• @DrCake@lemmy.world
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    2688 months ago

    So when’s the ruling against OpenAI and the like using the same copyrighted material to train their models

    • irotsoma
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      1008 months ago

      But OpenAI not being allowed to use the content for free means they are being prevented from making a profit, whereas the Internet Archive is giving away the stuff for free and taking away the right of the authors to profit. /s

      Disclaimer: this is the argument that OpenAI is using currently, not my opinion.

    • @norimee@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Ah, I see you got that all wrong.

      Open IA AI uses that content to generate billions in profit on the backs of The People. The Internet Archive just does it for the good of The People.

      We can’t have that. “Good for The People” is not how the economy works, pal. We need profit and exploitation for the world to work…

      • v_krishna
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        178 months ago

        OpenAI is burning billions of dollars not making profit.

          • v_krishna
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            58 months ago

            Eh? That article says nothing about their profit margins. Today they have something like $3.5B in ARR (not really, that’s annualized from their latest peak, in Feb they had like $2B ARR). Meanwhile they have operating costs over $7B. Meaning they are losing money hand over fist and not making a profit.

            I’m not suggesting anything else, just that they are not profitable and personally I don’t see a road to profitability beyond subsidizing themselves with investment.

            • @buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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              -18 months ago

              It’s in the first bloody paragraph. 😮‍💨

              OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it’s supposedly “impossible” for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar business — without them.

              And if you follow the link the title of the article says it all:

              #OpenAI is set to see its valuation at $80 billion—making it the third most valuable startup in the world

              • v_krishna
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                18 months ago

                I take it you don’t understand how startups work?

                OpenAI is not making any profit and is losing money hand over fist today. Valuation and raising investment rounds isn’t profit.

      • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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        28 months ago

        I think you accidentally swapped OpenAI and Open IA which happens to initialize Internet Archive, a little confusing.

      • @Gsus4@mander.xyz
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        8 months ago

        The matter is not LLMs reproducing what they have learned, it is that they didn’t pay for the books they read, like people are supposed to do legally.

        This is not about free use, this is about free access, which at the scale of an individual reading books is marketed as “piracy”…at the scale of reading all books known to man…it’s onmipiracy?

        We need some kind of deal where commercial LLMs have to pay a rent to a fund that distributes that among creators or remain nonprofit, which is never gonnna happen, because it’ll be a bummer for all the grifters rushing into that industry.

        • @PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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          18 months ago

          I think we need to re-examine what copyright should be. There’s nothing inherently immoral about “piracy” when the original creator gets almost nothing for their work after the initial release.

        • @barsoap@lemm.ee
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          08 months ago

          it is that they didn’t pay for the books they read, like people are supposed to do legally.

          If I can read a book from a library, why shouldn’t OpenAI or anybody else?

          …but yes from what I’ve heard they (or whoever, don’t remember) actually trained on libgen. OpenAI can be scummy without the general process of feeding AI books you only have read access to being scummy.

  • @MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
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    1438 months ago

    If OpenAI can get away with going through copy-righted material, then the answer to piracy is simple: round up a bunch of talented Devs from the internet who are writing and training AI models, and let’s make a fantastic model trained on what the internet archive has. Tell you what, let Mistral’s engineers lead that charge, and put an AGPL license on the project so that companies can’t fuck us over.

    I refuse to believe that nobody has thought of this yet

    • @bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
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      248 months ago

      An AI trained on old Internet material would be like a synthetic Grandpa Simpson:

      “In my day we said ‘all your base’ and laughed all day long, because it took all day to download the video.”

    • @werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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      38 months ago

      Better yet! Train an AI to re-write the books into brand new books and let us read, review the content, add notes etc so that the AI can refresh the books if we find errors.

      Kick the private collections to the curb! Teeth in like in American History X.

    • capital
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      18 months ago

      We get it, y’all hate LLMs and the companies who make them.

      This comparison is disingenuous and I have to think you’re smart enough to know that, making this disinformation.

      If/when an LLM like ChatGPT spits out a full copy of training text, that’s considered a bug and is remediated fairly quickly. It’s not a feature.

      What IA was doing was sharing the full text as a feature.

      As far as I know, there are some court cases pending regarding determining if companies like Open AI are guilty of copyright infringement but I haven’t seen any convictions yet (happy to be corrected here).

      All that said, I love IA and have a Warrior container scheduled to run nightly to help contribute.

  • @masterspace@lemmy.ca
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    1018 months ago

    Fuck Copyright.

    A system for distributing information and rewarding it’s creators should not be one based on scarcity, given that it costs nothing to copy and distribute information.

    • @snooggums@midwest.social
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      618 months ago

      It was fine when the limited duration was a reasonable number of years. Anything over 30 years max before being in the public domain is too long.

      • @Fuzzy_Red_Panda@lemm.ee
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        148 months ago

        Yeah. In a better world where the US court system doesn’t get weaponized and rulings aren’t delayed for years or decades, I would argue 8 to 15 years is the reasonable number, depending on the type of information being copyrighted.

      • @masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        That was fine then, but it makes zero sense today.

        If a book is on sale widely to the public, and it costs nothing to copy and distribute that book to everyone, why shouldn’t we?

        The fundamental problem with copyright is it is a system that rewards creators by imposing artificial scarcity where there is no need for one. Capitalism is a system designed around things having value when they’re scarce, but information in a world of computers and the internet is inherently unscarce the instant it’s digitized. Copyright just means that we build all these giant DRM systems to impose scarcity on something that doesn’t need it so that we can still get creators paid a living.

        But a better system would for paying creators would be one of attribution and reward, where everyone can read whatever they want or stream whatever they want, and artists would be paid based on their number of views.

        • @snooggums@midwest.social
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          68 months ago

          But a better system would for paying creators would be one of attribution and reward, where everyone can read whatever they want or stream whatever they want, and artists would be paid based on their number of views.

          Which would be enforced through copyright…

          • @masterspace@lemmy.ca
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            8 months ago

            If you’re referring to copyright as the actual effective title as owner of the works then yes. If you’re referring to copyright as in our system if copyright == monopoly, then no.

      • @NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        I personally like the idea that Copyright should be on par with design patent law. An initial filing 10-15yrs plus two additional opportunities to renew and extend it for 10 years if the creator can make supplementary creations that were dependent on and based off of the original works. -In the case of novels, that would equate to new sequels or prequels.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce
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    778 months ago

    Artificial scarcity at its finest. Imagine recording a song digitally, then pretending there are a limited amount of copies of that song in existence. Then you sell an agreement to another person that says they have to pretend there is only a certain made up number of copies that they bought, and if they allow more than that number of people to listen to those copies at rhe same time, they will get sued for “stealing” additional pretend copies?

    I hope everybody can see how this is the insane and pathetic result of Capitalism’s unrelenting drive to commodify everything it possibly can in the pursuit of profit.

    As always, the solution is sailing the high seas. Throughout history, those who created or saved illegal copies/translations of literature and art were important to preserving and furthering human knowledge.

    Many incredibly powerful people, empires, and countries have tried very hard to suppress that, but they keep failing. You cannot suppress the human drive for curiosity and knowledge.

    • @Ming@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      228 months ago

      True, and the fleet is big and strong. There are many people seeding hundreds of terabytes of books/research papers/etc. The knowledge will not be lost. Yarr, can’t catch me in the high seas…

  • HexesofVexes
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    568 months ago

    Ah, I see we’re burning the Library of Alexandria again… Just as with last time, the survival of texts will rely upon copies.

  • Stern
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    508 months ago

    Oh sure I want to read copyright books it’s an issue, but OpenAI does it and it’s vital to their business so they can keep going.

  • @drislands@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    My understanding is that the IA had implemented a digital library, where they had (whether paid or not) some number of licenses for a selection of books. This implementation had DRM of some variety that meant you could only read the book while it was checked out. In theory, this means if the IA has 10 licenses of a book, only 10 people have a usable copy they borrowed from the IA at a time.

    And then the IA disabled the DRM system, somehow, and started limitlessly lending the books they had copies of to anyone that asked.

    I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong against the agreement they entered into. Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.

    ETA: updated my wording. I don’t believe what the IA did was morally wrong, per se, but rather against the agreement I presume they entered into with the owners of the books they lent.

    • MrScottyTay
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      268 months ago

      They disabled drm during lockdown so people had something to do

      • @accideath@lemmy.world
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        138 months ago

        Which was nice of them, but that doesn’t mean they should’ve done that, especially in the eyes of the law. (Also, if you’re after free ebooks, why are you pirating them on archive.org instead of libgen?)

          • @accideath@lemmy.world
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            68 months ago

            Where did I say that find it good that they got sued or lost their appeal? I just said that the reason why they lost the appeal is because according to the law they’re bound to, what they did was wrong. And maybe they should’ve left that to a platform that enjoys a little more immunity from said law, because there are plenty of those. It was stupid of them. They painted an unnecessary target on their back that doesn’t help their cause and I‘d prefer them not to have to shut down at some point because I’m all for the Internet archive archiving anything and everything. They should’ve stayed a legitimate library and everything would have been fine and would have served their cause sufficiently well.

    • @huiccewudu@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong.

      The publisher-plaintiffs did not prove the “obvious wrong” in this case, however US-based courts have a curious standard when it comes to the application of Fair Use doctrine. This case ultimately rested on the fourth, most significantly-weighted Fair Use standard in US-based courts: whether IA’s digital lending harmed publisher sales during the 3-month period of unlimited digital lending.

      Unfortunately, when it comes to this standard, the publisher-plaintiffs are not required to prove harm, rather only assert that harm has occurred. If they were required to prove harm they’d have to reveal sales figures for the 27 works under consideration–publishers will do anything to conceal this information and US-based courts defer to them. Therefore, IA was required to prove a negative claim–that digital lending did not hurt sales–without access to the empirical data (which in other legal contexts is shared during the discovery phase) required to prove this claim. IA offered the next best argument (see pp. 44-62 of the case document to check for yourself), but the data was deemed insufficient by the court.

      In other words, on the most important test of Fair Use doctrine, which this entire case ultimately pivoted upon, IA was expected to defend itself with one arm tied behind its back. That’s not ‘fair’ and the publishers did not prove ‘obvious’ harm, but the US-based courts are increasingly uninterested in these things.

      edited: page numbers on linked court document.

    • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      48 months ago

      Wrong? No.

      Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.

      Actions also protected by laws exempting nonprofits and archives from copyright restrictions? Also supposed to be yes.

      • @drislands@lemmy.world
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        28 months ago

        Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.

        To be fair, this is what I meant when I said wrong. Enough people have taken umbrage with my wording that I think I should update it, though. Thank you for your reply.

    • @eskimofry@lemmy.world
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      -208 months ago

      Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.

      That’s how it works in the rest of the world.

  • @ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    178 months ago

    They need to rename themselves “Intelligent Archive” then claim they’re an AI service that can just happen to regenerate whole books.

  • sircac
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    148 months ago

    But I’m training my organic LLM, can’t I?

    • @zzx@lemmy.world
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      128 months ago

      I had the same question. Here’s the answer:

      The Archive Team Warrior is a virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the Archive Team archiving efforts. It will download sites and upload them to our archive—and it’s really easy to do!

      The warrior is a container running inside a virtual machine, so there is almost no security risk to your computer. (“Almost”, because in practice nothing is 100% secure.) The warrior will only use your bandwidth and some of your disk space, as well as some of your CPU and memory. It will get tasks from and report progress to the Tracker.

    • @antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      18 months ago

      Yeah I’m wondering as well. It seems to save webpages, whereas the issue is with scanned books which may be removed from IA…

      • @Grass@sh.itjust.works
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        28 months ago

        somehow I didn’t see anything above getting started. Looking again I don’t know how I missed it with the big logos unless they didn’t load and the rest was behind a notification or something.