Mastodawn

Manpageman May 16, 2023

Now at @[email protected]

The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.

If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!

If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!

And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.

Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.

@[email protected] @technology #technology #tech #economics #copyright #ArtificialIntelligence #capitalism #IntellectualProperty @[email protected] #law #legal #economics

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] Actually, @senficon did debunk the latter one.

https://felixreda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright/

GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright

Felix Reda

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] @senficon

Still your core argument is valid: The #Copyrightmafia is the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4

Copyright: Forever Less One Day

YouTube

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] @senficon and society suffers from the #Copywrong situation that only benefits #LicensingAdministations and #IP-hoarding corporations or individuals...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

YouTube's copyright system isn't broken. The world's is.

No copyright infringement intended. | Watch Money, my new Nebula Original series, when you join CuriosityStream for only $2.99/month: https://curiositystream...

YouTube

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] @senficon

Not to mention the power asymetry and the fact that #FairUse is worth jack shit and doesn't exist as an enforceable human right...

So everyone who doesn't have privilegues to flex [may it be money, connections, fans or whatever] is universally f**ked by te systemic bs setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trIn90HTqKs

I Can't Believe A Developer Tried To Kill My Channel (The Jimquisition)

YouTube

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] @senficon

Not gonna endorse anything like #piracy for obvious legal reasons but the 1st rule always is:

DON'T GET CAUGHT!

Sadly children today get groomed into gullible #consumerism by the #GAFAM's instead of getting taught actual #TechLiteracy in #school.
https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/110370328421999355

AJ Sadauskas (@[email protected])

The enforcement of copyright law is really simple. If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid! If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and feature a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised,. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others! And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.50 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US#2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent. Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business. @[email protected] #technology #tech #economics #copyright #ArtificialIntelligence #capitalism #IntellectualProperty @[email protected] @[email protected] #law #legal #economics

Aus.Social

Porquerias | 1312 🏴🌵May 16, 2023

@kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] @senficon yeah please STFU, bootlicker

@Galletasalada noone asked for your value-removing spam, asshole!

foonex May 16, 2023

You don‘t have to insult people just because they point out legal facts that don‘t fit your worldview. Don‘t shoot the messenger. You don‘t have to like the facts but that doesn‘t change them.

Porquerias | 1312 🏴🌵May 16, 2023

@foonex yeah, STFU too, bootlicker. You have no idea what you're talking about, you're clearly an ignorant little fascist, and you should follow your leader. Cry harder, you fucking bellend.

atomicfurball May 16, 2023

You are an asshole of unmitigated proportions.

Porquerias | 1312 🏴🌵May 16, 2023

@atomicfurball you can choke on me, you stupid piece of shit. You are utterly insignificant. Kill yourself.

Porquerias | 1312 🏴🌵May 16, 2023

@[email protected] pretty pathetic that Karhan make 2 sock accounts to call me an asshole because his pedophile brony ass couldn't handle being told to shut up

Sören May 16, 2023

@kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] @senficon Felix’s analogy is flawed.

> If I go to a bookshop, take a book off the shelf and start reading it, I am not infringing any copyright.

An LLM is not a person, and gobbling up the entire shop is not the same as reading a few pages from a single book. If you start reading more than half the books in the shop without ever paying, you bet the owner will ask you to buy something or kick you out.

@krisnelson May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @music yeah, sounds about right—see also the comparisons of e.g. wage theft vs shoplifting for what strikes me as a somewhat similar example of this kind of disparity

Tucker Teague May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected]
I think I'm going to steal that car.

Fan of Shared Truth & Empathy May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] Sometimes I don’t have to wonder why giving up on pursuing any of my creative talents seems like the depressingly reasonable thing to do.

William Bell May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] This is an excellent parallel to draw. Nationalise Google and close Chat GPT down.

Michel Jansen May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] but those videos are of course used as part of a training set for their AI

J.H.Noyes May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas
You make a great point.
@technology @[email protected] @[email protected] @SuperTwaddle

paul May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected]

one death is a tragedy a million is a statistic

Jens Comiotto-Mayer May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @guenterhack @music Major record labels are trying to get a handle on this. There‘s no real precedent, and it‘s unclear which laws fit, if any. In general, I share your sentiment – the issue is not AI, it‘s capitalism.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/1/23703087/ai-drake-the-weeknd-music-copyright-legal-battle-right-of-publicity

Drake’s AI clone is here — and Drake might not be able to stop him

Major record labels, including Universal Music Group, claim AI-generated songs featuring artists like Drake and The Weeknd infringe on their copyright. The legal argument is much messier.

The Verge

Bobby May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] Yeah, pretty much. That corporations are more important than people and have more rights is not a bug of the current system, it's the core feature.

@ajsadauskas
The wonders of capitalism.

Csepp 🌢May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology This is also why GitHub's Copilot is fucked up. Microsoft expects everyone to read the fine print and never do anything that might possibly infringe on any copyright laws, but of course they don't have to stay out of the legal grey areas.
See: https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

Give Up GitHub - Software Freedom Conservancy

The Software Freedom Conservancy provides a non-profit home and services to Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.

Darrell Bowles May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas I used napster, and I also create content on youtube. Don't get paid a cent either way.

OpenDNA⚙️May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror." Jean Rostand

Jorge Stolfi May 15, 2023

@opendna @ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected]

And if you kill only a million, but they are your own subjects, you are only a Republican President of the US facing a major epidemic. 😜

Dame-Armiger Kali Ranya ⚔️🐈May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] A post I saw over the weekend proposed a browser extension that replaces mentions of "AI" with "the Torment Nexus". An alternative find-replace could be "AI" to "copyright laundering"!

Richard Penner May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected]

#Copyright does not protect the concept and themes of artistic presentation. So training autocomplete tools like #ChatGPT or generative art tools along the lines of #StabilityAI on huge amounts of copyrighted material available on the web doesn't seem to trespass on the rights actually created by copyright law. That is, neither the trained model parameters nor the output qualifies as a infringing copy.

The fact that big corporations have heated the rhetoric with even small-scale copyright infringement being characterized as if it were an existential threat rather than free marketing perhaps misleads people to think copyright grants the owner total control of the future of their creations. But law is about statutes and precedents, not feelings, which is why big corporations aren't likely to train their models on billions of copyrighted works if there was a credible risk of paying statutory damages on a per-work basis.

If there is a moral right to the "something" that has been gifted to these models by their training, it has not been well described, let alone recognized in law as property of the creators. How is this "something" which an AI model steals supposed to be distinguished from the piecewise appreciation for the art as summed over all human viewers?

So perhaps the real problem is the moral outrage created by the corporations who for decades equate copyright infringement with being ambushed by a gang of seagoing rapists, kidnappers, killers, and robbers (pirates). Towards that end, Germany is discussing adding copyright infringement as a form of "digital violence" making the analogy more exact.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/05/germany-wants-to-include-copyright-infringement-under-its-planned-digital-violence-law/

Germany Wants To Include Copyright Infringement Under Its Planned ‘Digital Violence’ Law

The hyperbolic rhetoric that is a feature of the copyright industry, which tries absurdly to characterize making an additional digital copy as “theft”, can lead to some serious legislative harm. Fo…

Techdirt

nk May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas did anyone show Google “Don’t Cooy That Floppy”? I think that would help clear things up

Niclas Hedhman May 15, 2023

You GOT IT!

Comes back to Marxism's You kill one person it is murder. You kill 1 million it is statistics.

@technology @music @music

Marc Majcher May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] If corporations couldn't get away with doing things that would get an individual fined or arrested, how would they maintain their competitive edge? Profits above everything, baby!

sj_zero May 15, 2023

tbh, youtube and facebook made unlimited money on copyright infringement then their content-id system made a faustian offer: "say, your stuff will be pirated any other way, why not let us pay you a pittance so you get something for it?"

Aviva Gary May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] Big crime little crime paradox... also see corporations are people too 😉

Arthur Besse May 15, 2023

yeah, as others have already said, this isn't how copyright law works: it's how law in general works.

Canayjun May 15, 2023

@ajsadauskas I never used Napster. I found out Google’s own YouTube was giving me free music. While searching for why my hard drive space was being used up so quickly ( remember pre-terabyte drives… pre-Gb?) In my Windows system cache folders were massive files. Always after I had listened to YouTube. Google was basically storing every song I listened to on my own hard drive. Google was just lazy. Even MySpace had a js routine called cache-buster. Thanks Google.

Porquerias | 1312 🏴🌵May 16, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] wow this Kevin Karhan person is a major bootlicker who needs to STFU

@Galletasalada @ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected]

Says the right person... #ROFLMAO!
https://kolektiva.social/@Galletasalada/110375855256018892

Porquerias | 1312 🏴🌵G@K (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] yeah please STFU, bootlicker

kolektiva.social

NiceMicro May 16, 2023

@ajsadauskas
First, copying some work 1:1 (download the music and listen to it) is exactly what copyright is there to protect creators from.

Second, copyright doesn't mean you are entitled to monetization from YouTube. That's based on the agreement (contract) between you and the video platform you put your stuff on.

Third, training AI is not 1:1 copying of works, but highly transformative, and as such is fair use /fair dealing in many jurisdictions.

#AI #Copyright #AiArt

Christian Kent May 16, 2023

@nicemicro @ajsadauskas "highly transformative": is that enough? (morally or practically)

Because, many of the source works took effort and money to produce, and were taken / stolen / used without permission / whatever. That's an industry not just under threat of extinction, but necessary for the new works to be created.

We might have a battle of generative vs human-intensive works, but not have a result where both can exist. Does one have to kill the other?

NiceMicro May 16, 2023

@ckent @ajsadauskas well, that is going to be somewhat subjective, but I think that getting an image and making it into a bunch of gradients to train a neural network is much more transformative than anything a human artist does when "remixing" previous works, and we know of many cases when courts ruled that even re-cutting a video into a different story can be transformative enough to be "fair use".

Copyright law also does not care about how much did it cost to produce a work.

Christian Kent May 16, 2023

@nicemicro @ajsadauskas well this is why I asked “morally and practically” (sustainable long term) rather than legally. Sure, if we gotta update the law then we gotta update the law. It’s an area that gets regular updates.

NiceMicro May 16, 2023

@ckent @ajsadauskas sure, the law (or rather the laws of many jurisdictions) might be updated, but my sense is that the current change is "just" quantitative (the AI tools enable quicker, more efficient remixing than whatever humans were doing), and not qualitative, so the legal frameworks should work. When napster and then bittorrent made illegal copying of stuff easier and more efficient, we didn't need to change the law, we needed some precedents, so the courts can work faster.

bouriquet May 16, 2023

@nicemicro @ckent @ajsadauskas Copyright law has been overcome by technology. When AI generates new works from a compilation of millions of old works, things get muddy very quickly. And when those new works are recycled back into the database, even worse.
Perhaps the lawsuits will have AI generated defense briefs?
Where does this end?
Or is it the start of an informational age like we have never imagined in 1960?
What hath the semiconductor wrought?

NiceMicro May 16, 2023

@bouriquet I agree that it is quantitatively different, but because I don't think the change is really qualitative, the law can't just overcome it with a few additional guidelines so the courts interpret the same thing occurring again and again the same way.

Where does it end? Well, it ends where everyone will be able to remix the stuff themselves, without having to take years learning how to paint.

Like, how electronic music totally killed live music.

RealGravitas -Citizen Saboteur May 16, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] And now you understand capitalism.

msgbi Markus Sagebiel May 16, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] @charles_ex

Simon Brooke May 16, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] That essay is such a complete misunderstanding of the issue that the author is either an idiot or a bad actor.

atomicfurball May 16, 2023

This is a complete oversimplification of everythin.

Yes, downloading music for free is theft. Creators do deserve to be paid for their work.

Youtube ignores fair use, which is wrong. But they run the platform, they can do what they like. ContentID is the worst idea they ever came up with. But again, they are just trying to avoid being sued over and over and over again, so I kinda understand their position. It sucks, but again, they have the right to do what they like with their own platform.

I would argue that using information for the training of an AI is fair use. The information is just used to set weights that the AI then uses to generate text. The actual text is not stored in any database anywhere. So whether Microsoft does it, or I do it, it is the same. I can train a LLM on data as well. I just don't have tthe money for the very expensive hardware to do it.

Rev. GothAlice May 16, 2023

:hides her music library of 197K songs:

:hides her book library containing the entirety of Project Gutenberg, every StackExchange site, Wikipedia & Books & Wiktionary, 300K textbooks, and archives of Popular Mechanics dating to 1907, amongst other periodicals, plus tens of thousands of comics and graphic novels from three major publishers:

:points fingers at eyes, then points at the media industries: Come at me brosephs.

@technology @[email protected] @[email protected] @donmelton

Rev. GothAlice May 16, 2023

I need to find existing case law covering Canadian “fair dealing”… the sheer scale of my… collection… may bump me into a new category.

But I’m not illegally redistributing this material. No duplication going on here. Personal development only. (Some of this clearly and obviously from Archive.org)

down daemon May 16, 2023

i've been making a bugout usb with similar, do you have any tips?

Rev. GothAlice May 17, 2023

@downdaemon I’ve recently exported a goodly chunk of it to a 1TB μSD card. Archive.org is a great place to start; that’s where the Popular Mechanics, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, and many of the other publications I’ve collected (e.g. MacAddict) were sourced. Gutenberg via one of their rsync mirrors.

I’ve built a tag-based—non-hierarchical—primary storage system from several arrays in a redundant arrangement totalling a hair over 50TB, but that is not at all portable. μSD is “go”.

BlinkerFluid May 16, 2023

I argue that copyright law is as pointless as it is to circumvent legally.

For instance, Google any song.

Did a YouTube video show up? The copyright law is fucking useless.

down daemon May 16, 2023

i can be selectively enforced to instill fear in the population. my sister's long term bf (she already had 2 young kids) is from Iran and is really against me bring over pirated movies because he's trying to get citizenship. Like they have to watch the new mario movie at my place lol

Andy Kaplan-Myrth May 16, 2023

@ajsadauskas This is something I was thinking about yesterday at a conference when Osgoode's Carys Craig was talking about AI and copyright issues, both input and output. It does feel a bit like we're glossing over copyright infringement on the input side because the GenAI industry is already too big and too fast to control.

Christopher Schmidt May 16, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] Alphabet's market cap is also $3T corporation, similar to microsoft's $2.3T; their stock is split into GOOG and GOOGL, and each is about $1.5T market cap, but both make up the total Alphabet stock.

Brian May 16, 2023

At what point should copyright fees be paid and who gets the money? I have no answer. I don't see a problem with the training, but it's hard or impossible to break down the generated art and say this is x% artist A and x% stock image company B. Artists are also using these tools now, so it will be recursively difficult to figure out who created what.

Dr Ro Smith May 16, 2023

@ajsadauskas You wouldn't download the entire digitised content of human literature and art.

István May 16, 2023

@ajsadauskas @technology @[email protected] @[email protected] 🤬