<story><title>Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23788741/sarah-silverman-openai-meta-chatgpt-llama-copyright-infringement-chatbots-artificial-intelligence-ai</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw10920</author><text>&amp;gt; Let&amp;#x27;s take a second to remember&lt;p&gt;This is emotionally manipulative speech that provides no value to HN and only serves the purpose of bypassing peoples&amp;#x27; logical reasoning circuits.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; ~every child doesn&amp;#x27;t have access to ~every book ever written&lt;p&gt;More manipulation - &amp;quot;think of the children!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Copyright exists because people who produce content with low distribution costs (e.g. books) need some protection for their work being taken without compensation.&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, you are &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; entitled to someone else&amp;#x27;s work.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books in the public domain, and tens of thousands more under Creative Commons licenses (where the author &lt;i&gt;explicitly&lt;/i&gt; released their work for free distribution). There&amp;#x27;s lectures on YouTube and MIT OpenCourseWare. There&amp;#x27;s full K-12 textbooks on OpenStax and Wikibooks. There&amp;#x27;s Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, the Internet Archive, and millions of small blogs and websites hosting content that is completely free.&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;i&gt;no need&lt;/i&gt; for &amp;quot;a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized&amp;quot; - and it&amp;#x27;s deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else&amp;#x27;s work without compensating them &lt;i&gt;on their terms&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item><item><author>holmesworcester</author><text>Let&amp;#x27;s take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn&amp;#x27;t have access to ~every book ever written.&lt;p&gt;While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright&amp;#x27;s impact.&lt;p&gt;And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world&amp;#x27;s population in 2023 has a smartphone. Imagine a world where a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized, and could raise their children on these books!</text></item><item><author>pessimizer</author><text>&amp;gt; The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”&lt;p&gt;This is the makers of AI explicitly saying that they did use copyrighted works from a book piracy website. If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. If you downloaded all of them, you would be liable for many billions of dollars in damages.&lt;p&gt;But companies like Google and Facebook get to play by different rules. Kill one person and you&amp;#x27;re a murderer, kill a million and to ask you about it is a &amp;quot;gotcha question&amp;quot; that you can react to with outrage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>holmesworcester</author><text>&amp;gt; and it&amp;#x27;s deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else&amp;#x27;s work without compensating them on their terms.&lt;p&gt;But I&amp;#x27;m willing to bet that you don&amp;#x27;t believe this consistently across domains, and the domains in which you do believe it have been selected rather arbitrarily, not by you but rather by industry lobbying pressure.&lt;p&gt;Copyright doesn&amp;#x27;t exist for mathematics, jokes, fashion designs, architectural styles, recipes, and many other areas of human work. All of these represent similar creative work to the work done by musicians and writers. But we don&amp;#x27;t force comedians to license each others&amp;#x27; jokes, or sue bars for letting people tell unlicensed jokes in public. And almost all of us wear clothing by uncompensated designers. And of course it would be unfathomably destructive to allow something analogous to copyright for a mathematical idea.&lt;p&gt;We also set limits on how long heirs can inherit copyright, which we don&amp;#x27;t do for other kinds of property, and we don&amp;#x27;t have any moral issues with that.&lt;p&gt;So it&amp;#x27;s important to remember that our moral intuitions about work and material products don&amp;#x27;t really translate to information and that we are truly making all of this up as we go along, under the intense corrupting pressure of a few very sophisticated industry lobbies.</text></comment>
<story><title>Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23788741/sarah-silverman-openai-meta-chatgpt-llama-copyright-infringement-chatbots-artificial-intelligence-ai</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw10920</author><text>&amp;gt; Let&amp;#x27;s take a second to remember&lt;p&gt;This is emotionally manipulative speech that provides no value to HN and only serves the purpose of bypassing peoples&amp;#x27; logical reasoning circuits.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; ~every child doesn&amp;#x27;t have access to ~every book ever written&lt;p&gt;More manipulation - &amp;quot;think of the children!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Copyright exists because people who produce content with low distribution costs (e.g. books) need some protection for their work being taken without compensation.&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, you are &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; entitled to someone else&amp;#x27;s work.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books in the public domain, and tens of thousands more under Creative Commons licenses (where the author &lt;i&gt;explicitly&lt;/i&gt; released their work for free distribution). There&amp;#x27;s lectures on YouTube and MIT OpenCourseWare. There&amp;#x27;s full K-12 textbooks on OpenStax and Wikibooks. There&amp;#x27;s Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, the Internet Archive, and millions of small blogs and websites hosting content that is completely free.&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;i&gt;no need&lt;/i&gt; for &amp;quot;a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized&amp;quot; - and it&amp;#x27;s deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else&amp;#x27;s work without compensating them &lt;i&gt;on their terms&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item><item><author>holmesworcester</author><text>Let&amp;#x27;s take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn&amp;#x27;t have access to ~every book ever written.&lt;p&gt;While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright&amp;#x27;s impact.&lt;p&gt;And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world&amp;#x27;s population in 2023 has a smartphone. Imagine a world where a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized, and could raise their children on these books!</text></item><item><author>pessimizer</author><text>&amp;gt; The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”&lt;p&gt;This is the makers of AI explicitly saying that they did use copyrighted works from a book piracy website. If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. If you downloaded all of them, you would be liable for many billions of dollars in damages.&lt;p&gt;But companies like Google and Facebook get to play by different rules. Kill one person and you&amp;#x27;re a murderer, kill a million and to ask you about it is a &amp;quot;gotcha question&amp;quot; that you can react to with outrage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mensetmanusman</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s worth challenging the length of copyright. 20 years seems good enough for high tech R&amp;amp;D, probably good for books as well.</text></comment>