hendrik

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Oh, wow.

I mean for some questions, we already have an old way of doing it and it's relatively straightforward to apply it:

Can you figure out what economic reasons might exist for a creator being paid per copy or per viewer?

Selling/Buying something is a very common form of contract. In our economy, the parties themselves decide what's in the contract. I can buy apples, cauliflower or wood screws per piece or per kilogram. That's down to my individual contract between me and the supermarket (or hardware store) and nothing the government is involved in. It's similar with licensing, that's always arbitrary and a matter of negotiation.

What happens when something was wrongly included in a dataset? Is that a problem only for the original curator, or also for everyone who got a copy?

Of course for everyone. If I download a torrented copy of a Hollywood film, that's not "healed" by it being a copy of a copy. It's still the same thing.

It's due diligence. Especially once someone uses (or publishes) something. And it very much depends on circumstances. Did they do it deliberately, specifically ignoring being in violation of something? If they were wrongfully under the assumption it was a legal copy, then it's more analogous to fencing. They're not in trouble for stealing anymore, but can be ordered to let go of the stolen goods. I'd say that's pretty much the same liability as with other things. I kill someone with my car. Now the question is have I been neglectful? Did I know the brakes were faulty but I didn't repair them and used the car nonetheless? Or did the car manufacturer mess up? There might be a case against me, or the manufacturer or both. And both civil and criminal law can be involved in different ways.

When researchers and developers share datasets, what duty do they have to check how the contents were obtained by whoever assembled it?

I'd do it like with shipments in the industry. If you receive a truck load of nuts and bolts, you take 50 of them out and check them before accepting the shipment and integrating the lot into your products.

Whether you downloaded a legal copy depends on whether the party offering the download had the right to do so. Whether that is the case may not be apparent.

Though that is very hypothetical. If the torrent has annas-archive or libgen.is in the title... It's pretty obvious. And that was what happened here. They did it deliberately and we know they knew.

And this week the next lawsuit started, alleging they (Meta) uploaded tons of porn videos (illegally) to be able to download what they were interested in, since Bittorrent has a tit for tat mechanism.

So I believe we first need to address the blatant piracy before talking about hypothetical scenarios. I believe that's going to be easier, though. I proposed to mandate transparency with what a company piled up in a dataset. One of the reasons was to address this. Like with the DMCA and GDPR, this could be a relatively simple mechanism where the provider (or company) gets some leeway, since it indeed is complicated. People will get a procedure to file a complaint and then someone can have a look whether it was wrongly included.

You said that there should be a way that you can remove your personal data from the training set. That implies that an AI company can offer money in exchange for people not removing their data. That's basically a licensing fee, however it is framed.

I wasn't concerned with copyright here. Let's say I'm politically active and someone leaks my address and now people start showing up, throwing eggs at my front door and threatening to kill me. Or someone spreads lies about me and that gets ingested. Or I'm a regular person and someone posted revenge porn of me. Or I'm a victim of a crime and that's always the fist thing that shows up when someone puts in my name and it's ruining my life. That needs to be addressed/removed. Free of charge. And that has nothing to do with licensing fees for content or celebrities. When companies use data, they need to have a complaints department and that will immediately check whether the complaint is valid and then act accordingly. There needs to be a distinction between harmful content and copyright violations.

Ultimately, Fair Use derives from the US Constitution; from the copyright clause but also freedom of speech. Copyright law spells out 4 factors that must be taken into account. But courts may also consider other factors.

Thanks for explaining. I didn't know those were only guidelines. But it makes sense and that's generally different between common law countries and whatever we are called, civil law countries?

Exactly, they don't pay more for the same thing. It's almost exclusive to the copyright industry.

And that is for a good reason. Generally physical things can't be copied easily. So handling copying isn't really necessary with physical goods. That's kind of in the word "copyright". Though when licensing for example immaterial goods, you're also buying a different license and different rights, and not the same thing.

Maybe think more in terms of services and licensing, since that's the main point here. In the material world that'd be something like the difference between renting an excavator for 2 weeks or buying the same one. It'll be exactly the same excavator I get. It's going to be a very different number on the bill, and I get different rights and obligations.

Of course, you will have to pay more for the right to make copies than for a single copy. And even more for the exclusive copyright. Those things are different.

Sure. Since I grew up with the German model, I'd open yet another category for AI training so it can be handled specifically. I mean it doesn't really fit into anything existing. AI is neither making copies, nor a copy, but still it uses it. And it's also not an art form or a citation. So I need a good argument why it needs to be mushed together with something else.

And datasets and model-weights are yet different things. Since we agree that AI training is transformative, we can confine copyright to the datasets and it's not much of an issue with the learned model weights. Or at least it shouldn't be. And I mean we have enough other issues to deal with that arise from the models itself.

"how my server was targeted by Alibaba" I agree that the situation is far from ideal. [...] It's a difficult issue. Mind that an opt-out from AI training does not actually address this.

I think you underestimate the consequences. The AI Fair Use plus the illegitimate scraping lead to a quite substantial war on the internet. Now every entity is fighting for their own. People like me are at the bottom of the chain and we have to protect our servers simply so they don't burn down. Big content platforms wage war as well. They don't want "their" content to be scraped. Leaving it open like before only cuts into their business. They rather sell it themselves. So they started making lots of things inaccessible by technical means, and combat the freedom we had before.

And that's the conundrum. In practice, this leads to the opposite. My own Fair Use of content (and that of other normal people and smaller businesses) is collateral damage. I used to archive some videos and I run a PeerTube instance. And now Google blocks all datacenter IPs, so you can just watch Youtube from a residential internet connection. They introduced rate-limiting. Reddit's API debacle in 2023 was largely about this. Countless other services and platforms have become enshittified due to this. And many more will.

Idk if the average consumer already notices. But it's really bad once you look under the hood. And this is not sustainable. And benefactors of this war are mostly big companies. Like Reddit, who found a way to make profit off of it. And Cloudflare, who were way too big of a dominating central internet instance before, and now they're the arms dealer in the war against scraping and that makes them even bigger.

All the while the internet gets more locked down, enshittified... And everyone who isn't the big content industry or already a monopolist, loses.

"favour of the feudal lord companies and to the detriment of the average person" [...] How so?

See my text above. Even if it was a nice idea, it leads to the opposite in the real world. A few big internet companies "win" in this war with technology, disregarding the idea behind the law, and everyone exept them loses. Cementing monopolies, not helping with them.

And more generally because most AI companies are billion dollar companies, they own half the internet ("land"), and a random nonfiction book author is a random individual with a very moderate income. And Fair Use now says the labour of the small guy is free of charge for the big company.

This is what you believe based on what you see. The rest is just slogans by the copyright industry, which you repeat without thinking. The problem is that you are basically shouting yourself down; your own opinion.

Ultimately, I'm not set on any ideology here. I'm regularly more concerned with making things work. And that's my goal here, too. I want a world that includes the existence of books and TV shows. So I need people to do that job. Now jobs can't be done if the people doing it starve.

Copyright is just a tool trying to achieve that. And kind of an half-way obsolete one with a lot of negative side-effects. I'm not set on it. We just need a way so books and TV shows are still a thing in 20 years. And that's my concern here and why I talk a lot about labour involved, and never about how they deserve to get rich if they're popular or if they manage the stuff.

And I see roughly 3 options for the future: a) Nobody pays them, or b) people who make use of their labour pay them, or c) some people pay, some get a free pass.

And the way I see it is a) is a future where quality and professional content is likely going to vanish big scale. And I'm not sure if the exact pre-copyright model applies to our modern world. Things have changed. For example copying things was an expensive process back then and required very expensive machinery. When it's done at no cost and by everyone in the digital age. b) is what I'm advocating for. Everyone needs to pay. Preferrably not every taxpayer, but people who actually use the stuff. And c) is what I called a "subsidy" when everyone gets to use it but only a group of people pays for everyone.

I mean what's your idea here? I can't really tell. Let's say we're not set on copyright. How do $90,000 arrive at a book author each year so it's a viable job and they can create something full time? And I'd like a fair solution for society.

Na gut. Aber dafür gibt's ja Action. Da kosten HDMI Kabel oder 10m Netzwerkkabel sowas wie 4€. Und die üblichen Adapter, Powerbanks etc gibt's dort meist auch...

Ich finde Geschäfte eigentlich ganz nice um sich Produkte einmal anzuschauen, beispielsweise wie klobig so eine Smartwatch tatsächlich ist, das geht immer schlecht im Internet.

Ansonsten läuft ein durchschnittlicher MediaMarkt Besuch bei mir eher so ab:

Ich: Entschuldigen Sie, haben sie 10TB Festplatten?
Verkäufer: Nein, kann ich aber bestellen.
Ich: Danke, das kann ich auch selbst.

I am graduating [...]

Sorry, I read that after I replied and edited my comment, but a bit too late... That changes some things...

I agree. There's roughly two options. Either a static archive as your heritage. Or some writable file storage which can be kept up to date. And yeah, that needs payment, maintenance...

And from my observation, finding people willing to maintain something, or clean up after someone did some annoying things or filled up storage or whatever, is harder than setting up the technology.

Obviously that option would be preferable, though.

[...] or set something local, but set it behind some proxy

Maybe Cloudflare is your friend. They dominate the market of free reverse proxies / tunnels.

But I'm really unsure if I have any good recommendation that fits your situation. Ideally find a successor, next best thing is a Nextcloud, Google Drive, OneDrive or some of the other ones. And if that can't be done, split it into manageable chunks by course and dump it to some one click hoster or archive.org. That's all I can come up with.

And by the way, I did appreciate such archives and made use of them. And there's a lot of reasons (cheating aside) to share notes, PDFs, try old exams to prepare...

The main issue is, you graduate as well and life will move on for you. You might move far away, get a full-time job, maybe have new hobbies or a family and time will come and you'll stop supporting it as well. I've seen that all the time and most privately run things vanish sooner than later.

Of course the entities have to abide by the rules. We also did that... officially... It just happened to be the case that some of the same individuals also did other things after hours, and not in their role as members of the entity... And while mingling you'd find similar-minded people and/or successors for the inofficial operations. It's a bit trick to get it right. The official entity of course denies any involvement, they can't take any blame.

And I'd say if you're the main/sole contributor of content, it's questionable if this even survives long term. Unless people upload recent exams and material, the content will become obsolete after a few years. Professors will have changed the questions and assignments or the entire course is done by a new professor and the archive will slowly become obsolete. So you kind of need some community anyways. Or skip the hassle and just upload the thing to archive.org or some one click hoster.

Another option would be to talk to the dev club. Maybe they'd like to revamp their solution and take yours, or they have some idea about tech infrastructure.

Seems things have gotten more complicated in the age of cloud computing. I think these archives have always been a thing. In the good old days sometimes on their infrastructure, buried several layers deep in some windows network share or on some specific computer in the computer lab or maintained by the student body of a faculty... And there was always some secret file stash somewhere.

If you're concerned with a long-term solution. Are there any entities run by the students? Associations or clubs interested in maintaining such a thing long-term? I mean technology aside, the real issue is that this is done by random individuals and they're gone after a while. Ideally this is done with some help of an entity that lasts longer than that and passed down to future generations.

If the use case doesn't matter, then quotes and parody are illegal, as well as historical archiving and scientific analysis.

Well, there is a distinction between use and obtaining it. For stealing, the use doesn't matter. For later use, it does. That's also what licenses are concerned with.

That means that every time some new use becomes desirable, the law must be changes. This is obviously stifling for progress in science and culture.

Yes, that's obviously the wrong way round. Usually things should be allowed per default, unless they're specifically prohibited or handled by law. We got it the wrong way around, here. However, I don't think it's the other way around in the USA either. While Fair Use is a broad limitation/exemption, it's still concerned with specific exemptions. For example AI wouldn't be allowed by default unless it gets incorporated into law, but they're referring back to the already existing, specific exemption to do "transformative" work. Very much alike our exemptions. Just that it is way more broad.

Actually, no. Theft is prosecuted by the government; police and courts. Copyright infringement is generally a civil matter. Damages are paid but there is no criminal prosecution.

Well, it is. In the United States, willful copyright infringement carries a maximum fine of $150,000 per instance. In Germany it seems to be prison sentence up to 3 years or a fine.

I think laws should either be enforced or abolished. The current situation is not healthy.

Maybe you would like to see copyright infringement to be punished more harshly and enforced more strictly?

No, copyright should be toned down. Preferably for regular citizens as well and not just the industry.

That's an interesting idea. It's not how we do anything else. You don't usually have to pay more for the same thing, depending on who you are or how much you use it.

You're wrong here. People do have to pay more if they license a picture to show to their 20 million customers or use it in an advertising campaign, than I do for putting it up in the hallway. Airbus pays like 100x the price for the same set of nuts and bolts than someone else. A kitchen appliance for industrial use costs like 3x the price of an end user kitchen appliance. Because it's more sturdy and made for 24/7 use. A DVD rental business pays more for a DVD than the average customer.

Should there be exceptions for celebrities and such, or will they be able to demand licensing fees?

No exceptions, no licensing, no fees. This is strictly to avoid bad things like doxxing, ruining people's lives...

Then much public content can't be used, after all. The likes of Reddit, Facebook, or Discord will be able to charge licensing fees for their content, after all. [...]

They already do. There's a big war going on in the internet. I've told you how my server was targeted by Alibaba and it nearly took down the database. All other people have implemented countermeasures as well. Try scraping Reddit or downloading 5 Youtube videos. It's a thing of the past, you'll get rate-limited and your downloads will quickly start to fail. Unless you pay. So it is defacto that way already and can barely get worse. And the rich can buy their way into things, the monopolists are already in, while I can't do anything any more. My IP addresses get rate-limited or blocked and my accounts banned for "suspicious activity". Which was me making use of my Fair Use rights or the German version of something like that. But I'm prevented from exercising my rights.

It's very typically European. You rage against Meta's monopoly but you also call for laws to enforce and strengthen it. I think it's the echo of feudalism in the culture.

Well, I think taking authors' livelihood in favour of mega corporations is enforcing and strengthening their monopoly and the echo of feudalism. I'd be less concerned if it was some small research institute doing something for the public or progress. Or if a programming book author was making more than 100,000€ a year and they're "the monopoly". But it's the other way around. This application of Fair Use is in favour of the feudal lord companies and to the detriment of the average person. Also defacto I as a citizen get none of the Fair Use the big companies get, and that's just different rules for different people.

That's a tough question. Copyright is showing its age and barely applies in the digital world. Even before AI we had a lot of edge cases and court cases over like a decade to find out how copyright applies to a digital concept. I don't think there is an easy way to retrofit something. At least I can't come up with a good idea. And the general proposal seems to be all or nothing.

What I think doesn't work is saying every normal citizen needs to buy books and Zuckerberg gets to pirate books. In a democracy law has to apply to everyone. And his use-case doesn't matter here. I can also claim I pirated the 10TB of TV shows and movies for transformative or legitimate use. It's still piracy. And other law works the same way. If I steal chocolate in the supermarket, that's also theft no matter what I was planning to do with it. So that's out.

And then we're left with how economy is supposed to work as of today. An AI company needs supplies to manufacture their product, they buy those supplies on the market... In this case that's going to be licensing content. Though, that's going to be hard. A billion dollar company with a service used by millions of people should pay more than a single researcher doing it for 5 people. And implementing that would be impossibly complex. One possible way would be to introduce a collecting society to handle the money and maths. But they're not ideal either.

So it's more or less down to allowing AI companies to use content with some kind of default license. They can take all the public information as they wish. Again, they can not steal in the process. They'll buy one copy of a Terry Pratchett novel at the same price everyone needs to pay.

And to compensate for them not having to contract with the authors an buy special licenses, they need to offer transparency. Tell the authors and everyone what went into the models and if their content is amongst that. And if they scraped my personal data, I need a way to get that deleted from the dataset.

I'd also add an optional opt-out mechanism to appease to the people who hate AI. They can add some machine-readable notice, or file a complaint and their content will be discarded.

And since just taking and not contributing back isn't healthy to society, I'd add something about "composite" works. If something like an AI model is just pieced together by other people's content, that doesn't deserve copyright in my opinion. So all generations are automatically public domain and maybe the models as well.

And we need a definition of AI and transformative. Once we get capable models with a ability to recite an entire novel word by word, that's going to run into copyright again. So yeah.

And intellectual property has to be softened. A generative AI model necessary "contains" a lot of IP, has knowledge about it and can reproduce it. And we need to be alright with that. And in case someone wants to outlaw impersonation and celebrity deepfakes, there needs to be more than a blurry line.

But all of this is more patching copyright and we're going to run into all kinds of issues with that. I think ideally we come up with a grand idea and overhaul the entire thing so it applies to the 21st century.

I don't think this is true. We have mechanisms in authentication systems to prevent that. For example make requests valid for one use only. And I'd say if an attacker can ask about age every single day until a user turns 18, and by that gaining knowledge about their exact birthday, it's something like a side-channel attack and by definition not "zero" knowledge any more and needs to be handled/prevented by the implementation.

Systematic analysis [...] That is arbitrary, no?

Yes. That's arbitrary. But we're conflating several very different things here. There is investment in form of labour. And I'm pretty sure we have to agree that in general, labour needs to be compensated in a capitalist economy. Then there is copyright. And this is intellectual property, which is yet another concept. All of this goes into a book, but they're all very different things. I think IP is the most abstract one (it protects concepts) and kind of moot. I'd be more lax with IP and try to allow everyone to draw a Mickey Mouse, program a Final Fantasy game or write a new Harry Potter book. Patents are a similar thing. Though we have them for a reason.

That's why I say I'm with you with the copyright and the intellectual property. But there's also work going into a book and we're always brushing over that as if it weren't a thing.

How do you think they manage that

It's many factors. Timing, aggressive acquisition strategies, ecosystem building, network effects, then ecosystem lock-in, data harvesting, dominating standards, but also providing genuinely useful services. Economy of scale, massive capital... And I probably forgot dozens of factors, some legitimate, some exploitative.

That seems pretty vibes-based. What do you rationally expect the outcome of your favored policies to be?

• A more level playing field for new players and institutions apart from mega-corporations
• More transparency, since this is a disruptive technology with impact on society
• Expanding on transparency: Mandating transparency in cases like: Why was my loan declined? Why is my insurance now 4x the cost? And is the picture/text on the internet misinformation and fake or real?
• More public research and access to AI. AI shouldn't be just a for-profit service shaped by the tech bros
• Regulation of Black Mirror episode content, like social scoring, total surveillance and mass control, fraud and big-scale manipulation of people, discrimination... And oversight and mandatory standards for dangerous tech, like systems used in healthcare or the arms industry.
• Handle copyright in a way that applies universally. It's unfair and deeply undemocratic to allow Mark Zuckerberg to pirate books because he's rich and has an AI company, while I and other businesses can go to jail for the exact same thing.
• Less ruthless business practices like deliberately abusive data scraping.
• Clarify edge-cases like whether it's okay to impersonate Scarlett Johannsson or David Attenborough. Or generate pornography of Emma Watson.
• Incentives to develop open-weights models (ideally more than that) and to contribute to society and progress.

I believe some projects using OpenVino and ONNX can make use if the NPU. Maybe the generative AI plugins for GIMP and Audacity. But it's not a lot.

Ahh. But they are not. That's what we're discussing. Let me make this clear: All intellectual property is arbitrary.

I feel we've ran into the exact same issue as before. Now we're talking property. But we were just talking about investment and we've just established those two are distinct and not the same. It's a bit confusing. And I agree, that resulting granted monopoly and rent-seeking is an intended feature, and not contributing to society. But my previous comment was addressing the aspect of the author's investment and ROI, not the resulting property from that. And that's not arbitrary at all. The author sat at his desk for 6 months specifically. Sure the resulting product is arbitrary when selling it for money, but that wasn't what we were talking about.

which is why Europeans are so easily defrauded by the copyright industry

I don't think we're easily defrauded by the copyright industry. As I said, school-books seem like 10x cheaper here. Medication with pharma IP in it is mostly cheaper here, I have my library card for like 30€ a year?! And other than that we use the same Spotify and Netflix subscriptions for a similar price. There's no substantial difference with that. I don't see myself in a less favourable position than an US citizen. We also have access to information here, good books, podcasts, journalism, we have culture, concerts... And I don't think any of that is better or cheaper or more accessible in the US. Correct me if I'm wrong...

photograph

Yeah, some photography rules are absurd. I think it's completely mental that people do copyright infringement when they take a picture of a sculpture. Seems US Fair Use sometimes has weird quirks. We also have stupid rules for pictures in Germany.

[...] feudal practices

Considering feudalism... I'd like to re-define that since wo don't have lords and a king for quite some time now. Today's land holders on the internet are companies like Meta, Google etc. They own the platforms we use on a daily basis. They make the rules, shape the place and lease chunks to us peasants as a service. We even let them shape society. For all intents and purposes, they're the feudal lords of today. And that's kind of the reason for my rejection here and why I said early on, all these AI companies are big multi-billion dollar corporations with motivations far from benefit to society. I believe concepts like Fair Use might have been invented as a means to combat feudalism. But looks to me like the situation is now changing and it's more and more used to the opposite effect by the feudal lords themselves to now contribute to their posessions, wealth and dominance.

I'll grant you the copyright industry is a worthy enemy, since they're villains, too. The copyright business model isn't healthy or beneficial to society overall. We've established that. But I really think of feudalism and a defacto-monopoly when I think of Google and Meta and OpenAI/Microsoft. And I'd really like to avoid making more concessions to my feudal lords.