Comment by petesergeant
4 months ago
I am curious what happens if they call their bluff on this and cut off ChatGPT in Germany. Not that I think OpenAI is doing the right thing, just, I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace.
There are many competing providers of commercial LLMs with equal capabilities, so another vendor would probably be happy to serve a leading Western market of 83 million people.
Yeah? Which commercial provider’s model do you think was trained without using lyrics?
The point is that some other vendor will do the work to implement the filtering required by Germany even if OpenAI doesn't.
I would imagine providers who want to comply will scan the LLM's output and pay a license fee to the owner if it contains lyrics.
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There are 80 million Germans. If you where OpenAI, or it's shareholders, would you leave that market open for a competitor? No, you'd make a version of your product without the lyrics. More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence. Should OpenAI just pull out of a market with 500 million people and leave it to Claude, Perplexity or someone else entirely?
It doesn't appear that modern LLMs are really that hard to build, expensive perhaps, but if you have monopoly on a large enough market, price isn't really your main concern.
> More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence.
That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries. Courts/the legal system in Germany can not set legal precedents for other countries, and countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws. It could be cited as an authority, but no one is obligated to follow that.
What could happen for example, would be that EU law is interpreted through the CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union), and its rulings bind EU member states, but that's outside of what individual countries do.
Sidenote, I'm not a English native speaker, but I think it's "precedent", not "precedence", similar words but the first one is specifically what I think you meant.
> That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries
yes, even if just looking at other court cases in Germany the role of precedent is "in general" not quite as powerful (as Courts are supposed to follow what the law says not what other courts say). To be clear this is quite a bit oversimplified. Other court ruling does still matter in practice, especially if it is from higher courts. But it's very different to how it is commonly presented to work in the US (can't say if it actually works that way).
but also EU member states do synchronize the general working of many laws to make a unified marked practically possible and this does include the general way copy right works (by implementing different country specific laws which all follow the same general framework, so details can differ)
and the parts which are the same are pretty clear about that
- if you distribute a copy of something it's a copy right violation no matter the technical details
a human memorizing the content and then reproducing it would still make it a copy right infringement, so it should be pretty obvious that this applies to LLMs to, where you potentially could even argue that it's not just "memorizing it" but storing it compressed and a bit lossy....
and that honestly isn't just the case in the Germany, or the EU, the main reason AI companies got mostly away with it so far is due to judges being pressured to rule leniently as "it's the future of humanity", "the country wouldn't be able to compete" etc. etc. Or in other words corruption (as politicians are supposed to change laws if things change not tell judges to not do their job properly).
countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws
The seminal authority for all copyright laws, the Berne Convention, is ratified by 181 countries. Its latest revisions are TRIPS (concerning authorship of music recordings) and the WIPO Copyright Treaty (concerning digital publication), both of which are ratified by the European Union as a whole. It's not directly obvious to me that EU member states have different laws in this particular area.
That said, the EU uses the civil law model and precedent doesn't quite have the same weight here as it does under common law.
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>That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries. Courts/the legal system in Germany can not set legal precedents for other countries, and countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws. It could be cited as an authority, but no one is obligated to follow that.
Do you have some sort of different understanding of copyright law where it's legal to commercially use lyrics (verbatim, mind you) without a license?
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> I think it's "precedent", not "precedence",
I think you're right, also not native English speaker.
No, you're right that a German can't influence e.g. the similar lawsuit against Suno in Denmark, but as you point out, it can, and most likely will be cited, and I think it's often the case that this carries a lot of weight.
This assumes that tech companies can act above the law because they've got a new feature to jam down our throats. Have you considered that not everyone wants that? Or that it might not be the best thing?
> Have you considered that not everyone wants that? Or that it might not be the best thing?
Did I suggest either of those things?
Conversely, last week we had Spain being willing to cut off Cloudflare (!) to protect football match royalties.
> I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace.
Counter-argument: can any country's government justify allowing its population and businesses to become completely dependent on an overseas company which does not comply with its laws? (For Americans, think "China" in this case)
In curious why you think the rule of law is a bluff.
I come from the country with the world’s oldest continuous parliament, and they change the law all the time. Arguably that’s all the majority of politicians do.
Probably pattern recognition
German student performance will plateau, while all other countries slowly decline.
AI is actively harming kids' abilities while inflating their grades when they make AI do their homework.
German student performance may plateau, but when student performance in other countries falls, that still leaves them in a better place.
> cut off ChatGPT in Germany
God I can only hope
first due to how the EU unified marked works they would have to cut it from all of the EU not just Germany
second it probably would be good for the EU and even US as it would de-monopolize the market a bit before that becomes fully impossible
Claude and Gemini would become more popular.
> I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace
They're not saying no LLMs, they're saying no LLMs using lyrics without a license. OpenAI simply need to pay for a license, or train an LLM without using lyrics.
But lyrics are just one example. Are you saying that training experiments must filter out all substrings from the training input that bear too close a resemblance to a substring of a copyrighted work?
Obviously there's a limit, reproducing a single sentence is unlikely to be copyright infringement just because there are only so many words in a language; but if reproducing some text would be copyright infringement if a human did it, I don't see why LLM companies should get a free pass.
If it's really essential that they train their models on song lyrics, or books, or movie scripts, or articles, or whatever, they should pay license fees.
At some point, use of the lyrics becomes de minimis
Oi, you got a loisense to read those words and then repeat them back to me when asked?
I take it you think copyright shouldn't exist at all, then?
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This obviously applies to all copyrighted works. I could sue OpenAI when it reproduces my source code that I published on the Internet.
They already "filter" the code to prevent it from happening (reproducing exact works). My guess it is just superficially changing things around so it is harder to prove copyright violations.
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