Comment by SilverElfin
13 hours ago
I don’t understand why corporations can violate copyright laws at hyper scale but individuals are banned from small scale piracy through authoritarian internet governance.
13 hours ago
I don’t understand why corporations can violate copyright laws at hyper scale but individuals are banned from small scale piracy through authoritarian internet governance.
Maxwell Tabarrok has a take on this, basically in his words:
> The confusion of intellectual property and property rights is fair enough given the name, but intellectual property is not a property right at all. Property rights are required because property is rivalrous and exclusive: When one person is using a pair of shoes or an acre of land, other people’s access is restricted. This central feature is not present for IP: an idea can spread to an infinite number of people and the original author’s access to it remains untouched.
> There is no inherent right to stop an idea from spreading in the same way that there is an inherent right to stop someone from stealing your wallet. But there are good reasons why we want original creators to be rewarded when others use their work: Ideas are positive externalities.
> When someone comes up with a valuable idea or piece of content, the welfare maximizing thing to do is to spread it as fast as possible, since ideas are essentially costless to copy and the benefits are large.
> But coming up with valuable ideas often takes valuable inputs: research time, equipment, production fixed costs etc. So if every new idea is immediately spread without much reward to the creator, people won’t invest these resources upfront, and we’ll get fewer new ideas than we want. A classic positive externalities problem.
> Thus, we have an interest in subsidizing the creation of new ideas and content.
And so you can reframe whether or not IP rights should be assigned in this case, based on whether you believe that the welfare generated by making AI better by providing it with content is more valuable for society than the welfare generated by subsidizing copyright holders.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/ai-copyright...
There's no inherent right to anything, really. The statements in whatever declaration or philosophy are just arbitrary lines. Physical property rights are just as arbitrary as the divine right if kings (and incredibly closely related when that property is inherited!)
The argument really isn't based on rights, it's based on the rules of the game have been that people that make things get to decide what folks get to do with those things via licensing agreements, except for a very small set of carve outs that everyone knew about when they made the thing. The argument is consent. The counter argument is one/all of ai training falls under one of those carve outs, and/or it's undefined so it should default to whatever anyone wants, and/or we should pass laws that change the rules. Most of these are just as logical as if someone invented resurrection tomorrow, then murder would no longer be a crime.
> the divine right if kings (and incredibly closely related when that property is inherited!)
These seem to be very different indeed. You only need to be able to own and give property to have inheritance.
If your property is owned by a monarch or de facto the state, and you work your lifetime to rent it from them, then you don't get inheritance.
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That's the standard rubric, but it doesn't actually answer the question of differential enforcement, which comes down to the usual questions: money and power.
In this case, the money and power are there precisely because people perceive AI as having the potential to reshape society, resulting in its creators receiving money and power, so it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation.
>the welfare generated by making AI better by providing it with content is more valuable for society than the welfare generated by subsidizing copyright holders.
Isn't the AI in this case also copyrighted intellectual property that benefits its owners and not the society? As far as I know, Perplexity is a private, for-profit corporation.
I don't see how improving Perplexity's proprietary models is any more beneficial to society than YouTube blocking ad blockers.
Because there is arguably more societal value in commercial AI being able to do tasks well than there is in users being able to avoid looking at ads on an ad-supported platform.
You should also look at the welfare generated by showing that all are equal under the law, versus showing that companies can get away with blatant lawbreaking if they can convince people that it’s for the greater good.
The proper way to decide this would be to pass a law in the legislature. But of course our system in general and tech companies in particular don’t work that way.
The USA tends to invest a great deal of legislative power in the courts, and as you mention the legislature isn’t very responsive nor effective, so this is what we get.
I actually think physical property rights are much more problematic than copyright.
Works are so sparse, and there is such an explosion in how many texts there are that when someone has a right to the exclusive use of one of these huge numbers that are almost unrepresentable, you lose almost nothing.
If someone didn't announce that they had written, let's say, Harry Potter and there was a secret law forbidding you from distributing it, that would be really bad, but it would never matter.
Copyright infringement is a pure theft of service. You took it because it was there, because someone had already spent the effort to make it, and that was the only reason you took it.
Land, physical property, etc. meanwhile, is something that isn't created only by human effort.
For this reason copyright, rather than some fake pseudo-property of lower status than physical property, is actually much more legitimate than physical property.
How one adjudicates ownership or authorship disputes under copyright is fundamentally different than disputes about land and property ownership. We can go to records and so on in each case, but a resolution would be different in each case, because they are different sorts of potential violations or transgressions.
I don’t think it’s as clear who is at fault if I mention “he who must not be named” in a hypothetical scenario where Harry Potter was never published, and then start telling people about the manuscript I found. If I violated someone’s rights to privacy or property to get or keep the original manuscript, that’s one thing, but merely having it even if the author didn’t want me to have it as a copy especially is another issue. If I never published it but merely described it to others, I’m not sure if I’m any less culpable, but it seems like I should be.
I’m not sure how much more I can explore your thought experiment, but I appreciate you for sharing it with me.
The law only exists for those without enough money and influence to control the enforcers.
They don’t even need control. It’s a version of the old saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars then you have a problem, but if you owe a billion dollars then the bank has a problem. If your company is important enough then it’s not possible (at least not politically) to punish it significantly. See also: 2008 and “too big to fail.”
Perplexity is still a small startup. If Enron and Theranos could be published then Perplexity can be punished. So far it's unclear whether they've done anything illegal.
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Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is just my interpretation of the situation from the comments above.
I don't have an answer to your question, which seems more general and doesn't correspond to the situation described by the article anyway: here the corporations have the right to use copyrighted materials to train their model, in the same way that you are allowed to learn from the same materials. You might even learn it by heart if you want to, but copyright laws forbid you from reproducing it, and in this instance the Japanese law tries to follow the same principle for AI models.
How should the corporations implement their training to prevent their models to reproduce the material verbatim is their problem, not the copyright holder's, in exactly the same fashion if you learn an article by heart, it's on you to make sure you won't recite it to the public.
> I don’t understand why corporations can violate copyright laws at hyper scale
Can they, though? Isn't that why Perplexity is being sued?
Learning isn’t copying and copyright only restricts copying. Are you comparing cases where individuals distribute copies to cases where corporations are not distributing copies? The difference seems clear.
Two different issues IMO. Piracy is depriving someone of payment for an item for which payment was expected. Neither you nor Perplexity may pirate a DVD that you didn't buy.
Copyright usually doesn't prevent copying per se, it's the redistribution that is violative. You, as well as Perplexity are free to scrape public sites. You'll both be sued if you distribute it.
Both corporations and individuals are banned from piracy, but both corporations and individuals can violate copyright laws at hyper scale until somebody stops them. Corporations are probably more likely to get sued, but also more likely to get a lawyer instead of completely losing their head over a legal threat.
Yanis Varoufakis would like to have a word with you
Its the same reason how Uber could run a ride service without taxi medallions and Air BnB can open home stays in your neighborhood. If there is enough money involved, the VCs in Silicon Valley know who to pay to get what they want.
Transformative usages of copyrighted material is very different than people consuming content thr way it was meant to be consumed for free.
Is it? Bulk downloading of every articles of a journal is OK if I train a neural network on it later, but accessing a single one without paying is not?
I'm not pirating, I'm AI model training. Got it!
Yes, you do understand why. In our societies, capital is king.
Do you understand this for other laws?
It is because corpprattions can pay lawmakers for this, just how they did in the case of copyright law. Welcome to "democracy".
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Things should not have escalated to the point where reasonable views need someone to escalate to the point of murdering a CEO to get heard
People should be involved in local communities. Waiting for solutions while watching TV (or youtube) won't do anything.
anthropic has lawyers and buys senators, aron swartz was one dude corporations could make an example of via the courts.