Comment by daedrdev
14 hours ago
Japan has extremely favorable copyright laws to the holders. My understanding is that without explicit permission, there is no fair use and so any reproduction or modified work is only allowed as long as they don't request a takedown.
The belief that it's acceptable to copy or alter copyrighted material unless the rights holder objects is merely an assertion by those who violate copyright law. Barring a few exceptions such as citation or non-commercial use without internet distribution, you are generally prohibited from using someone else's creative work without their consent.
From tfa:
> Japan’s copyright law allows AI developers to train models on copyrighted material without permission. This leeway is a direct result of a 2018 amendment to Japan’s Copyright Act, meant to encourage AI development in the country’s tech sector. The law does not, however, allow for wholesale reproduction of those works, or for AI developers to distribute copies in a way that will “unreasonably prejudice the interests of the copyright owner.”
I wonder if you can download the copyrighted material without permission though? The article specifically states 'the scraping has been used by Perplexity to reproduce the newspaper’s copyrighted articles in responses to user queries without authorization'. They don't seem to be complaining about the training (legal), but the scraping.
Training a model isn't redistribution; only when you give someone a copy of the model can we think about there being a problem. At that point, you are not training, but redistributing a derived work.
tl;dr: If you are not directly affecting the "sales" of the product, you are good to go. But It seems perplexity did, and (as they might call it) directly trying to compete as a news source
Personally, About their news service, Their news summarization is kinda misleading with AI hallucination in some places.
Japanese copyright law still has a few statutory exceptions.