zlacker

>>ssgodd+(OP)
Solidly rooting for NYT on this - it’s felt like many creative organizations have been asleep at the wheel while their lunch gets eaten for a second time (the first being at the birth of modern search engines.)

I don’t necessarily fault OpenAI’s decision to initially train their models without entering into licensing agreements - they probably wouldn’t exist and the generative AI revolution may never have happened if they put the horse before the cart. I do think they should quickly course correct at this point and accept the fact that they clearly owe something to the creators of content they are consuming. If they don’t, they are setting themselves up for a bigger loss down the road and leaving the door open for a more established competitor (Google) to do it the right way.

>>kbos87+Na
For all the leaks on: Secret projects, novelty training algorithms not being published anymore so as to preserve market share, custom hardware, Q* learning, internal politics at companies at the forefront of state of the art LLMs...A thunderous silence is the lack of leaks, on the exact datasets used to train the main commercial LLMs.

It is clear OpenAI or Google did not use only Common Crawl. With so many press conferences why did no research journalist ask yet from OpenAI or Google to confirm or deny if they use or used LibGen?

Did OpenAI really bought an ebook of every publication from Cambridge Press, Oxford Press, Manning, APress, and so on? Did any of investors due diligence, include researching the legality of the content used for training?

>>belter+kl
Why isn't robots.txt enough to enforce copyright etc? If NYT didn't set robots.txt properly, is their content free-for-all? Yes I know the first answer you would jump to is "of course not, copyright is the default", but it's almost 2024 and we have had robots.txt as industry de jure to stop crawling.

>>alfied+cs
>Why isn't robots.txt enough to enforce copyright

You actually need a lot more than that. Most significantly, you need to have registered the work with the Copyright Office.

“No civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until ... registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title.” 17 USC §411(a).

>>trogdo+xB
But the thing is, you can only bring the civil action forward after registering your claim but you need not register the claim before the infringement occurs.

Copyright is granted to the creator upon creation.

>>jacobl+gC
That is incorrect.

If the work is unpublished for the purposes of the Copyright Act, you do have to register (or preregister) the work prior to the infringement. 17 USC § 412(1).

If the work is published, you still have to register it within the earlier of (a) three months after the first publication of the work or (b) one month after the copyright owner learns of the infringement.

See below for the actual text of the law.

Publication, for the purposes of the Copyright Act, generally means transferring or offering a copy of the work for sale or rental. But there are many cases where it’s not clear whether a work has or has not been published — most notably when a work is posted online and can be downloaded, but has not been explicitly offered for sale.

Also, the Supreme Court recently ruled that the mere filing of an application for registration is insufficient to file suit. The Register of Copyrights has to actually grant your application. The registration process typically takes many months, though you can pay $800 for expedited processing, if you need it.

~~~

Here is the relevant portion of the Copyright Act:

In any action under this title, other than an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A(a), an action for infringement of the copyright of a work that has been preregistered under section 408(f) before the commencement of the infringement and that has an effective date of registration not later than the earlier of 3 months after the first publication of the work or 1 month after the copyright owner has learned of the infringement, or an action instituted under section 411(c), no award of statutory damages or of attorney’s fees, as provided by sections 504 and 505, shall be made for—

(1) any infringement of copyright in an unpublished work commenced before the effective date of its registration; or

(2) any infringement of copyright commenced after first publication of the work and before the effective date of its registration, unless such registration is made within three months after the first publication of the work.