Comment by DonsDiscountGas
1 month ago
> then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
Yes it is, in the legal/copyright sense of fair use. That's why they ban it in their TOS. Which customers agree to when signing up for the service.
My website’s TOS says not to use it to train AI without permission, yet my website is in the training set of all the big models.
So… my TOS doesn’t matter, but theirs does?
> my TOS doesn’t matter, but theirs does?
Wilhoit Conservatism: In-groups protected by contract law but not bound by it, alongside out-groups bound by contract law, but not protected by it.
Yes - yours is just some optional text nobody reads or understands and is probably not legally required to adhere to. Theirs is a contract signed by their customer who they know did understand it.
Accessing the site may already mean that you agree to TOS. Also if you don’t see an explicit copyright terms on some text on the internet it doesn’t mean that it’s public domain. Same as checking a checkbox. Text being small and somewhere is not an excuse for a corporation to steal and sell other people’s work.
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Interesting. So what makes theirs not “optional text nobody reads or understands”?
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The term "matters" is proportional to influence. Do you have a team of well financed attorneys?
Your TOS matters insofar as you can prove a person actually read and agreed to it. These are illegal in different ways:
1. Copyright violations (can put you in jail) 2. TOS violations (will be a fine at worst)
Companies do get away with drive-by legal shittiness way too often and frankly the practice needs to be reined in, but at the end of the day the only damages are the financial ones you can prove in court.
And what if the LLM ingested and “understood” it as part of its training?
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L1 contracts class: offer, acceptance, and consideration.
The content of the site is subject to licence for making copies. So you’re saying licences don’t matter?
The GPL established this rather clearly. Copyright law doesn’t require consideration.
(The licence itself is a basic BSD licence, so it just requires attribution including in marketing materials, which obviously hasn’t happened.)
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So what you are saying is that, if I can somehow get my hands on a copy of Fable, it's fair use to use it to train any models and serve those, since I'm no longer bound by the TOS of the service provider?
Asking for all Anthropic employees who dream big.
How long until books come with TOS, then?
Damn now im looking forward to the day when books end up like physical game disks, where somehow you're not buying the book just a license to it, what a boring dystopia this is lol
As usual, Stallman already predicted this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
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Common for college textbooks to have some digital-only component accessed with a one-time key inside the cover. Sometimes time-limited to a single semester.
Have you ever heard of Amazon? Kindle?
Many of them do already and have for decades
Can you please provide a specific example?
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I suspect first-sale doctrine doesn’t allow such.
However, if content is “licensed” instead of “sold” …
They kind of do. There's usually a big scary notice on the imprint page scolding you for even thinking about piracy
We are talking of TOS independent of copyright law.
So far, we have one ruling that says "model distillation by vendor A from vendor B with the intent to use the results to compete with vendor B in vendor B's domain is not fair use". Which makes a degree of sense.
It's possible that distillation for other reasons, with no intent to harm the vendor you distill from, would have been ruled to be fair use. But in law, intent matters.
What was the intent of the original ai companies (anthropic, OpenAI, etc) when they mass-distilled the entire internet to create their training data set?
One could make arguments for OpenAI and Anthropic. But Google Search displays AI results above the SERP - clearly in competition with them. No premise or excuse there.