AI and Copyright: Expanding copyright hurts everyone

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/ai-and-copyright-expanding-copyright-hurts-everyone-heres-what-do-instead

by mooreds • 9 months ago

39 72 9 months ago

eff.org

mwkaufma• 9 months ago

"Here's What to Do Instead" misleading title, no alternatives suggested. Just hand-wavey GenAI agitprop.

rapjr9• 9 months ago

These are their alternatives:

What neither Big Tech nor Big Media will say is that stronger antitrust rules and enforcement would be a much better solution. What’s more, looking beyond copyright future-proofs the protections. Stronger environmental protections, comprehensive privacy laws, worker protections, and media literacy will create an ecosystem where we will have defenses against any new technology that might cause harm in those areas, not just generative AI.

bgwalter3• 9 months ago

None of their alternatives will work or solve the problems that creatives face or the problem that people cannot think for themselves any longer (as seen by the downvoting in this submission).

freejazz8• 9 months ago

How do they get to the conclusion that AI uses are protected under the fair use doctrine and anything otherwise would be an "expansion" of copyright? Fairly telling IMO

zrm• 9 months ago

AI training and the thing search engines do to make a search index are essentially the same thing. Hasn't the latter generally been regarded as fair use, or else how do search engines exist?

Kye2• 9 months ago

There was a relatively tiny but otherwise identical uproar over Google even before they added infoboxes that reduced the number of people who clicked through.

justapassenger• 9 months ago

Most important part of fair use is does it harm the market for the original work. Search helps to brings more eyes to the original work, llms don't.

asdefghyk• 9 months ago

re ".....AI training and the thing search engines do to make a search index are essentially the same thing. ...."

Well, AI training has annoyed LOTS people. Overloaded websites.. Done things just because they can . ie Facebook sucking up content of lots pirate books

Since this AI race started our small website is constantly over run by bots and it is not usable by humans because of the load.. NEWER HAD this problem before AI , when just access by search engine indexing .....

soco• 9 months ago

Google doesn't offer for own gains copies of existing websites (except they do that lately as well)

freejazz8• 9 months ago

Weird, AI companies insist that AI models are not just indexes but instead something the model has "learned".

So, again, to answer my question, it's certainly not a settled matter of law that AI models and/or their "training" is actually akin to a search engine such that it amounts to a fair use. So how is it that the EFF is reporting it like a fact?

amelius• 9 months ago

Not the EFF I once knew. Are they now pro-bigtech?

slyall• 9 months ago

They have always been anti-bigcontent. Maybe you are the one who has changed

bigbadfeline• 9 months ago

Not the EFF I once knew. Are they now pro-bigtech?

There's nothing pro-bigtech in this proposal. Big tech can afford the license fees and lawsuits... and corner the market. The smaller providers will be locked out if an extended version of the already super-stretched copyright law becomes the norm.

dragonwriter2• 9 months ago

They’ve always been anti-expansive-copyright, which has historically aligned with much (but not all) of big tech, and against big content/media.

A lot of the people that were anti-expansive-copyright only because it was anti-big-media have shifted to being pro-expansive-copyright because it is perceived as being anti-big-tech (and specifically anti-AI).

turtletontine• 9 months ago

Basically, it’s an open question that courts have yet to decide. But the idea is that it’s fair use until courts decide otherwise (or laws decide otherwise, but that doesn’t seem likely). That’s my understanding, but I could be wrong. I expect we’ll see more and more cases about this, which is exactly why the EFF wants to take a position now.

They do link to a (very long) article by a law professor arguing that data mining is fair use. If you want to get into the weeds there, knock yourself out.

https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk15026/...

dragonwriter2• 9 months ago

Basically, it’s an open question that courts have yet to decide.

While it hasn't either been ruled on or turned away at the Supreme Court yet, a number of federal trial courts have found training AI models from legally-acquired materials to be fair use (even while finding, in some of those and other cases, that pirating to get copies to then use in training is not and using models as a tool to produce verbatim and modified similar-medium copies of works from the training material is also not.)

I’m not aware of any US case going the other way, so, while the cases may not strictly be precedential (I think they are all trial court decisions so far), they are something of a consistent indicator.

1gn15• 9 months ago

Basically, it’s an open question that courts have yet to decide.

This is often repeated, but not true. Multiple US and UK courts have repeatedly ruled that it is fair use.

Anthropic won. Meta won. Just yesterday, Stability won against Getty.

At this point, it's pretty obvious that it's legal, considering that media companies have lost every single lawsuit so far.

https://fixvx.com/technollama/status/1985653634390995178

freejazz8• 9 months ago

But the idea is that it’s fair use until courts decide otherwise

That's certainly an "idea"

tpmoney13• 9 months ago

They probably get to that conclusion because the courts have rules that AI uses are protected under fair use, and so yes changing that would be an expansion of copyright.

Kim_Bruning• 9 months ago

I think your question was supposed to be rhetorical, but I think it's safe to assume that the answer is that they're lawyers. They've read the law, and read through a large number of cases to see how judges have interpreted it over the past century or so.

freejazz8• 9 months ago

I'm a lawyer. Many lawyers disagree. It's certainly not a settled matter of law that AI model training is a fair use.

free_bip4• 9 months ago

One of the few times I vehemently disagree with the EFF.

The problem is this article seems to make absolutely no effort to differentiate legitimate uses of GenAI (things like scientific and medical research) from the completely illegitimate uses of GenAI (things like stealing the work of every single artist, living and dead, for the sole purpose of making a profit)

One of those is fair use. The other is clearly not.

Calavar• 9 months ago

What happens when a researcher makes a generative art model and publicly releases the weights? Anyone can download the weights and use it to turn a quick profit.

Should the original research use be considered legitimate fair use? Does the legitimacy get 'poisoned' along the way when a third party uses the same model for profit?

Is there any difference between a mom-and-pop restaurant who uses the model to make a design for their menu versus a multi-billion dollar corp that's planning on laying off all their in house graphic designers? If so, where in between those two extremes should the line be drawn?

free_bip4• 9 months ago

I'm not a copyright attorney in any country, so the answer (assuming you're asking me personally) is "I don't know and it probably depends heavily on the specific facts of the case."

If you're asking for my personal opinion, I can weigh in on my personal take for some fair use factors.

- Research into generative art models (the kind which is done by e.g. OpenAI, Stable Diffusion) is only possible due to funding. That funding mainly comes from VC firms who are looking to get ROI by replacing artists with AI[0], and then debt financing from major banks on top of that. This drives both the market effect factor and the purpose/character of use factor, and not in their favor. If the research has limited market impact and is not done for the express purpose of replacing artists, then I think it would likely be fair use (an example could be background removal/replacement).

- I don't know if there are any legal implications of a large vs. small corporation using a product of copyright infringement to produce profit. Maybe it violates some other law, maybe it doesn't. All I know is that the end product of a GenAI model is not copyrightable, which to my understanding means their profit potential is limited as literally anyone else can use it for free.

[0] https://harlem.capital/generative-ai-the-vc-landscape/

tpmoney13• 9 months ago

At what point do you cross the line from "legitimate use of a work" to illegitimate use?

If I take my legally purchased epub of book and pipe it through `wc` and release the outputs, is that a violation of copyright? What about 10 books? 100? How many books would I have to pipe through `wc` before the outputs become a violation of copyright?

What if I take those same books and generate a spreadsheet of all the words and how frequently they're used? Again, same question, where is the line between "fine" and "copyright violation"?

What if I take that spreadsheet, load it into a website and make a javascript program that weights every word by count and then generates random text strings based on those weights? Is that not essentially an LLM in all but usefulness? Is that a violation of copyright now that I'm generating new content based on statistical information about copyright content? If I let such a program run long enough and run on enough machines, I'm sure those programs would generate strings of text from the works that went into the models. Is that what makes this a copyright violation?

If that's not a violation, how many other statistical transformation and weighting models would I have to add to my javascript program before it's a violation of copyright? I don't think it's reasonable to say any part of this is "clearly not" fair use, no matter how many books I pump into that original set of statistics. And at least so far, the US courts agree with that.

free_bip4• 9 months ago

I think your analogy is a massive stretch. `wc` is neither generative nor capable of having market effect.

Your second construction is generative, but likely worse than a Markov chain model, which also did not have any market effect.

We're talking about the models that have convinced every VC it can make a trillion dollars from replacing millions of creative jobs.

bgwalter3• 9 months ago

EFF is bought and paid for. Not once does this piece mention that "AI" and humans are different and that a digital combine harvester mowing down and ingesting the commons does not need the same rights as a human.

It is not fair use when the entire output is made of chopped up quotes from all of humanity. It is not fair use when only a couple of oligarchs have the money and grifting ability to build the required data centers.

This is a another in the long lists of institutions that have been subverted. ACLU and OSI are other examples.

OkayPhysicist• 9 months ago

What definition of "sufficiently transformative" doesn't include "a book about wizards" by some process being used to make "a machine that spits out text"? A magazine publisher has a more legitimate claim against the person making a ransom letter: at least the fonts are copied verbatim.

There are legitimate arguments to be made about whether or not AI training should be allowed, but it should take the form of new legislation, not wild reinterpretations of copyright law. Copyright law is already overreaching, just imagine how goddawful companies could be if they're given more power to screw you for ever having interacted with their "creative works".

bgwalter3• 9 months ago

We did have that. In some EU countries, during the cassette tape and Sony Walkman era, private individuals were allowed to make around 5 copies for friends from a legitimate source.

Companies were not allowed to make 5 trillion copies.

nickthegreek• 9 months ago

EFF is bought and paid for.

by whom?

tpmoney13• 9 months ago

It is not fair use when only a couple of oligarchs have the money and grifting ability to build the required data centers.

Seems like a good argument to not lock down the ability to create and use AI models only to those with vast sums of money able to pay extortionist prices from copyright holders. And let's be clear, copyright holders will happily extort the hell out of things if they can, for an example of this we can look to the number of shows and movies that have had to be re-edited in the modern era because there are no streaming rights to the music they used.

drivebyhooting8• 9 months ago

Let’s play out what the successful story looks like, for example in music generation:

* thousands of composers and musicians “contribute” their works for free to OpenAI and their ilk.

* models are trained and can produce movie scores, personalized sound tracks, etc

* the market for composers dwindles to a small sliver. Few if any choose to pursue it.

* OpenAI et al have a de facto monopoly on music creation.

* Soon the art of composition is lost. There are a few who can make a living as composers by selling their persona rather than their music. They actually just use OpenAI to write it for them.

Is that the future we want? Inevitable.

fragmede• 9 months ago

http://Suno.ai is already there.

drivebyhooting8• 9 months ago

Might be a skill issue but my prompt was not followed.

Msurrow• 9 months ago

Koda, the danish music copyright organisation just sued Suno.ai [1] calling it the “biggest music theft in history”.

Apparently suno can almost completely reproduce some “big” songs made by danish bands eg D-A-D, Aqua.

Edit- and from the article it seems they are doing what they can to make it a political/legislation issue.

[1] https://koda.dk/om-koda/nyheder/koda-sagsoeger-ai-tjenesten-...

glimshe• 9 months ago

Keep in mind that professional composers are a tiny minority of people who make great music. And very few professional musicians actually live off royalties. I'm sure that music will do just fine without draconian copyright laws, as it has done for literally thousands of years.

drivebyhooting8• 9 months ago

Because something had been the same for thousands of years doesn’t mean it will remain so. That is a logical fallacy.

I think it’s undeniable that the financial incentive will change dramatically as genAI tools become substitute goods (even if inferior) to creative output.

drivebyhooting8• 9 months ago

I’m not sure why so many seem angry about my scenario.

Is it because my prose sounds biased against GenAI companies? Or I jumped to a bleak conclusion without adequate supporting arguments?

AI and Copyright: Expanding copyright hurts everyone

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