zlacker

People often get buried in the weeds about the purpose of copyright. Let us not forget that the only reason copyright laws exist is

> To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries

If copyright is starting to impede rather than promote progress, then it needs to change to remain constitutional.

>>joquar+(OP)
Do other countries all use the same reasoning?

>>tbrown+66
I don't think this was your point, but no they don't. Specifically China. What will happen if China has unbridled training for a decade while the United States quibbles about copyright?

I think publications should be protected enough to keep them in business, so I don't really know what to make of this situation.

>>joquar+(OP)
The reason copyright promotes progress is that it incentives individuals and organizations to release works publicly, knowing their works are protected against unlawful copying.

The end game when large content producers like The New York Times are squeezed due to copyright not being enforced is that they will become more draconian in their DRM measures. If you don't like paywalls now, watch out for what happens if a free-for-all is allowed for model training on copyrighted works without monetary compensation.

I had a similar conversation with my brother-in-law who's an economist by training, but now works in data science. Initially he was in the side of OpenAI, said that model training data is fair game. After probing him, he came to the same conclusion I describe: not enforcing copyright for model training data will just result in a tightening of free access to data.

We're already seeing it from the likes of Twitter/X and Reddit. That trend is likely to spread to more content-rich companies and get even more draconian as time goes on.

>>joquar+(OP)
Copyright isn't what got in the way here. AI could have negotiated a license agreement with the rights holder. But they chose not to.

>>gosub1+Ek
From their perspective they're training a giant mechanical brain. A human brain doesn't need any special license agreement to read and learn from a publicly available book or web page, why should a silicon one? They probably didn't even consider the possibility that people'd claim that merely having an LLM read copyrighted data was a copyright violation.

>>logicc+5p
I was thinking about this argument too: is it a "license violation" to gift a young adult a NYT subscription to help them learn to read? Or someone learning English as second language? That seems to be a strong argument.

But it falls apart because kids aren't business units trained to maximize shareholder returns (maybe in the farming age they were). OpenAI isn't open, it's making revolutionary tools that are absolutely going to be monetized by the highest bidder. A quick way to test this is NYT offers to drop their case if "open" AI "open"-ly releases all its code and training data, they're just learning right? what's the harm?

>>nsagen+0e
I doubt there’s much that technical controls can do to limit the spread of NYT content, their only real recourse is to try suing unauthorized distributors. You only need to copy something once for it to be free.