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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Which is why I'm confused as to why this does not apply to a human memory, other than that just being the Court's distinction between human hardware and electronic systems that they apply.

There may be no other distinction.

Then presumably putting sufficient controls on the system so that it WILL NOT produce copyrighted works on demand solves the objection.

Only if the controls are inseparable from the system. If I can take your weights and use them in an uncensored system to produce the copyrighted works, they were still in there. Just as if you rigged a DVD player not to play a DVD of "Return of the Jedi" wouldn't mean "Return of the Jedi" wasn't on the DVD.

We also run into the 'library of Babel" issue. If you have a pile of sufficiently large randomized information, then it probably contains 'copies' of various copyrighted works that can be extracted.

If the randomized information was generated without reference to the copyrighted works, this doesn't matter. That's not the case with the AIs; they had the copyrighted works as training data.

That's not the case with the AIs; they had the copyrighted works as training data.

Yes yes, but so did the humans.

This is what gets real fraught here.

The terminal end result of harshly applying IP restrictions is preventing someone who has a sufficiently accurate memory of a copyrighted work from conveying any portion of the work to anyone else outside of a 'fair use' context.

If the technology allowed it, I have little doubt that they'd implement a system to collect royalties every time some college student plays Wonderwall on his guitar at a party.

But on the assumption that the laws haven't gotten THAT ridiculous yet, I'm inclined to suggest that the situation as it stands is that the AI is basically the equivalent of a human being with eidetic memory and thus can recall any copyrighted work it wishes, on demand, when given the correct prompting, but is also fully capable of "original" thought.

Does IP law REALLY grant the owner the absolute right of ownership over every single instance of the information that composes their work... regardless of the format, medium, or usage it is put to?

The terminal end result of harshly applying IP restrictions is preventing someone who has a sufficiently accurate memory of a copyrighted work from conveying any portion of the work to anyone else outside of a 'fair use' context.

Well, we've already had lawsuits asserting that people can be found guilty of subconsciously plagarizing someone else's music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infringement_suit

The terminal end result of harshly applying IP restrictions is preventing someone who has a sufficiently accurate memory of a copyrighted work from conveying any portion of the work to anyone else outside of a 'fair use' context.

Copyright does not restrict private performance, so if you've memorized a work you can tell it to someone else in private. You can't write it down (including typing it into a computer), you can't make other works based on it, and you can't perform it publicly (which sometimes includes performing it to many people in a serial fashion).

If the technology allowed it, I have little doubt that they'd implement a system to collect royalties every time some college student plays Wonderwall on his guitar at a party.

They do have such a system, and they (in this case, ASCAP and BMI, mainly) are famous for busting venues over it.

Copyright does not restrict private performance, so if you've memorized a work you can tell it to someone else in private.

Which is... sort of what ChatGPT currently does, no?

No. For one, ChatGPT produces the results in a form which makes what it produces a copy. But my larger claim is that ChatGPT itself is a copy of all the copyrighted works that were in its training set and which it can output copies of without prompting it with what amounts to a copy itself. Even if you rigged it so its output were ephemeral, ChatGPT itself would still be a massive copyright violation.

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