• FlowVoid@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    There are situations where permission is not required to use copyrighted material, mainly “fair use”. But AI training often does not qualify as fair use.

    Otherwise, intellectual property is treated similarly to other types of property. For example, the person who owns a car can give you permission to use it. That doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with it. The owner gets to set the rules. They aren’t “kings”, but as owners they do have near complete control over what you can do with their car.

    When you upload something to social media, you (the content owner) give the host permission to display your content. That does not mean users who view your content have permission to do whatever they want with it.

    There is plenty of open source code posted into repositories that are extensively mirrored, yet the code has lengthy conditions attached to it. If you use it in violation of the stated license, you could find yourself on the losing end of a lawsuit.

    There are plenty of photographs posted onto Instagram, which is also designed to display them to anyone who asks. If a professional photographer finds that you’ve used one of their Instagram photos without permission, you could find yourself on the losing end of a lawsuit.

    And the Fediverse may be a non-commercial decentralized platform, but copyright protection doesn’t magically disappear here. You give servers a license to display what you wrote, but you may reserve the same rights over your IP as software developers and photographers do over their own.

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      But AI training often does not qualify as fair use.

      [citation needed]

      Otherwise, intellectual property is treated similarly to other types of property.

      Ha!

      Intellectual property is nothing like physical property. It has nothing in common with it. If it did, why isn’t copyright violation literally “stealing”? People love to throw the word “stealing” around in the context of copyright violation, but they’re completely different areas of law and work completely differently.

      It’s no wonder that people get weird about AI training if they are laboring under this basic misunderstanding.

      You give servers a license to display what you wrote

      That’s all an AI needs in order to get trained on something. They just need to see it.

      • FlowVoid@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        [citation needed]

        As I already said, fair use is generally not granted when it entails competition with the original work. See above regarding movie reviews vs copying an entire film.

        It has nothing in common with it.

        Legally, property is something that has an owner. IP has an owner, and like other types of property it can be transferred to another owner and become the subject of contracts.

        IP cannot be “stolen”, and I never said it could be. Real estate cannot be “stolen” either, yet real estate is still property.

        That’s all an AI needs in order to get trained on something. They just need to see it.

        For someone who thinks other people are “weird” about legal language, you keep making the same mistakes.

        When people “see” something, they do not need to create a copy of it in the legal sense. When I look at an old photograph, legally I do not create a copy of the photograph.

        AI do not “just see” data. They need access to an electronic copy of the data. An AI cannot “see” an old photograph unless they first create a local copy of the photograph. There is a significant legal difference.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          No, that’s not remotely what I said and I have no idea how you were able to derive it from that.

          If it “rewrites” it as in it literally makes a copy-and-paste duplicate, then that’s covered by the existing copyright. And that’s also a failure of an AI because there are far easier ways to copy a text file.

          If it “rewrites” it as in it makes a distinct book that tells the same basic story but is different in the details, then that’s a new work and either gets a new copyright or is in the public domain (depending on how various lawsuits pan out and what jurisdiction you’re in).