The Govt. has stepped back from its 'preferred option' of reforming copyright law to allow expanded (unrestricted) use of content after extensive opposition from the creative industries in the UK.
The next step may well be further consideration of other reforms, but we can also expect a lot of blackmail-like lobbying from AI firms claiming they will withdraw from the UK if their casual theft of content is halted... many might say: good riddance!
ha ha, but now corrected..... thanks for the typo spot (as always)
@ChrisMayLA6
Excellent! “god riddance!” And good riddance too. Grand Theft AutoComplete should pay to use content just as others do under copyright law.
Apparently #NewerLabour don't have a sense of natural justice. That is, you don't steal other people's stuff. Handing out the burglary tools to thieves should never have been a preferred option.
I expect the techbros will shift strategy and we'll see a weak law with zero enforcement.
@TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 Not really, our company does some ML training; we literally have a budget for licenses, and being the new guy, I wondered what we are spending so “much” (relatively) money on, considering that our tech stack is, cough, rather mostly open source. It's actually specialized training data sets.
But then we are in the EU, and in the EU the copyright laws changed a couple of years ago already. Without big fanfare.
I'm talking about the big AI players. The ones who have bought control over US policy - and significant influence in UK policy.
Of course, those techbros *could* pay for licenses. They can also lower their prices, pay their employees and stop destroying the planet - but that would cut their grotesque profits.
Data theft has been their business model since Day One
@TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 Despite how they whine, a certain level of regulation and payments actually favors the big players.
See also how the “payments for news headlines” schemes worked out for news organizations versus Google around the world.
True.
Cory Doctorow has written some great pieces about how the Australia model was a strategic disaster.
Same here. The monopolist power of the big techbros will *not* be reduced by more industries feeding on their crumbs.
@ChrisMayLA6 They didn't withdraw from the EU.
Training from copyrighted digital data in a very insidious way in the EU is legally allowed BUT that's a "by default", the hook is, it explicitely allows copyright holders to forbid it and regulate it via a separate license.
I personally call it cynically, the "give robots.txt" a legal standing law :-P
DSM directive or so.
These rules for data and text mining usually end up implemented in the MS copyright laws.
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