Instagram photos without permission, you could find yourself on the losing end of a lawsuit.
And the Fediverse may be a non-commercial decentralized platform, but copyright protection doesn't magically disappear here. You give servers a license to display what you wrote, but you may reserve the same rights over your IP as software developers and photographers do over their own.
[citation needed]
Ha!
Intellectual property is nothing like physical property. It has nothing in common with it. If it did, why isn't copyright violation literally "stealing"? People love to throw the word "stealing" around in the context of copyright violation, but they're completely different areas of law and work completely differently.
It's no wonder that people get weird about AI training if they are laboring under this basic misunderstanding.
That's all an AI needs in order to get trained on something. They just need to see it.
No, that's not remotely what I said and I have no idea how you were able to derive it from that.
If it "rewrites" it as in it literally makes a copy-and-paste duplicate, then that's covered by the existing copyright. And that's also a failure of an AI because there are far easier ways to copy a text file.
If it "rewrites" it as in it makes a distinct book that tells the same basic story but is different in the details, then that's a new work and either gets a new copyright or is in the public domain (depending on how various lawsuits pan out and what jurisdiction you're in).
You are being deliberately obtuse.
As I already said, fair use is generally not granted when it entails competition with the original work. See above regarding movie reviews vs copying an entire film.
Legally, property is something that has an owner. IP has an owner, and like other types of property it can be transferred to another owner and become the subject of contracts.
IP cannot be "stolen", and I never said it could be. Real estate cannot be "stolen" either, yet real estate is still property.
For someone who thinks other people are "weird" about legal language, you keep making the same mistakes.
When people "see" something, they do not need to create a copy of it in the legal sense. When I look at an old photograph, legally I do not create a copy of the photograph.
AI do not "just see" data. They need access to an electronic copy of the data. An AI cannot "see" an old photograph unless they first create a local copy of the photograph. There is a significant legal difference.