And here I thought this shit would expose the blatant contradictions in IP law but it looks like it’s only creating the same cycle of vocal contrarians speaking out against a step in the right direction

  • jaeme
    ·
    11 months ago

    “There is nothing ‘transformative’ about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it,” the Times said in its complaint. “Because the outputs of Defendants’ GenAI models compete with and closely mimic the inputs used to train them, copying Times works for that purpose is not fair use.”

    You know, there's something ironic about these journalists feeling so threatened by a large language models. I thought the first law of the internet is that anything you upload stays there. A lot of this just seems like the Times wants a payday rather than looking to create regulation

    contradictions in IP law

    Also little pet peeve of mine, this article deals exclusively in copyright law. IP law is a misleading term that merges very different sections of law (mainly copyright, patent, and trademark) together. The reason "intellectual property" is used is the same reasons why distributors use the term "piracy" to demean people who share copyrighted works.

    • drhead [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it

      So they think a chatbot is a substitute for their news? They don't really think highly of themselves, do they?

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      11 months ago

      steal audiences away from it

      Stop right there, varmint! You've done robbed me of my rightly claimed property of people's eyeballs! Now why don't ya just lower dem dar gazes and back away all peaceful like?

    • stigsbandit34z [they/them]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Shit. So copyright, patent and trademark all fall under the nebulous umbrella of intellectual property? lmao it just gets worse doesn’t it

    • context [fae/faer, fae/faer]
      ·
      11 months ago

      IP law is a misleading term that merges very different sections of law (mainly copyright, patent, and trademark) together

      are they really all that different? they're all about excluding other people from making use of abstractions without negotiating payment with the person or corporate entity claiming ownership. i'm not a lawyer so feel free to school me. trademark i can see as being different because it's more about establishing identity, but copyrights and patents seem fairly similar to me.

      i hope this is very expensive for both of them. sounds like the nyt is basically saying openai isn't allowed to read their articles because it means making a copy on their own servers? they have a point, a specific enough prompt that's related to a nyt article could conceivably spit out something very similar to the article itself because statistically that's what's most likely for the prompt and training set. and then you're really drilling down into the concept of ownership over combinations of words or numbers and i can imagine the legal situation getting pretty murky.

      • jaeme
        ·
        11 months ago

        are they really all that different?

        This article from the GNU Project is helpful in clarifying why, Here's the main gist though:

        The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws. Nonlawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle and function similarly.
        Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues.

        it means making a copy on their own servers?

        That's also murky since the dataset the OpenAI trains on is a trade secret, and most likely astronomically huge with not just NYTimes but other publications as well. Microsoft and OpenAI haven't responded, I doubt they didn't already have a plan beforehand (which was most likely what we've already seen, lobbying/compaigning against "AI" in order to become regulators of their own field). The hysteria and disinformation around machine learning and large language models is also part of OpenAI's strategy to muddy the waters.