Comment by marssaxman

They are not free to do whatever they like, there are tomes of laws across all countries governing what someone can and cannot do with your intellectual property. Just because we didn't have the foresight to add in a "if by chance in the future someone invents artificial intelligence, that's not fair use" is a shame, but doesn't make what these companies are doing ethical or morale.

I don't disagree regarding Google, I also think they exploited others IP for their own gain. It was once symbiotic with webmasters, but when that stopped they broke that implied good faith contract. In a sense, their snippets and widgets using others IP and no longer providing traffic to the site was the warning shot for where we are now. We should have been modernising IP laws back then.

What if that data isn’t publicly posted? For example, copilot regurgitating code from private repos, complete with comments.

Proper term for it is Computer Assisted Plagiarism, CAP for short. Also, I really hope that Google doesn't claim it created sites it crawl for search their engine.

Ok so if I publish under a license saying I don't allow for it to be used for AI do you believe they respect it? What word would you use to describe this violation? Go ahead throw up a robots.txt, throw up a license. You will be able to coax the "fair use" stochastic parrots to render it verbatim.

Sam Altman and his ilk are exploiting the incredibly slow moving legal system to enrich themselves.

It's not about the downloading of the data, it's about its use in training models, which is dubious from a copyright perspective.

That is not at all how the internet works. Try to download music from Napster and Lars will sue your ass.

  > where it can freely be downloaded by anyone at any time, by people who are then free to do whatever they like with it on their own hardware

I think you have a strong misunderstanding of the law and the general expectation of others.

I'd like to remind you that a lot of celebrities face legal issues for posting photos of themselves. Here's a recent example with Jennifer Lopez[0]. The reason these types of lawsuits are successful is because it is theft of labor. If you hire a professional photographer to take photos of your wedding then the contract is that the photographer is handing over ownership of the photos in exchange of payment. The only difference here is that the photo was taken before a contract was made. The celebrity owns the right to their body and image, but not to the photograph.

Or think about Open Source Software. Just because it is posted on GitHub does not mean you are legally allowed to use it indiscriminately. GitHub has licenses and not all of them are unrestricted. In fact, a repo without a license does not mean unfettered usage. The default is that the repo owner has the copyright[1].

  > You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work.

A big part of what will make a lawsuit successful or not is if the owner has been deprived of compensation. As in, if you make money off of someone else's work. That's why this has been the key issue in all these AI lawsuits. Where the question is about if the work is transformative or not. All of this is in new legal territory because the laws were not written with this usage in mind. The transformative stuff is because you need to allow for parody or referencing. You don't want a situation where, say... someone including a video of what the president has said to discuss what was said[2]. But this situation is much closer to "Joe stole a book, learned from that book, and made a lot of money through the knowledge that they obtained from this book AND would not have been able to do without the book's help." Just, it's usually easier to go after the theft part of that situation. It's definitely a messy space.

But basically, just because a piece of art exists on public property does not mean you have the right to do whatever you want with it.

  >  is equally a description of Google.

Yes and no. The AI summaries? Yeah. The search engine and linking? No. The latter is a mutually beneficial service. It's one thing to own a taxi service and it is another to offer a taxi service that will walk into a starbucks take a random drink off the counter and deliver it to you. I'm not sure why this is difficult to understand.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2qqew643go

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY

But they didn't only train on information the creators made freely available. They trained on copyrighted materials obtained illicitly.

> "Having machines consume large volumes of data posted on the Internet for the purpose of generating value for them without compensating the creators" is equally a description of Google.

Quid pro quo. Those sites also received traffic from the audiences searching using Google. "Without compensation" really only became a thing when Google started adding the inlined cards which distilled the site's content thus obviating the need for a user to visit the aforementioned site.

I find LLMs extremely useful but I think the difference is that they regurgitate the content (not verbatim) instead of a link to it. This is not unlike how a human might tell their friend about it.

Because they have terms of service they have to adhere to. We need laws to be lawful.

Anthropic downloaded books from Library Genesis and The Pirate Library mirror. This is factual and reported on from court documents.

What’s the angle that describes this as fair use?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-cut-pirated-millio...

No one gave them permission to access their webservers back then either. Before it's cited that there is precedent in law, that is in the US. No such precedent exists in my country, and our laws suggest that unauthorized access regardless of "gates up or down" would constitute trespassing. There are also no protections for scrapers coming out of prior lawsuits, and copying copyrighted material is of course illegal.

Which is just to point out that the world wide web is not its own jurisdiction, and I believe AI companies are going to be finding that an ongoing problem. Unlike search, there is no symbiosis here, so there is an incentive to sue. The original IP holders do not benefit in any way. Search was different in that way.

Search engines never claimed that their content was orignal, and redirect to the original author (which gets proper retribution)