Comment by reinitctxoffset
21 hours ago
How is distillation an "attack" but gigascraping the Internet to the point of crashing servers and everyone needs Cloudflare and Anubis now not an "attack"?
I'm not aiming for a what about kickflip here: I'm saying we need to either agree on some rules or stop crying foul. Maybe the coherent legal theory is that neural networks and intellectual property don't interact. That would be weird but it would be consistent, a market could price it, I could do coding stuff and know if I was illegaling.
But this weird gerrymander that no judge will really rule on in an emphatic way is like, bad for the planet, bad for markets, bad business.
There are a lot of reasons to look forward to DeepSeek Huggingface drop kicking the unambiguous frontier weights in like, November, but I think my favorite one will be "who's distilling now bitch?"
I think you've basically got the legal theory. Training a neural network isn't prohibited by copyright law so if you can legally get your hands on something (e.g. by sending a GET request to someone with rights to serve the contents of their web page, or by buying a book) without signing a contract to not train on it, you can train on it.
But the American AI companies only let you query their models if you first sign a contract to not train on the output.
It's hypocrisy and unfair, but I think there's a strong legal argument for it.
Of course China can simply decline to assist in enforcing that contract... But I would expect US courts to do their best to.
The penalties for breach of contract are much less than for copyright infringement. Breaching contracts and paying the penalties is often a viable business strategy. You're supposed to make the other side whole for any losses they incurred due to you not following it.
> to someone with rights to serve the contents
Now THAT'S doing some heavy lifting lmao. The vast, vast, VAST majority of the original datasets were from pirated books and the like. Also, arguably a robots.txt is the exact mechanism to follow to do the mass GET-ing, yet the AI cos choose time and time and time again to simply ignore it and be as abusive as they possibly fucking can
> The vast, vast, VAST majority of the original datasets were from pirated books and the like
And there's been significant legal consequences as a result
> Also, arguably a robots.txt is the exact mechanism to follow to do the mass GET-ing
You're free to argue this of course, but the courts have largely rejected it already pre LLMs. See for example hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn
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Contract law is never going to prevent this.
Why not? Seems like a perfectly normal contact term to me.
Or do you just mean that US courts don't have enough teeth to prevent Chinese companies from violating contracts? On that I agree.
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> It's hypocrisy and unfair, but I think there's a strong legal argument for it.
That right there is the problem.
> but I think there's a strong legal argument for it.
Maybe today. I doubt it tomorrow. Legal and not legal, largely, has to answer to the population sooner or later. Ultimately, humanity decides legality. And I don't think the frontier labs will get a pass from humanity in the midterm, let alone the long term. I think you'll see the rules change towards something more "intent" driven. And there's absolutely no difference in intent between Frontier labs and everyone chasing them.
Frontier labs just want the door closed behind them, as do their investors, because they know the money will never be recouped if others can do the same magic tricks.
Eh, I think you've done a pretty good job summarizing a collection of settlements with a few narrow bench rulings for seasoning. I'm not sure I follow you to it being a coherent legal theory. Buying a book in a bookstore is sure legal, and excerpting from it for e.g. literary criticism is pretty settled. Downloading every torrent of all e-books ever is pretty clearly illegal (or at least it fuckin would be if I did it). Pretty sure like, multiple labs have been popped for that though.
Situation right now seems more like a fragile detente: if you got a Hill staffer drunk and hounded him long enough he'd probably be like "God damnit the market will fucking tank if we don't get these two IPOs out north of a trillion. And don't even get me started on how I'm going to sell Chinese AI to a Senate that still calls people Nipponesians when no one is looking. We're doing the best we can alright, get off my back man."
We have a situation, but it's not exactly A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster.
> Downloading every torrent of all e-books ever is pretty clearly illegal (or at least it fuckin would be if I did it). Pretty sure like, multiple labs have been popped for that though.
Oh it is, and at least anthropic has paid $1.5 billion and deleted there torrented copies and not released any models derived from them as a consequence.
The thing is it turns out to be not that expensive to just buy a copy of every book legally and scan them. And there's even precedent that this is legal predating LLMs (Google books)
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Knowlege should not have ownership. Training and distillation should be allowed
Granting people some form of control over knowledge only serves the public interest inasmuch it provides incentive to create more of it. Mass media, effortless duplication, and copyright extensions had already broken this to the point where control of knowledge was suppressing creation of new knowledge more than it facilitated.
The world has changed, we need a mechanism that works for the public interest that applies to the facts as they now are.