EFF to Courts: Don't Rewrite Copyright over AI Hype

josefritzishere

This is solid guidance. "Given this range of experimentation, courts should be reluctant to decide in advance what tools do and do not foster “human creativity.”"

boxed

There might need to be some calibration. The reason for copyright is (ostensibly) to compensate for the enormous cost of production. If the cost goes down, the protection should also logically go down.

anonyfox

Independend of AI I am fully supporting the idea to abolish copyright in general, full stop. Allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation and culture changes. Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes, but the general everyday stuff, incluing music and literature and code and so on is something to strip default rights away to allow faster progress. and oh the poor artists: next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore, streaming income is close to zero usually even if popular, the only real world industry to defend are the parasites that do not create art to begin with but siphon production/distribution channels. you might disagree with me, just wanna make clear that some people like me are against this copyright theater before AI blew up in popularity.

ThePhysicist

To be fair AI as we have it today wouldn't exist if everything was copyrighted and copyright was enforced very strictly across the web. Not sure if it's fair use and I get that it's not great if these companies try to monopolize knowledge (if they even can do that) but overall being more lax on copyright for fair use is good. Especially scientific knowledge should be openly accessibly to anyone, imagine what we could achieve if we could train LLMs on everything and make it accessible to everyone.

gwbas1c

I think we need to adjust copyright to balance market needs and preservation needs. AI works best when we can strike a balance between the needs of the creator to get compensated and the need of the general public to use content in ways the creator didn't anticipate.

AlexandrB

Copyright in general, is too long, too broad, and - thanks largely to DMCA - enforced too strictly. One reason for China's success in tech is their willingness to ignore all the IP nonsense (or at least look the other way) allowing folks to rapidly iterate on ideas without running into IP rent-seekers at every turn.

Roark66

I recently heard a local EU politician on the radio trying to convince the listeners "things made with AI should be inherently non copyrightable, because they lack human creative labour". I wish I could tell him there is this thing called photography where all a human does is presses a button and copyrightable artefacts are created by capturing how the world looks. For example a landscape that human had no influence over creating! Surely this "non copyrightability" should apply to photography too. /sarcasm AI is just a tool. You can make slop or you can make beautiful art. Is it fair to Picasso's copyright holder that all his paintings were used for training and you can prompt "this in style of Picasso"? No, especially if the company that trained the LLM makes money on it. But there is a technical solution. Simply during training record who owns what training data and record how much influence on each weight this training run had. Then during inference it could be recorded if the weights that trained on Picasso's stuff activated or not. And if someone pays for inference the original owner of tgat data should get a cut. Maybe even blockchain tech could be used for this... Imagine the hype! AI and crypto together!

Ekaros

I consider current length of copyright to be extremely too long. On other hand I also think that creators should be compensated when their creations are used to train AI models and this compensation should be substantial per company. And to any fallacious person telling about humans also "learning". Well humans brains are not replicated en masse just yet. And single learned person is not made to millions of copies and made to answer inane queries day and night...

123aGa

The EFF is in the pocket of Big-AI, and this isn't the first time. "It is not the place of courts to say these people are not artists or that AI cannot augment human creativity in a positive way." Yes it is. If you had ever created anything, which you have not, you would know! You are a couple of tech bureaucrats who want foundation salaries and change with the political winds.

tancop

We need to limit copyright to commercial use. Piracy only hurts corporate profits (CDPR proved it will never bankrupt a studio) but a media company getting an artist to work for them and not paying is seriously unfair. This kind of breaks down with independent artists but any economic loss for them would be way less important than the benefits of a system where all culture is shared and open for modification. We can't put the interests of a small group over everyone else if the members of that group choose to be in it.

bogwog

Guess it's time to stop donating to the EFF. They're completely off the mark this time. The random loser generating slop in his bedroom isn't necessarily the one infringing, it's the AI company that took all of our work and is reselling it that is infringing. This is an obvious blind spot in copyright law and no reasonable person would consider that to be fair use. The challenge I think is communicating to a layman how AI training works. For the people currently in the grips of AI psychosis: new regulation here is good for AI too. AI models will not get more creative without new human training data, but the current exploitative situation means people are not incentivized to keep creating. Human artists who create new things should be rewarded by the market, as copyright law intended. Even if their work only ever ends up feeding some gen AI model, they should still be entitled to compensation in some way (eg royalties). They worked hard so that you don't have to.™ Instead, AI companies are the ones being rewarded for it. That's not sustainable for anyone.

fny

Under the current state of affairs, copyleft material can be laundered through LLMs without triggering proprietary weights from becoming open. Something feels broken.

fridder

Copyright is too long (thank you Disney and Pelosi) and I'm all for shortening it. Also I do agree that market dilution is not really defensible. The main reason why models should have been shut down is the sketchy way in which the models were trained.

snohobro

ITT: Tell me you don’t have anything worth copyrighting without telling me you don’t have anything worth copyrighting. I worry about some of y’all. After reading the article, I don’t disagree with the EFF. We shouldn’t rewrite copyright law to ban creative generation of {art}. AI generated images only increases competition, which is good for consumers of {art}. I do agree that copyright should still exist to prevent duplicate {art} being sold by a new individual claiming it as their own. I think the tricky thing with AI is that as the end user, it’s still your responsibility to identify when you might be infringing on someone else’s copyright. I imagine that will be very difficult to do. Perhaps we need an AI copyright agent that can ingest your {art} and compare against all existing {art} for percent copyright infringement score. In my opinion, the biggest thing I worry about is small creators having their work stolen, repackaged, and sold by big corporations. Which copyright protects. In fact with AI assisted lawyering, it might actually be even easier for small timers to protect their stuff, just like the big wigs do. Abolishing copyright altogether is just such a wild, knee jerk take.

teeray

I think the asymmetry of fair use is what feels the most wrong about copyright and AI. Forever, fair use has been limited with an iron fist: you can’t rip that DVD because it’s copy-protected; You can only use 10s of that song in your school project. Then these AI companies wield fair use like a sledgehammer in a way that nobody has been able to for decades to enormously profit. Maybe it’s technically correct, but it feels like mass exploitation of a loophole that the legal system has previously taken a dim view towards (see: Aereo).

trashburger

20 years of copyright from creation, just like patents. The first two Shrek movies should be public domain by now.

Planktonne

The EFF has managed to keep to the letter of its principles while discarding the spirit of them; it's now defending enormous commercial concerns that hoover up and hoard data, at the expense of people creating and sharing information. A small number of huge corporations keeping tight control of data and access to data is not a pro-freedom stance.

UtopiaPunk

Copyright is broken and needs major reform, but copyright must exist in some form as long as we are operating under the current economic system. If we want a society where some people have the job of creating art, then they must be compensated for their art. The leverage that artists have to demand compensation is controlling who access to their art. Said another way, the artist owns the right to make copies of their art. That is protected by law. I think copyright as it exists is abused by large companies and stifles culture. Broadly speaking, I think copyright should be a much shorter term, lasting more like 20 years rather than the 100+ years that is typical (life of the author + 70 years). The exact term is debateable, but the purpose should be to allow the artist sufficient time to monetize their creation for themselves, and then allowing the art to belong to the broader culture. There should be a worthwhile financial incentive to create art. My utopian dream would be a radically restructured society where we do not expect people to have "artist" as a career. Instead, people would work 15 hours a week doing the work that must be done to contributue to society. The compensation from that 15 hours of work guarantees all their needs to live in modest comfort. People then have more leisure time to pursue whatever they find self-actualizing, which for many will mean creating art and sharing it with the world.