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Yes, I mainly wanted to rule out the opposite. Because the multi billion dollar companies currently do some lobbying as well. Including the same manipulation and narratives, just the other way around. They want everyone else to lose rights, while they themselves retain full rights, little to no oversight... And that's just inherently unfair.
As I said. Copyright might not be something good or defendable. It clearly comes with many obvious flaws and issues. The video you linked is nice. I'd be alright with abolishing copyright. Preferrably after finding a suitable replacement/alternative. But I'm completely against subsidising big companies just so they can grow and manifest their own Black Mirror episode. Social scoring, making my insurance 3x more expensive on a whim and a total surveillence state should be prohibited. And the same rules need to apply to everyone. Once a book author doesn't get copyright any longer, so does OpenAI and the big tech companies. They can invest some $100 million in training models, but it's then not copyrighted either. I get to access the model however I like and I can sell a competing service with their model weights. That's fair and same rules for everyone. And Höffner talks to some degree about prior work and what things are based upon. So the big companies have to let go of their closely guarded trade secrets and give me the training datasets as well. I believe that'd be roughly in the spirit of what he said in the talk. And maybe that'd be acceptable. But it really has to be same rules for everyone, including big corporations.
Can you back this up? They certainly do not have the same reach or influence as the copyright industry.
What do you mean by that?
AI models may not be copyrightable under US law. I'm fairly sure that base models aren't. Whether curating training data, creating new training data, RL, and so on, ever makes a copyrighted model is something that courts will eventually have to decide.
They are probably copyrightable under EU law (maybe protected as databases). That's an EU choice.
The rules are different in different countries. They are not different for corporations.
The current thing is Meta is very vocal about the EU AI act. Their opinion is everywhere in the tech news, this week. And they're a very influential company. Completely dominating some markets like messengers, parts of social media. Also well-known in the AI industry.
Other companies do the same. They test what they can get away with all the time. Like stealing Scarlett Johansson's voice, pirating books on bittorrent... And they definitely have enough influence and money to pay very good lawyers. Choose what to settle out of court and what to fight. We shouldn't underestimate the copyright industry. But Meta for example is a very influential company with a lot of impact on society and the world.
And AI is in half the products these days. Assisting you, or harvesting your data... Whether you want it or not. That's quite some reach, pervasive, and those are the biggest companies on earth. I'd be with you if AI were some niche thing. But it's not.
And Meta are super strict with trademark law and parts of copyright when it's the other way around. I lately spent some time reading how you can and cannot use or mention their trademark, embed it into your website. And they're very strict if it's me using their stuff. The other way around they want free reign.
I mean manifacturing a supply chain for them where they get things practically for free. Netflix has to pay for licenses to distribute Hollywood content. OpenAI's product also has other people's content going into the product, but they don't need to do the same. It's subsidised and they get the content practically for free for their business model.
And what do you think I do with my server and the incident last week? If I now pay $30 more for a VPS that's able to withstand Alibaba's crawlers... Wouldn't that be a direct sunsidy from me towards them? I pay an extra $30 a month just so they can crawl my data?
We were talking about a specific lecture that questions the entire concept of copyright as we have it now. You can't argue to abolish copyright and then in the next sentence defend it for yourself or your friends. It's either copyright for book authors and machine learning models, or it's none of them. But you can't say information in the products from other people is not copyright, but the information in the products of AI companies is copyright. That doesn't make any sense.
And they're not wrong.
That doesn't quite back up what you claimed, though. You wrote: "They want everyone else to lose rights, while they themselves retain full rights,"
Their claim of Fair Use seems straightforward. That's not everyone else losing their rights. I am not aware where they lobby for "full rights" for themselves, whatever that means.
There are different kinds of intellectual property. Trademarks are different from copyright. Then there's also trade secrets, patents, publicity rights, privacy, etc.
Generally, you can use any Trademark as long as you don't use it for trade or harm the business that owns it. I'm not going to look it up but I'm guessing that the rules are around not giving a misleading impression of your page's relationship with Meta.
As for copyright, when you are in the US you can make Fair Use of their materials, regardless of what the license says.
That you can't do that in Europe is not Meta's fault.
Oh. You're talking about Net Neutrality and not copyright. I'm afraid I don't know enough about the network business to form an opinion on that.
I don't think what happened to you was a subsidy, though. You're offering something for free, and apparently Alibaba took advantage of you for that. That's just how it is, sometimes.
I touched on a lot of subjects. In a nutshell, I am against rent-seeking. No more, no less.
BTW, that turned out to be a false.
That's correct. My point was that they're following an agenda as well. But they're correct that that signature has consequences and doesn't translate into unlimited corporate growth.
OpenAI is very secretive and not transparent at all. They promised to release a model which they've delayed several times now. But other than that, they don't write papers for some time now, they don't share stuff. And they do other small little things for their own benefit and so the competition can't do the same. They even go ahead and keep simple numbers like the model size a big trade secret. They guard everything closely and they like it that way. It's the literal opposite of free exchange of information. And they do that with most of their business decisions.
And Meta's model come with a license plus an EULA. And I've lost track of the current situation, but as an Europen I've been prohibited from downloading and using Meta's LLMs for some time. Sometimes they also want my e-mail address, I have to abide by their terms and I don't like the terms... That's their rights. And they're making use of them. It is not I can just download it and do whatever because that were Fair Use as well... They retain rights, and many of them.
Trademark is definitely part of the conversation. Can models paint a mickey mouse? other trademarked stuff? Sure they do. And it's the same trademark that protects fictional characters and other concepts. So once AI ingests that, it needs addressing as well. And it's not just that. They (Meta/Instagram) also address copyright and they also have a lot of rules about that. With that specific thing I was more concerned with their logo, though, and that is mostly trademark law.
No, I am talking about copyright. Net neutrality has nothing to do with any of this.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. They're taking advantage of people. And kind of in a mischevious way, because they've thought about how they can defeat the usual defenses. How do you think I'm supposed to deal with that? Let everyone take advantage of me? Take down my server and quit this place?
I'm with you on this. As long as it's fair. Make sure AI companies aren't rent-seeking either. Because currently that's big part of their business model.
I mean what do you think the big piles of information the gather for training are? That they don't share and do contracts and even buy up companies to get exclusive access... How they gobble up the resources? And how prices for graphics cards skyrocket first due to crypto and then due to AI? That's kinda rent-seeking on several different levels...
It's definitely inspired by her performance on "Her". Sam Altman himself made a reference, connecting his product and that specific movie. It's likely not a coincidence. And they kind of followed up and removed that voice along with a few others. Clearly not because they were right and this is an uncontroversial topic.
The vision models are not for the EU. Meta trained them on Facebook data. The EU did not allow that. Meta said that this would mean that their models would not have the necessary knowledge to be useful for European users, and disallowed their use in the EU. It also means that some EU regulations don't apply, but they did not give that as a reason, I think.
In any case, it seems quite fair to me. If Europe does not want to pitch in, but only makes demands, then why should it reap the benefits?
Some other recent open models by Tencent and Huawei are also not for the EU. That is in response to the AI Act. I am surprised that it is not a standard clause yet.
No. They can't override fair use. That's the point of fair use. You cannot do what you like with it because you are in Europe and don't have fair use.
I really don't understand how that is supposed to make sense. You demand that American companies should be giving more free stuff to Europe. But also, they should be following European laws in the US and pay rent-seekers for the privilege. It's ridiculous.
I don't see how that is about copyright.
Back that up or retract the statement.
What you are saying is that someone who sounds a bit like Scarlet Johanson must get permission from her to speak in public.
Maybe there is a language issue here. But from what you are writing, you are not against rent-seeking. You demand privileges and free money for special people; a new aristocracy. You even want privileges for Meta, even though you use these privileges as arguments why these privileges should exist. This is all absolutely ridiculous.
Here's rent-seeking in the German Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renten%C3%B6konomie