<story><title>The coming IP war over facts derived from books</title><url>https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/02/11/books-facts-ip.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PeterisP</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s no IP war coming over facts derived from books because copyright doesn&amp;#x27;t cover facts derived from books and  the other forms of IP (trademarks, patents) are even less relevant.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve done some work with corpus linguistics and quantitative linguistics, and large parts of these disciplines essentially are about facts derived from books in some manner. Modern approaches tend to involve machine learning, deep neural networks and other things fashionable on hackernews, but in general that&amp;#x27;s an old, traditional area that was working on facts derived from books for decades before the &amp;quot;ML era&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;To work on facts derived from books, we&amp;#x27;re sourcing all kinds of books and other written language, such as newspapers. Some publishers and authors are cooperative and helpful for such research, some are uncooperative and prefer to intentionally make working on their sources difficult - but in any case, even in the case of disagreement and conflict there&amp;#x27;s no &amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;IP&lt;/i&gt; war&amp;quot;, the conflict in our case tends to be about practical convenience of access, not about IP, because they don&amp;#x27;t really have a leg to stand on in claiming a copyright violation. They hold the copyright on the original text, which gives them certain exclusive rights, there&amp;#x27;s a bunch of intermediary data that we can&amp;#x27;t make available to public without their permission, but these rights don&amp;#x27;t extend to facts derived from that text, and we legally don&amp;#x27;t need their permission to work on, analyze, transform, publish and use stuff based on facts in the text or facts about the text, we can do that openly even if they&amp;#x27;ve explicitly made it clear that they don&amp;#x27;t want us to do that. That&amp;#x27;s nothing new, that&amp;#x27;s established law that probably predates modern computers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Iv</author><text>I found it interesting from a legal point of view when someone pointed out that the recent &amp;quot;AI dungeon generator&amp;quot; that was using BERT to act like a game master was in some occurrences basically copying (relevant) excerpts from books.&lt;p&gt;Can an AI commit copyright infringment? BERT probably &amp;quot;knows&amp;quot; that Cthulhu is a giant thing evoking squids, tentacle and non-orthonormic dimensions. These are facts based on books, but you can produce copyright infrigement based on those facts. It is called &amp;quot;producing a derived work&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;In the past years I never managed to get anyone with legal knowledge interested in what they saw as a totally impossible scenario: the idea that AI could one day produce original work y learning its craft, like human do, from copyrighted works. Their criterion was &amp;quot;if you fed copyrighted work into an algorithm to produce a new work, then that&amp;#x27;s a derived work&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Humans are somehow imbued with a magic property that allows them to watch read WH40K books, alien and predator movies, then produce the Starcraft universe, and have it count as original work.&lt;p&gt;We do have a philosophico-legal discussion to have there. And way overdue, if I may. The state of copyright is already late in acknowledging internet, DL-generated work will be even more of a conundrum for it.</text></comment>
<story><title>The coming IP war over facts derived from books</title><url>https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/02/11/books-facts-ip.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PeterisP</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s no IP war coming over facts derived from books because copyright doesn&amp;#x27;t cover facts derived from books and  the other forms of IP (trademarks, patents) are even less relevant.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve done some work with corpus linguistics and quantitative linguistics, and large parts of these disciplines essentially are about facts derived from books in some manner. Modern approaches tend to involve machine learning, deep neural networks and other things fashionable on hackernews, but in general that&amp;#x27;s an old, traditional area that was working on facts derived from books for decades before the &amp;quot;ML era&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;To work on facts derived from books, we&amp;#x27;re sourcing all kinds of books and other written language, such as newspapers. Some publishers and authors are cooperative and helpful for such research, some are uncooperative and prefer to intentionally make working on their sources difficult - but in any case, even in the case of disagreement and conflict there&amp;#x27;s no &amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;IP&lt;/i&gt; war&amp;quot;, the conflict in our case tends to be about practical convenience of access, not about IP, because they don&amp;#x27;t really have a leg to stand on in claiming a copyright violation. They hold the copyright on the original text, which gives them certain exclusive rights, there&amp;#x27;s a bunch of intermediary data that we can&amp;#x27;t make available to public without their permission, but these rights don&amp;#x27;t extend to facts derived from that text, and we legally don&amp;#x27;t need their permission to work on, analyze, transform, publish and use stuff based on facts in the text or facts about the text, we can do that openly even if they&amp;#x27;ve explicitly made it clear that they don&amp;#x27;t want us to do that. That&amp;#x27;s nothing new, that&amp;#x27;s established law that probably predates modern computers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brlewis</author><text>A single fact isn&amp;#x27;t protected by copyright, but if I understand correctly, collections of facts are, if creative work is involved. The article seems to describe digesting all the facts in a book, and making them available to third parties in a way that competes with the book itself. I can see copyright being an issue there.</text></comment>