It's not if you own the copy and saved it. The distribution is specifically the problem. Physical media ownership allows for alternative copy ownership depending on where you live.
Honestly, this sounds like the best test of copyright laws.
If corporations can train models on pirated data, and corporations are persons, then you, as a person, should be able to infringe copyright to train an AI model too.
I agree with the conclusion, but that rationale is wrong. First, you can digitize a DVD. Second, it's not a double standard. You can grab copies of random stuff and jam it in an AI model too.
Our laws are written such that it's making a copy outside of reasonable use that's illegal, and AI training only makes a copy incidentally to what they're doing and then it's deleted. It's the same standard that makes viewing a photo on an artists website legal.
It's not bullshit because they're breaking the law, but because we need to refine the law to make it clear training an AI model isn't a reasonable usage anymore than a public broadcast of a DVD is a reasonable use.
Trying to shoehorn it into the existing laws will just create a nightmare of loopholes and complications.
You got four replies all about just the DVD part, but I want to ask is how you would word things to apply to AI specifically? LLM models? Idk what language would be in legaleese for this and exclusive enpugh to apply.
The traditional method would be to define the scope and intent of the law, and then defer the specifics of enforcement to an executive agency for nuanced application. That way the law conveys "no usage of information passed to a machine learning model for the purposes of generative content production, nor the output of any such system, should be considered fair use under copyright law unless the usage is non commercial and qualifies as fair use for academic or research purposes". Then someone like the FCC would determine what qualifies as a machine learning model, and can flex to account for changes in technology.
You basically just say what you mean very specifically. I don't think it's a problem for Google to download webpages and track how they connect and their words, because that's how search engines work. So I'm okay with that. I'm okay with individuals downloading chunks of the public web to do normal things. I'm okay with people needing huge swaths of the text for research, as well as the images, even for specific research into generative AI of the type we're talking about. No one is being harmed by someone at MIT incidentally creating farside comics.
Harm or no harm, the disagreeable part to me is the commercial use of the model trained on inputs from people who didn't want you to do that, sometimes without even having the most superficial justification to have the content in the first place.
AI training only makes a copy incidentally to what they’re doing and then it’s deleted. It’s the same standard that makes viewing a photo on an artists website legal.
That's not what the U.S. Copyright office says about training. They hold that it does implicate the copyright of reproduction. Meaning: If you train on a protected work without a license you are violating copyright, and if that's not a fair use then you are breaking the law.
Training ~ viewing might be an analogy used by "AI" brands, but it is not legal reality.
I'm not sure that's been extensively tested in courts. The document you referenced below appears to be as-yet not officially published, so I don't believe it actually qualifies as an official position yet, but the bigger issue is that it's untested in court.
This thread is a response to an AI court case where the ruling was that training on copy written works is fair use.
Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a "central library" that would not necessarily be used for that purpose
Regardless, you do make good points and I think we agree that the end state is "they shouldn't be able to do that". I have concerns that using existing standards that take copying too literally results in some unintended ambiguity, and situations where AI training is incidentally blocked, but so is stuff like "opening a news article on a computer", which does the same things the copyright office report highlights as infringement.
I think we'd be in a much more agreeable place if we just legally state that a commercial AI tools training isn't fair use. That lets you have nuance like "search engine? It's a statistical model, but not generative: allowed. AI agent? Statistical model that's generating content as opposed to classification or ranking: not allowed".
I think we’d be in a much more agreeable place if we just legally state that a commercial AI tools training isn’t fair use.
Good luck getting any federal law changes through before 2028, at best. So, for at least a couple of years, we get to use the existing laws to address generative "AI"'s use of works still under copyright protection.
Any change in status before then we be policy changes by the U.S. Copyright Office, but they have already come down against training (mostly; the publications are long because there's a lot of nuance).
Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work to train
But, Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (Judge Chhabria, June 25, 2025) states that “in most cases,” training LLMs on copyrighted works without permission is likely infringing and not fair use and "this ruling does not stand for the proposition that [...] use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful."
The courts are divided, but the copyright office is not.
The document you referenced below appears to be as-yet not officially published
Parts 1 and 2 are officially published.
On May 9, 2025, the Office released a pre-publication version of Part 3 [...] A final version of Part 3 will be published in the future, without any substantive changes expected in the analysis or conclusions.
I could've sworn a court case decided otherwise. Literally EVERY AI model in existence right now is commiting copyright theft on a massive scale if that's the interpretation the courts took. Which is why I have a hard time buying it. I fear it's reached the idea of normalcy in people's minds and we'll never see it illegal.
There's been a couple court cases (that I know of / at least), and one judge was accepting on the argument that model training was a "fair use" while the other was not. I think both of those rulings came down prior to the publication of the U.S. Copyright Office guidelines.
Also, I'm not 100% sure that the U.S. Copyright Office is an authority here. The DOJ and/or Federal judiciary would have the authority to interpret the copyright laws: The DOJ to decide to prosecute, and the judiciary to make binding rulings and/or advise juries. I'm sure both the DOJ and the judiciary will give a lot of weight to the guidelines, but the guidelines aren't actually the law.
In any case, you can read the guidelines and make your own decisions: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ Part 3 is about training, and I think the damning bits are III, B and D. Part 2 is about outputs, and I think the damning bits are II, B and D.2. (My summaries: 1. Training infringes 2. Outputs that are substantially similar infringe 3. models get no copyright 4. prompts are NOT 'human creative effort' and thus are insufficient to establish copyright 5. human creative effort still gets copyright protections, even when generative AI is used as a tool in the creative process.)
It is likely that commercial generative AI is in violation of a lot of copyrights, yes. Research projects are fair use, but only as long as they stay research projects.
Its a slopper who wants to project these spreadsheets as 'conscious' when what's happening is they're essentially being transcoded into statistical models.
Yup. Give a Markov chain multi-billion parameters and you can get some surprisingly cogent results.
I will freely admit that current LLM architectures include several innovations that make them not actually Markov chains, but it's still statistics and linear algebra. I don't know what thought is, but I'm quite unconvinced that LLMs (or any current generative AI architecture) is doing it.
I don’t know what thought is, but I’m quite unconvinced that LLMs (or any current generative AI architecture) is doing it.
Okay, why not? I also don't know what thought is, so I don't think it's possible to say if an LLM is or is not doing it. And giving wrong or incoherent answers doesn't invalidate it as thought or your local stoner buddy would be considered brain dead.
I've not seen evidence of it in any of my interactions with generative AI, which have pretty universally been bad. I feel like it has something to do with autonomous spontaneity. I recognize it in animals I can't communicate well with, but I found it lacking in the LLM that I tried to play a TTRPG with. It would be easier for me to be convinced, if I really had a better understanding of what thought is. It's hard for me to be convinced because while I understand LLMs and diffusion networks better than most people*, I don't think I understand thought so I recognize the gap.
Also I'm not sure I agree with your final assertion, the stoner buddy is plenty wrong, but there is a coherency there. When coherency disappears entirely from human thought that's usually a seizure or stroke. Even as confusing as they are dreams and acid trips often have a coherency while you are in them, if not one that's easily described when recalling the experience.
*: My formal AI training ended before big data met ML, so it's woefully out of date. I am quite the computer geek tho, it's just my passion tends toward languages, type systems, and proof assistants. So, better than most, but not an expert by any means.
Nah. Shut the fuck up slopper. If you're going to insult us and then ask chatgpt to win the argument, which you always do and it always misses the point, I'm not going to answer your question.
The fact is these systems can do what a lot of humans do. That's not because the matrix multiplication is identical to thinking, but because most of these humans have never thought in their lives, do not have interiority, and are not people in any way that matters. Prove you're conscious if you want me to address you as such, fucking slopper.
‘‘(a)(3) As used in this subsection—
‘‘(A) to ‘circumvent a technological measure’ means to
descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work,
or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair
a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright
owner;
and
‘‘(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES.—(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
They hyphenated techno-logical both times in the second paragraph? Was it a line break both times, or was the moron who wrote it really that out of touch with the topic he was writing laws for?
The larger part of the infringement is probably its use commercially. I doubt that there would have been such a fuss if it was a fully-open, low-profit operation.
But as-is, the commercial products are being used to make money for the AI company in an unauthorised way.
Similar to how it's generally frowned upon for fan media to make money, because it starts being infringement. You can have a "support the fan media maker" button, but you generally can't do things like put your fan media behind a pay wall. The IP owners will come down hard on you for that.
Different senses of the word digital. The dvd is digital as in "made discrete and not analog".
I meant in the sense of "to move off of fixed use physical media and translate to a format more agnostic to storage medium or conducive to transfer and immediate processing".
More succinctly: to copy something to a storage medium that's harder to loose under the couch.
Okay so how DO you digitize it since you can also hold the SSD in your computer in your hand? In fact I can't think of a data storage medium in use that you can't touch physically at all.
Nitpick: Why would anyone do that, DVDs are already digital mediums with a filesystem. So they first have to convert to analog media first... And that introduces losses...
You just put a DVD in your drive and now you can copy files from it to you HD... If copying files is now called 'digitizing' we live in a strange world...
If you have a large number of DVDs, digitising them makes them easier to browse and decouples you from the physical medium (so you don't have to bring them with you everywhere in order to watch them).
As for the conversion, maybe you're confusing this with ripping vinyl or tape. Ripping a CD or a DVD is easy and reproducible and gives you a 1:1 digital copy of it.
You're missing his point, he's unhappy with the word choice. Ripping a DVD is not digitizing it. Digitizing means specifically turning an analog signal digital.
Ah, my bad - now that I read it again, you're right. In the same line of thought though "digitising" is sometimes wrongly used in the place of ripping.
Maybe because I'm not a native english speaker, but to me 'digitising' means converting an analog medium to a digital one. Like with vinyl, VHS, etc. And 'ripping' is about an extraction process. Like overcoming a protection or more difficult to access mediums like Audio CDs, which don't have a real filesystem, and into a easily accessible single file on a harddrive.
DVDs are already digital, and if they don't have a copy protection, which you have to rip through, you can just copy the files to a hardrive and then, if you want reencode them into one more portable file...
It definitely does have the meaning of making an analog signal discrete, and DVDs are digital in that sense.
There's also the sense of serializing or enumerating something into a format more flexible or amenable to computer manipulation. More briefly: to put it on a computer.
For some things it's super obvious: a vinyl record has a groove you can see, and you digitize it by sampling the output of the wiggle: analog.
The contents of an SD card are invisible and the only way to observe them is via a computer, where they're already presented in a flexible format: not analog.
Then you have fuzzy things: a printed picture that was taken with a digital camera. Grab a magnifying glass and you can see that it's got blocks of quantized color, and isn't continuous. You digitize the photo by shining light on it and capturing the bounce.
Optical media is a disc with a groove in it that you read by shining a light on it to capture the bounce. Instead of a horizontal wiggle though it's pits creating an interference pattern with a laser.
It's digital because it's quantized information that it stores. It needs to be digitized to work with easily because the format is often read-only or write once. It's analog because the pits themselves are continuous and the system spends surprising amount of nuance correcting errors from things like fingerprints and dust.
Books are plainly analog, even though they're composed almost entirely of discrete, quantized units of structured information. Sometimes even with a lookup table and index for faster search!
Magnetic tape stores analog audio by varying the strength of a magnet with the audio signal. It stores digital information by only setting the magnet to specific strengths. Same for VHS or cable Internet.
To make a long ramble short: digitize also means to stick it on a computer, owing to efforts to digitize things often being focused on items that aren't continuous, like text.
Now you have upgraded to a more limited number of rich assholes with even more concentrated power. Oh wait, a couple of decades later they reintroduce capitalism too.
It's unclear that is inevitable, but it does seem to be a common result of State socialism.
In libertarian socialism, hoarding resources will be recognized as an attack on the commons that can be answered with an attack (by the people) on the hoarder.
In libertarian socialism, the people are the police. There's no States, so no state-organized and state-privileged police force. I could be wrong though, I still need a lot of education around libertarian socialism; I'm very much used to Capitalism.
Simply put, if people impose themselves by force on others then “they will be the government” and “we will oppose them with force” for “if today we want to make a revolution against the government, it is not in order to submit ourselves supinely to new oppressors.” [Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 99] This applies to defending a free society against organised counter-revolution and against those within it conducting anti-social (“criminal”) activities. The principle is the same, it is just the scale which is different.
The "bunch of vigilantes" will be accountable to the people because they will be the people. They will act to reject anti-social activities, re-educate people that chose to do anti-social acts (so they have a pro-social understanding), and remediate any harms due anti-social activities.
Am I misunderstanding something here??? Copyright needn't exist under socialism because under socialism artists wouldn't be dependent on the legal fiction of "intellectual property" to make a living.
Without copyright, what LLMs raiding the creative output of whoever (including by destroying and scanning books), and reproducing it, even exactly, wouldn't have any legal restrictions, but neither would overt piracy.
It would be a very different world. So, depending on what you think is "wrong" with one of the listed activities but not the other, it might be solved by eliminating IP (as part of overthrowing Capitalism or otherwise). Also, the current private justifications of those behaviors would no longer acquiring or obtaining capital, but that doesn't mean people wouldn't pursue those behaviors for other justifications.
I think in a socialist world, a great many artists will still find themselves working to make a living; they will work for the community instead of the Capitalists, but there will still be work to be done, and art may not keep your belly full in lean times. But, I also have problems imagining a socialist world.
Missed a major part: the AI companies are buying rare books, scanning them and then burning them. It's not like buying a DVD which can easily be digitally copied with hardware that most people have at home, it's so mucn worse than that.
They are buying the books. Used booksellers are reporting a rash of unusual purchases: high volumes of book purchases with no regard for content or cost.
Oh no no no no you got it all wrong, you have to digitize it and then burn the CD so that nobody can ever see it unless they have access to that digital copy.
Something something who else was it that burned books?
Can you tell me what point you are making? I thought I was being crystal clear but I'll try again:
Breaking the encryption is illegal. That is circumvention of the protection system and therefore is specifically illegal. Playback is obviously "decryption" but that is the intended use, so it is quite clearly not illegal.
No one said anything you are implying was said. All that was said is this ^
What good would copy protection be...
Was not said to say that it's impossible to break. Nothing like that was even closed to implied. It was said because you claimed all one needs to do is copy a disc and it will work. Which is hilarious because the implication would be that they developed a copy protection system that literally did: not almost nothing, but precisely nothing. Go ahead and try to clone a hollywood DVD. I tried it too back in 1999, because I just knew I understood everything. Guess what, that doesn't work. You have to break the encryption.
The AI company does copy an image of the book but digitally transforms it into a form they can use. You can't transform the dvd into a form you can more conveniently use (like MP4) without illegally breaking encryption.
An encrypted unplayable copy which is far worse than having no copy. For that copy to be anything but a waste, you have to break the encryption which is specifically illegal.
The data is encrypted and legal, or it's been decrypted which is illegal. That is what was being discussed here. You're trying to make a pedantic argument about it and I'm growing weary of that.
Thing? Sorry I didn't sleep last night and I got Shanghai'd into being in a 3 hour gig/funeral I was not awake enough for this morning. I got to like season 3 I think.
That's an option, but it's got a pretty expensive penalty if you get caught. It's a lot of risk for a song / movie / game. By all means, do your thing, but you gotta be prepared for what could happen.
They're both infringement, and no-one in authority cares about either. This is kind of the situation we collectively negotiated post-Napster. Piracy is allowed to exist as long as distribution isn't being directly commercialized; it is only addressed in a piece-meal fashion by big publishers on a short-term basis for their critical first weeks.
Yeah? I can make money off the information I pirate. Nobody asks, "Where did you learn that knot? Did you pay for Ashley's Book Of Knots? Because if not, you're in trouble!"
Ripping a DVD isn't copyright infringement. If the playback program caches the output video 500ms in advance, is it infringement? If my computer has any DRAM, is it infringement? If the law says it is, the law needs to change.
But digitizing your own content isn’t illegal you have the right to backups. It’s when you choose to distribute those copies to people who did not pay for the original product that you get in trouble. This argument makes no sense.
Buying physical media is actually only buying a limited license to use that media yourself, and ripping the content to digitize/backup is technically against the the terms of that license in many cases. It's ridiculous and unenforceable, but true.
It depends on what "your own content" means. Ripping a home movie has no encryption to begin with so you don't break any laws. Ripping a Hollywood movie requires breaking the dvd encryption and that itself is a violation of law.
welcome to the real world where those in power make up their own rules and tell us to abide by whatever rules they make up on the fly to keep us powerless.
This defines my political stance better than any party does. I’m against hypocrisy. I’m pro fairness. For fucks sake, there’s a reason “liberty and justice for all” is part of the Pledge of Allegiance that American public school students (like me) said every morning from grade school through high school.
I can feel a rant coming on, so I’ll just be quiet now.
Yep! Laws are literally only tools of oppression. They have never and will never protect you any time you need protecting. That is not what they're for.
They couldn't if they wanted to. Which they don't.
I'm not so sure about that. Murder being illegal is the only way to get justice when a family member is killed outside of retribution, and that opens a whole can of worms
Edit: Whether or not it's applied fairly is a different story and is likely the main issue, not that laws exist in general
Ask an indigenous canadian, a black southeast american, or a trans person or sex worker anywhere how illegal murder is. Or anyone who disappeared after dating a cop
justice
Revenge is not justice. The state getting revenge 'for you' isn't even good revenge. Fuck that.
How the fuck is me grabbing a rifle and shooting a fucker I'm sure killed a loved one in the head any less justice than the state deciding to hire a bite mark analyst to frame the person they want to go down for it and making sure someone's punished so they look strong, then cooking them with a Looney toons gadget or dosing them with torture drugs til they die?
Neither of these things is justice, dead certain. Maybe neither of them should happen. But one of them would at least help repair some of the disempowerment and bring some dramatic shitty closure to my grief.
So even your worst case, the state is still more evil, fucked up, and useless for anything but the harm part.
Seriously, did you think that the people convinced they're right taking it into their own hands would stop with you? Haven't you seen all those parents and other relatives arguing that their kid/whatever could never have done it? Even after mountains of evidence, let alone after they're just gunned down? Some of them don't even care if they did it!
And once its a social expectation that return violence will come if you retaliate, the logical next step is to wipe out the offending family. Because that's the only way to take revenge and be safe. Shit gets bad fast.
One of the prime benefits of our "justice" system taking over the revenge business is limiting feuds.
Bitch if you just wanna rehash some warmed over uncle tom (the more problematic one) bullshit you're free but I got over this 'leviathan' crap by the time I hit puberty and have no patience for it.
If you got nothing better than 'but leviathan!' and can't read the clauses in what I wrote, or acknowledge any of the rest of what I said ('maybe both these things are bad'?), you can go fuck yourself, 'cuz I'm having none of it.
How the fuck is me grabbing a rifle and shooting a fucker I’m sure killed a loved one in the head any less justice than the state deciding to hire a bite mark analyst to frame the person they want to go down for it and making sure someone’s punished so they look strong, then cooking them with a Looney toons gadget or dosing them with torture drugs til they die?
That's what you said.
It's less justice because it's likely to lead to a spiral of violence.
Just because shit's bad doesn't mean it can't be worse.
To copy it into a format that you want (the equivalent of an ai company copying your book into their own format) you need to break css which is illegal. It's common and everyone can do it easily but it is still illegal.
Okay, look. If we're going to be pedantic, let's be pedantic. Speaking solely on U.S. law, format shifting is legal provided you don't bypass a copy-protection mechanism which lacks an exemption granted by the Library of Congress. So, ripping a dvd in a way that circumvents css- illegal. But digitizing can be accompished via other means, video stream capture for example, and remains legal even if the most popular method is not.
When it comes to this sort of thing, the lobbyist's interests have been taking precedence over the People's interests for a long while. And it has become much worse since the Citizen's United ruling. Something has got to give eventually, right?
They should not be allowed to gobble up knowledge like that. I get that if they want to buy a book and analyze it, that should be ok. Similarly, you should be able to analyze a DVD. No one owns facts. But in order to analyze, they need a digital copy, at least I assume so. If they don’t make a digital copy and just analyze, then technically they are not doing anything wrong (I might be wrong about this). I do not agree with them destroying books though. Like Meta is in hot water for illegally coping many books without paying for them, but not for analyzing the books to train their models.
Man this community is just so sadly misguided. It's not illegal to copy even under current draconian laws - publishing is the illegal part. Not to mention that learning from copyrighted material is fair use and you can argue that LLMs are not learning but first you must come to this argument fairly rather than spewing this ludite shit - what's the point of this?
It's machine learning not copying. They are not copying and reproducing your book - except by accident lol. And they will fix the accidents soon enough. It's meant to be not just transformative use but actually learning how to write. And clearly they are mostly successful with that goal, even if the quality of the generated text is subpar - it is generating new text by learning from your book.
So this meme is moving the goalpost of IP. If someone goes to university and learns from textbooks the university wrote, they will have to get a license to practice the skills they learn. Like some kind of rent. That is what the argument here seems to be.
Bullshit. The works are blatantly copied and used to make money of someone else's effort.
This is simply stealing and clearly worse than copying something for personal use.
It seems you've fallen for their scheme to humanize AI. This is not some student learning from a book, it's a database containing all the books.
If they wanted, AI could easily throw out any book, song or other work line by line. Just because they programmed it to jumble up the words doesn't mean it has any human-like ability.
Yeah read that too, that is just fucking outrageous. I really wish fuckai would channel all that anger into some concrete and sensible demands for regulation. Like making destruction of rare books for scanning illegal, or mandatory metadata tags for generative content and showing watermarks in the browser. Or labor rights. The only country regulating AI at all sensibly is China, like most recently they outlawed making addictive AI girlfriend / boyfriend apps.
PS: Just to add, the rare book thing is a bit hypocritical too. Personally I'm pretty much against copyright or intellectual property on principle, so rare books should be scanned non-destructively and be available as eBooks for free. But the argument against AI will tighten copyright, which is also what the AI techbros want. They are fine with paying some license fee to some fund to use the training data, because that will prevent others from offering AI for free (e.g. no running local open source AI models). Which makes certain they can forever collect rent on AI.
Personally I’m pretty much against copyright or intellectual property on principle, so rare books should be scanned non-destructively and be available as eBooks for free.
You're against protecting a person's intellectual property? So anything you make could be copied and sold by a megacorp just because they have a bigger factory and can sell it cheaper? What are you, amazon?
Why not support a library instead of creating greater need for more fucking datacenters?
But the argument against AI will tighten copyright, which is also what the AI techbros want.
They don't want tighter copyright laws, they want to be able to pillage every ounce of untainted writing at the lowest cost so their chatbot can be trained on data that hasn't been poisoned by their chatbot spamming slop into the internet.
No I'm opposed to the concept of intellectual property, I find the very idea obscene. Humanity has always shared ideas and knowledge. Abolishing it would prevent megacorp from selling books for profit.
Instead you would have payments directly to authors or creators etc based on views or interest, ideally on a progressive scale. So someone who starts out can make a living with even just a few fans, while someone with millions gets a bit less proportionally. There are other ideas on how to manage things and make things fair.
No, corporations love copyright. They can afford to pay licenses and buy every single book they scanned. They are also just "too big to fail". So ideal for them would be to make the very use of any AI model require a license for IP to monopolize and squash competition. If you consider AI the "means of generation" or whatever, it's able to do work that humans used to do. If they DO manage to shift the legal framework for this, then they get to own that work. And worse, "we" can't make use of these AI models.
PS: A good example is how health insurance companies purposefully drive up costs of medications and healthcare. They can afford it and can negotiate in large quantities, we can't.
This might not seem important right now, but advances in robotics are happening too, and a small LLM that can write "code" for executing tasks and manual labor could enable actual people or actual small businesses to do "subsistence farming". You build your open source robot like you can build a 3D printer, plop a smartphone in as a control unit, and you get free food for life or make cabinets or build whatever. But not if they extend IP law to AI models because open source couldn't afford to license the training data and they are considered piracy. Obviously this will take time yet.
IP and patents are a tool for monopolization and oppression because they want you to forever pay rent.
I see what you mean, and entirely agree with the concept of technological developments being for the people, but the example of insurance companies is evidence against this, since the person that invented insulin as a treatment for diabetes made it free for everyone by refusing to patent it, then health insurance companies took it upon themselves to charge exorbitant amounts for 'their version' of it.
It's another one of those where people with good intentions are exploited by companies to make a profit
I would much rather have a world where people didnt have to patent their inventions just to protect their ability to make any money from it because of the big corps taking it and making bank through mass production
It stands for "dastardly", because the blasted things stop working if you are in a different country than what it says on the box.
Decide to go on holiday to visit a friend or family member in another country, and bring a DVD so you can both have a nice movie night together? Nope, won't work, because you live in a region 1 country, but they live in a region 3 country, even though it's the same video format. But if you had a VCD from the nice aunty working at the flea market, that worked fine no matter where it went, even if the subtitling was horrendous.
At least with a video cassette, it was an obvious format compatibility issue, and some nicer videotape players could switch between PAL/NTSC/SECAM.
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Why don't you just buy a few senators and do something about it, if you're so upset?
Yup. Donors get policies, voters get apologies.
Donors get policies, voters get
apologiesfined.Rich Americans have money and buy senators.
Poor Americans have guns and take fascism sitting down.
MMW the midterm results will enshrine DNC Incumbents as the fascist enablers they are.
"Poor americans have guns" bruh, guns cost 1/2 a month of rent just for the gun. No way I can put my money for that.
Can't wait for Dems to take both the House and Senate ... and then always be just one vote short of being able to do anything meaningful. As usual.
Or have enough votes for something not meaningful.
If only Americans would learn from MAGA primarying GOP incumbents until the party moved in the direction they wanted.
Takes more effort than bitching online and actually takes persistence and patience.
This is why I’m just back to pirating shit.
Especially if it’s from Amazon.
Digitizing a dvd shouldn't count as copyright infringement unless you are actively distributing the video or selling it. Bullshit.
It's not if you own the copy and saved it. The distribution is specifically the problem. Physical media ownership allows for alternative copy ownership depending on where you live.
Yep. The "fine OR imprisonment" part means fines for the rich, and imprisonment for the poor.
The filthy rich only go to prison for stealing from other filthy rich assholes.
97?! I was that old already... I thought this was older
tbf, some fines in europe are based on income, not a set value. I remember someone getting a fine of a few hundred grand.
Except it's not even fines anymore, apparently it's perfectly legal as long as you destroy the book after scanning it.
They used the duress PIN on their rare book library
Fines would be nice if they were tied to a percentage of someone's net worth. Too bad something like that would never be accepted in the US though.
I'm not pirating, I'm building an AI model
Honestly, this sounds like the best test of copyright laws.
If corporations can train models on pirated data, and corporations are persons, then you, as a person, should be able to infringe copyright to train an AI model too.
“The training process [also] implicates the right of reproduction.” – Part 3, III, B, U.S. Copyright Office Guidelines on generative AI.
I agree with the conclusion, but that rationale is wrong. First, you can digitize a DVD. Second, it's not a double standard. You can grab copies of random stuff and jam it in an AI model too.
Our laws are written such that it's making a copy outside of reasonable use that's illegal, and AI training only makes a copy incidentally to what they're doing and then it's deleted. It's the same standard that makes viewing a photo on an artists website legal.
It's not bullshit because they're breaking the law, but because we need to refine the law to make it clear training an AI model isn't a reasonable usage anymore than a public broadcast of a DVD is a reasonable use.
Trying to shoehorn it into the existing laws will just create a nightmare of loopholes and complications.
You got four replies all about just the DVD part, but I want to ask is how you would word things to apply to AI specifically? LLM models? Idk what language would be in legaleese for this and exclusive enpugh to apply.
The traditional method would be to define the scope and intent of the law, and then defer the specifics of enforcement to an executive agency for nuanced application. That way the law conveys "no usage of information passed to a machine learning model for the purposes of generative content production, nor the output of any such system, should be considered fair use under copyright law unless the usage is non commercial and qualifies as fair use for academic or research purposes". Then someone like the FCC would determine what qualifies as a machine learning model, and can flex to account for changes in technology.
You basically just say what you mean very specifically. I don't think it's a problem for Google to download webpages and track how they connect and their words, because that's how search engines work. So I'm okay with that. I'm okay with individuals downloading chunks of the public web to do normal things. I'm okay with people needing huge swaths of the text for research, as well as the images, even for specific research into generative AI of the type we're talking about. No one is being harmed by someone at MIT incidentally creating farside comics.
Harm or no harm, the disagreeable part to me is the commercial use of the model trained on inputs from people who didn't want you to do that, sometimes without even having the most superficial justification to have the content in the first place.
Thank you for the clarification. The topic is growing ever more nebulous.
That's not what the U.S. Copyright office says about training. They hold that it does implicate the copyright of reproduction. Meaning: If you train on a protected work without a license you are violating copyright, and if that's not a fair use then you are breaking the law.
Training ~ viewing might be an analogy used by "AI" brands, but it is not legal reality.
I'm not sure that's been extensively tested in courts. The document you referenced below appears to be as-yet not officially published, so I don't believe it actually qualifies as an official position yet, but the bigger issue is that it's untested in court.
This thread is a response to an AI court case where the ruling was that training on copy written works is fair use.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-judge-approves-15-billion-anthropic-copyright-settlement-with-authors-2025-09-25/
Regardless, you do make good points and I think we agree that the end state is "they shouldn't be able to do that". I have concerns that using existing standards that take copying too literally results in some unintended ambiguity, and situations where AI training is incidentally blocked, but so is stuff like "opening a news article on a computer", which does the same things the copyright office report highlights as infringement.
I think we'd be in a much more agreeable place if we just legally state that a commercial AI tools training isn't fair use. That lets you have nuance like "search engine? It's a statistical model, but not generative: allowed. AI agent? Statistical model that's generating content as opposed to classification or ranking: not allowed".
Good luck getting any federal law changes through before 2028, at best. So, for at least a couple of years, we get to use the existing laws to address generative "AI"'s use of works still under copyright protection.
Any change in status before then we be policy changes by the U.S. Copyright Office, but they have already come down against training (mostly; the publications are long because there's a lot of nuance).
But, Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (Judge Chhabria, June 25, 2025) states that “in most cases,” training LLMs on copyrighted works without permission is likely infringing and not fair use and "this ruling does not stand for the proposition that [...] use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful."
The courts are divided, but the copyright office is not.
Parts 1 and 2 are officially published.
I could've sworn a court case decided otherwise. Literally EVERY AI model in existence right now is commiting copyright theft on a massive scale if that's the interpretation the courts took. Which is why I have a hard time buying it. I fear it's reached the idea of normalcy in people's minds and we'll never see it illegal.
There's been a couple court cases (that I know of / at least), and one judge was accepting on the argument that model training was a "fair use" while the other was not. I think both of those rulings came down prior to the publication of the U.S. Copyright Office guidelines.
Also, I'm not 100% sure that the U.S. Copyright Office is an authority here. The DOJ and/or Federal judiciary would have the authority to interpret the copyright laws: The DOJ to decide to prosecute, and the judiciary to make binding rulings and/or advise juries. I'm sure both the DOJ and the judiciary will give a lot of weight to the guidelines, but the guidelines aren't actually the law.
In any case, you can read the guidelines and make your own decisions: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ Part 3 is about training, and I think the damning bits are III, B and D. Part 2 is about outputs, and I think the damning bits are II, B and D.2. (My summaries: 1. Training infringes 2. Outputs that are substantially similar infringe 3. models get no copyright 4. prompts are NOT 'human creative effort' and thus are insufficient to establish copyright 5. human creative effort still gets copyright protections, even when generative AI is used as a tool in the creative process.)
It is likely that commercial generative AI is in violation of a lot of copyrights, yes. Research projects are fair use, but only as long as they stay research projects.
Its a slopper who wants to project these spreadsheets as 'conscious' when what's happening is they're essentially being transcoded into statistical models.
Yup. Give a Markov chain multi-billion parameters and you can get some surprisingly cogent results.
I will freely admit that current LLM architectures include several innovations that make them not actually Markov chains, but it's still statistics and linear algebra. I don't know what thought is, but I'm quite unconvinced that LLMs (or any current generative AI architecture) is doing it.
Okay, why not? I also don't know what thought is, so I don't think it's possible to say if an LLM is or is not doing it. And giving wrong or incoherent answers doesn't invalidate it as thought or your local stoner buddy would be considered brain dead.
I've not seen evidence of it in any of my interactions with generative AI, which have pretty universally been bad. I feel like it has something to do with autonomous spontaneity. I recognize it in animals I can't communicate well with, but I found it lacking in the LLM that I tried to play a TTRPG with. It would be easier for me to be convinced, if I really had a better understanding of what thought is. It's hard for me to be convinced because while I understand LLMs and diffusion networks better than most people*, I don't think I understand thought so I recognize the gap.
Also I'm not sure I agree with your final assertion, the stoner buddy is plenty wrong, but there is a coherency there. When coherency disappears entirely from human thought that's usually a seizure or stroke. Even as confusing as they are dreams and acid trips often have a coherency while you are in them, if not one that's easily described when recalling the experience.
*: My formal AI training ended before big data met ML, so it's woefully out of date. I am quite the computer geek tho, it's just my passion tends toward languages, type systems, and proof assistants. So, better than most, but not an expert by any means.
Nah. Shut the fuck up slopper. If you're going to insult us and then ask chatgpt to win the argument, which you always do and it always misses the point, I'm not going to answer your question.
The fact is these systems can do what a lot of humans do. That's not because the matrix multiplication is identical to thinking, but because most of these humans have never thought in their lives, do not have interiority, and are not people in any way that matters. Prove you're conscious if you want me to address you as such, fucking slopper.
There may be a limitation if the DVD is copy-protected, as is usually the case. There's too much to read for a single comment in DMCA: https://www.congress.gov/105/plaws/publ304/PLAW-105publ304.pdf
But it does fall under this definition (§1201):
and
They hyphenated techno-logical both times in the second paragraph? Was it a line break both times, or was the moron who wrote it really that out of touch with the topic he was writing laws for?
Line break, I'll fix it.
The larger part of the infringement is probably its use commercially. I doubt that there would have been such a fuss if it was a fully-open, low-profit operation.
But as-is, the commercial products are being used to make money for the AI company in an unauthorised way.
Similar to how it's generally frowned upon for fan media to make money, because it starts being infringement. You can have a "support the fan media maker" button, but you generally can't do things like put your fan media behind a pay wall. The IP owners will come down hard on you for that.
Commercializing a work virtually guarantees it's creation isn't "fair use".
But also, "fair use" is actually quite a bit more narrow than just non-commercial.
How do you digitize a DVD when it’s already digital?
Har har.
Different senses of the word digital. The dvd is digital as in "made discrete and not analog".
I meant in the sense of "to move off of fixed use physical media and translate to a format more agnostic to storage medium or conducive to transfer and immediate processing".
More succinctly: to copy something to a storage medium that's harder to loose under the couch.
You can't hold something in your hand if it's digital.
Oh?
Okay so how DO you digitize it since you can also hold the SSD in your computer in your hand? In fact I can't think of a data storage medium in use that you can't touch physically at all.
On the cloud, duh
Nitpick: Why would anyone do that, DVDs are already digital mediums with a filesystem. So they first have to convert to analog media first... And that introduces losses...
You just put a DVD in your drive and now you can copy files from it to you HD... If copying files is now called 'digitizing' we live in a strange world...
If you have a large number of DVDs, digitising them makes them easier to browse and decouples you from the physical medium (so you don't have to bring them with you everywhere in order to watch them).
As for the conversion, maybe you're confusing this with ripping vinyl or tape. Ripping a CD or a DVD is easy and reproducible and gives you a 1:1 digital copy of it.
You're missing his point, he's unhappy with the word choice. Ripping a DVD is not digitizing it. Digitizing means specifically turning an analog signal digital.
Right, that's it. Though... you probably shouldn't assume someones gender ;)
You're right, but I think I got a lucky hit this time.
Ah, my bad - now that I read it again, you're right. In the same line of thought though "digitising" is sometimes wrongly used in the place of ripping.
Maybe because I'm not a native english speaker, but to me 'digitising' means converting an analog medium to a digital one. Like with vinyl, VHS, etc. And 'ripping' is about an extraction process. Like overcoming a protection or more difficult to access mediums like Audio CDs, which don't have a real filesystem, and into a easily accessible single file on a harddrive.
DVDs are already digital, and if they don't have a copy protection, which you have to rip through, you can just copy the files to a hardrive and then, if you want reencode them into one more portable file...
It definitely does have the meaning of making an analog signal discrete, and DVDs are digital in that sense.
There's also the sense of serializing or enumerating something into a format more flexible or amenable to computer manipulation. More briefly: to put it on a computer.
For some things it's super obvious: a vinyl record has a groove you can see, and you digitize it by sampling the output of the wiggle: analog.
The contents of an SD card are invisible and the only way to observe them is via a computer, where they're already presented in a flexible format: not analog.
Then you have fuzzy things: a printed picture that was taken with a digital camera. Grab a magnifying glass and you can see that it's got blocks of quantized color, and isn't continuous. You digitize the photo by shining light on it and capturing the bounce.
Optical media is a disc with a groove in it that you read by shining a light on it to capture the bounce. Instead of a horizontal wiggle though it's pits creating an interference pattern with a laser.
It's digital because it's quantized information that it stores. It needs to be digitized to work with easily because the format is often read-only or write once. It's analog because the pits themselves are continuous and the system spends surprising amount of nuance correcting errors from things like fingerprints and dust.
Books are plainly analog, even though they're composed almost entirely of discrete, quantized units of structured information. Sometimes even with a lookup table and index for faster search!
Magnetic tape stores analog audio by varying the strength of a magnet with the audio signal. It stores digital information by only setting the magnet to specific strengths. Same for VHS or cable Internet.
To make a long ramble short: digitize also means to stick it on a computer, owing to efforts to digitize things often being focused on items that aren't continuous, like text.
False, they never bought your book.
remember folks: the entire problem is capitalism. it can literally all be solved by dismantling capitalism and …undismantling some guillotines.
Now you have upgraded to a more limited number of rich assholes with even more concentrated power. Oh wait, a couple of decades later they reintroduce capitalism too.
It's unclear that is inevitable, but it does seem to be a common result of State socialism.
In libertarian socialism, hoarding resources will be recognized as an attack on the commons that can be answered with an attack (by the people) on the hoarder.
How in the world is that going to be policed?
In libertarian socialism, the people are the police. There's no States, so no state-organized and state-privileged police force. I could be wrong though, I still need a lot of education around libertarian socialism; I'm very much used to Capitalism.
That makes no sense. How are a bunch of vigilantes going to be accountable to the rest of society?
Maybe this will help: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full#text-amuse-label-seci58
I haven't internalized all of it yet.
I think this is the most direct answer:
The "bunch of vigilantes" will be accountable to the people because they will be the people. They will act to reject anti-social activities, re-educate people that chose to do anti-social acts (so they have a pro-social understanding), and remediate any harms due anti-social activities.
The police, right now, are the people. The state is the people.
Do you think that under State socialism that copyrights will exist and be enforced?
Who/what exactly would grant OR enforce copyrights under libertarian socialism?
Capitalism is a problem, but is not quite parallel with IP rights/protections.
Am I misunderstanding something here??? Copyright needn't exist under socialism because under socialism artists wouldn't be dependent on the legal fiction of "intellectual property" to make a living.
Without copyright, what LLMs raiding the creative output of whoever (including by destroying and scanning books), and reproducing it, even exactly, wouldn't have any legal restrictions, but neither would overt piracy.
It would be a very different world. So, depending on what you think is "wrong" with one of the listed activities but not the other, it might be solved by eliminating IP (as part of overthrowing Capitalism or otherwise). Also, the current private justifications of those behaviors would no longer acquiring or obtaining capital, but that doesn't mean people wouldn't pursue those behaviors for other justifications.
I think in a socialist world, a great many artists will still find themselves working to make a living; they will work for the community instead of the Capitalists, but there will still be work to be done, and art may not keep your belly full in lean times. But, I also have problems imagining a socialist world.
i think also state socialism would be a problem, yes.
Missed a major part: the AI companies are buying rare books, scanning them and then burning them. It's not like buying a DVD which can easily be digitally copied with hardware that most people have at home, it's so mucn worse than that.
The law overwhelmingly favors corporate entities over people. We've been over this more times than HBO Max changed their logo.
Haha he thinks these AI companies are buying the books.
They are buying the books. Used booksellers are reporting a rash of unusual purchases: high volumes of book purchases with no regard for content or cost.
The AI company doesn't even have to buy it.
You are reposting a screen capture of a (probably AI generated) shortform video of a repost of a tweet screenshot.
Copyright laws are just state's monopoly on information, at this point.
Oh no no no no you got it all wrong, you have to digitize it and then burn the CD so that nobody can ever see it unless they have access to that digital copy.
Something something who else was it that burned books?
I have heard in the US is illegal to bypass copy protection or encryption on DVDs which is required to digitize them.
The DMCA prevents breaking encryption but you can still create an ISO from the disk.
For which you need a key to unlock "your" locked copy. Breaking the lock would be illegal. Making your ISO useless.
Not as useful but still perfectly usable. Just not editable
What? That's not true at all. You can just burn the iso to disc or use software that's paid the license fee.
It's stupid bullshit but perfectly possible.
What good would copy protection be if all you have to do it replicate it exactly? You're not correct.
Are you telling me you can't burn DVDs?
How do you think they even make DVDs? Do you think each one is unique or something?
What good is copy protection if all you need to do is hook a tape recorder up to the DVD player?
The system is stupid and ultimately futile. Is it really shocking that such a system produced a weirdly easy to bypass copy protection?
It's not an impervious technical hurdle, it's a legal protection. You can legally do it by using software that has the license to do the decryption.
Can you tell me what point you are making? I thought I was being crystal clear but I'll try again:
Breaking the encryption is illegal. That is circumvention of the protection system and therefore is specifically illegal. Playback is obviously "decryption" but that is the intended use, so it is quite clearly not illegal.
No one said anything you are implying was said. All that was said is this ^
Was not said to say that it's impossible to break. Nothing like that was even closed to implied. It was said because you claimed all one needs to do is copy a disc and it will work. Which is hilarious because the implication would be that they developed a copy protection system that literally did: not almost nothing, but precisely nothing. Go ahead and try to clone a hollywood DVD. I tried it too back in 1999, because I just knew I understood everything. Guess what, that doesn't work. You have to break the encryption.
It prevents changing encoding formats and that's about it. It's bothersome for pirates but hardly a challenge.
If you needed a special key to run a disks then there would be a monopoly on DVD players.
I don't know why anything but those two facts would matter at all.
The AI company does copy an image of the book but digitally transforms it into a form they can use. You can't transform the dvd into a form you can more conveniently use (like MP4) without illegally breaking encryption.
Yeah I think given they're reselling others works for profit is clearly illegal, I wish more judges were agreeing with me about that.
An encrypted unplayable copy which is far worse than having no copy. For that copy to be anything but a waste, you have to break the encryption which is specifically illegal.
You can still play it, it just requires a different device or an emulator. DVD players aren't some secretive dark magic.
Really? Because everyone here thought they were!
The data is encrypted and legal, or it's been decrypted which is illegal. That is what was being discussed here. You're trying to make a pedantic argument about it and I'm growing weary of that.
Because it absolutely is illegal
you forget we all practice bird law here
Hey, btw, did you get that thing I sent ya?
Thing? Sorry I didn't sleep last night and I got Shanghai'd into being in a 3 hour gig/funeral I was not awake enough for this morning. I got to like season 3 I think.
It's easy. Don't follow the rules.
That's an option, but it's got a pretty expensive penalty if you get caught. It's a lot of risk for a song / movie / game. By all means, do your thing, but you gotta be prepared for what could happen.
Yes of course. However, if all understand and do that, it's impossible to go after all.
The law has to follow the habit. So education is key, equal right for everyone.
That's the part many corrupt people have not understood. It all collapses at some point.
They can buy a one of a kind book from you, scan it, and shred the original and all they get is more military contracts
nonono, the difference is that they pirated it.
It's not a Jellyfin library. It's a future AI training centre.
They're both infringement, and no-one in authority cares about either. This is kind of the situation we collectively negotiated post-Napster. Piracy is allowed to exist as long as distribution isn't being directly commercialized; it is only addressed in a piece-meal fashion by big publishers on a short-term basis for their critical first weeks.
But the LLM companies do make money off the content it was trained on, no?
Yeah? I can make money off the information I pirate. Nobody asks, "Where did you learn that knot? Did you pay for Ashley's Book Of Knots? Because if not, you're in trouble!"
This is just an example. I do have a pirated copy of ABoK but I also own an original print.
Ripping a DVD isn't copyright infringement. If the playback program caches the output video 500ms in advance, is it infringement? If my computer has any DRAM, is it infringement? If the law says it is, the law needs to change.
"The law says Not P. If the law says P then the law is wrong." Thanks, councilor; we'll take your learned contribution under advisement.
But digitizing your own content isn’t illegal you have the right to backups. It’s when you choose to distribute those copies to people who did not pay for the original product that you get in trouble. This argument makes no sense.
Buying physical media is actually only buying a limited license to use that media yourself, and ripping the content to digitize/backup is technically against the the terms of that license in many cases. It's ridiculous and unenforceable, but true.
Definitely not the case in Europe
It depends on what "your own content" means. Ripping a home movie has no encryption to begin with so you don't break any laws. Ripping a Hollywood movie requires breaking the dvd encryption and that itself is a violation of law.
A story as old as time.
Which means unlimited corrupt folk to eat.
Whether or not we can make long term change, idk.
But seeing these folk suffer sure would be nice regardless.
You wouldn't download a DVD
Exactly my argument. Its bullshit
welcome to the real world where those in power make up their own rules and tell us to abide by whatever rules they make up on the fly to keep us powerless.
Someone should make an ai model that steals from other ai models: call it privateer.
Uh, they already did, and have been doing so for about 2 years now.
https://www.aitechinsights.com/articles/behind-moonshot-ai-s-kimi-k3-the-distillation-controversy-explained/
I'm sick of twitter reposts and this format, write the damn thing yourself i trust someone on lemmy more than i trust someone on twitter
This defines my political stance better than any party does. I’m against hypocrisy. I’m pro fairness. For fucks sake, there’s a reason “liberty and justice for all” is part of the Pledge of Allegiance that American public school students (like me) said every morning from grade school through high school.
I can feel a rant coming on, so I’ll just be quiet now.
Yep! Laws are literally only tools of oppression. They have never and will never protect you any time you need protecting. That is not what they're for.
They couldn't if they wanted to. Which they don't.
I'm not so sure about that. Murder being illegal is the only way to get justice when a family member is killed outside of retribution, and that opens a whole can of worms
Edit: Whether or not it's applied fairly is a different story and is likely the main issue, not that laws exist in general
Ask an indigenous canadian, a black southeast american, or a trans person or sex worker anywhere how illegal murder is. Or anyone who disappeared after dating a cop
Revenge is not justice. The state getting revenge 'for you' isn't even good revenge. Fuck that.
How the fuck is me grabbing a rifle and shooting a fucker I'm sure killed a loved one in the head any less justice than the state deciding to hire a bite mark analyst to frame the person they want to go down for it and making sure someone's punished so they look strong, then cooking them with a Looney toons gadget or dosing them with torture drugs til they die?
Neither of these things is justice, dead certain. Maybe neither of them should happen. But one of them would at least help repair some of the disempowerment and bring some dramatic shitty closure to my grief.
So even your worst case, the state is still more evil, fucked up, and useless for anything but the harm part.
That's how you get feuds.
Seriously, did you think that the people convinced they're right taking it into their own hands would stop with you? Haven't you seen all those parents and other relatives arguing that their kid/whatever could never have done it? Even after mountains of evidence, let alone after they're just gunned down? Some of them don't even care if they did it!
And once its a social expectation that return violence will come if you retaliate, the logical next step is to wipe out the offending family. Because that's the only way to take revenge and be safe. Shit gets bad fast.
One of the prime benefits of our "justice" system taking over the revenge business is limiting feuds.
Bitch if you just wanna rehash some warmed over uncle tom (the more problematic one) bullshit you're free but I got over this 'leviathan' crap by the time I hit puberty and have no patience for it.
If you got nothing better than 'but leviathan!' and can't read the clauses in what I wrote, or acknowledge any of the rest of what I said ('maybe both these things are bad'?), you can go fuck yourself, 'cuz I'm having none of it.
Feuds are not a mythical beast. They are historical fact.
What did I say, dumbass? What if we didn't 'solve' the 'killing people' problem by killing even more people and not even getting anything out of it'?
Can you even think of solutions to problems that do not involve murder? What do you do when you run out of cheese, or a lightbulb goes?
It's less justice because it's likely to lead to a spiral of violence.
Just because shit's bad doesn't mean it can't be worse.
You are certifiably deranged. Some people should never have been given internet access.
Yeah, I don't think being evil on purpose is a broad spectrum moral imperative. Totally nuts.
"Doesn't always" ≠ "never does"
https://youtube.com/shorts/bmaoNLSHx_w?is=KZ7Q3-gFY_GD_wVn
Sorry I don't click yt links.
👍
Well, a DVD would already be pretty digital, I'd think...
It's the best Ju$tice money can buy.
Digitizing a DVD is completely legal
To copy it into a format that you want (the equivalent of an ai company copying your book into their own format) you need to break css which is illegal. It's common and everyone can do it easily but it is still illegal.
Okay, look. If we're going to be pedantic, let's be pedantic. Speaking solely on U.S. law, format shifting is legal provided you don't bypass a copy-protection mechanism which lacks an exemption granted by the Library of Congress. So, ripping a dvd in a way that circumvents css- illegal. But digitizing can be accompished via other means, video stream capture for example, and remains legal even if the most popular method is not.
I'm pretty sure that would easily be argued in court to be a method of circumventing the copy protection and thus also illegal.
Confidently incorrect. As the other user said you have to break the encryption which is specifically illegal.
When it comes to this sort of thing, the lobbyist's interests have been taking precedence over the People's interests for a long while. And it has become much worse since the Citizen's United ruling. Something has got to give eventually, right?
Then play by your own rules. Nobody can truly stop you from anything. For the most part society tries to give you consequences after the fact.
They should not be allowed to gobble up knowledge like that. I get that if they want to buy a book and analyze it, that should be ok. Similarly, you should be able to analyze a DVD. No one owns facts. But in order to analyze, they need a digital copy, at least I assume so. If they don’t make a digital copy and just analyze, then technically they are not doing anything wrong (I might be wrong about this). I do not agree with them destroying books though. Like Meta is in hot water for illegally coping many books without paying for them, but not for analyzing the books to train their models.
Man this community is just so sadly misguided. It's not illegal to copy even under current draconian laws - publishing is the illegal part. Not to mention that learning from copyrighted material is fair use and you can argue that LLMs are not learning but first you must come to this argument fairly rather than spewing this ludite shit - what's the point of this?
It's machine learning not copying. They are not copying and reproducing your book - except by accident lol. And they will fix the accidents soon enough. It's meant to be not just transformative use but actually learning how to write. And clearly they are mostly successful with that goal, even if the quality of the generated text is subpar - it is generating new text by learning from your book.
So this meme is moving the goalpost of IP. If someone goes to university and learns from textbooks the university wrote, they will have to get a license to practice the skills they learn. Like some kind of rent. That is what the argument here seems to be.
Bullshit. The works are blatantly copied and used to make money of someone else's effort.
This is simply stealing and clearly worse than copying something for personal use.
It seems you've fallen for their scheme to humanize AI. This is not some student learning from a book, it's a database containing all the books. If they wanted, AI could easily throw out any book, song or other work line by line. Just because they programmed it to jumble up the words doesn't mean it has any human-like ability.
I don't mind them using textbooks. Its these companies that are CUTTING THE FUCKING SPINES OFF 1 OF 1 RARE BOOKS JUST TO TURN THEM INTO CLANKER SLOP.
Yeah read that too, that is just fucking outrageous. I really wish fuckai would channel all that anger into some concrete and sensible demands for regulation. Like making destruction of rare books for scanning illegal, or mandatory metadata tags for generative content and showing watermarks in the browser. Or labor rights. The only country regulating AI at all sensibly is China, like most recently they outlawed making addictive AI girlfriend / boyfriend apps.
PS: Just to add, the rare book thing is a bit hypocritical too. Personally I'm pretty much against copyright or intellectual property on principle, so rare books should be scanned non-destructively and be available as eBooks for free. But the argument against AI will tighten copyright, which is also what the AI techbros want. They are fine with paying some license fee to some fund to use the training data, because that will prevent others from offering AI for free (e.g. no running local open source AI models). Which makes certain they can forever collect rent on AI.
You're against protecting a person's intellectual property? So anything you make could be copied and sold by a megacorp just because they have a bigger factory and can sell it cheaper? What are you, amazon?
Why not support a library instead of creating greater need for more fucking datacenters?
They don't want tighter copyright laws, they want to be able to pillage every ounce of untainted writing at the lowest cost so their chatbot can be trained on data that hasn't been poisoned by their chatbot spamming slop into the internet.
No I'm opposed to the concept of intellectual property, I find the very idea obscene. Humanity has always shared ideas and knowledge. Abolishing it would prevent megacorp from selling books for profit.
Instead you would have payments directly to authors or creators etc based on views or interest, ideally on a progressive scale. So someone who starts out can make a living with even just a few fans, while someone with millions gets a bit less proportionally. There are other ideas on how to manage things and make things fair.
No, corporations love copyright. They can afford to pay licenses and buy every single book they scanned. They are also just "too big to fail". So ideal for them would be to make the very use of any AI model require a license for IP to monopolize and squash competition. If you consider AI the "means of generation" or whatever, it's able to do work that humans used to do. If they DO manage to shift the legal framework for this, then they get to own that work. And worse, "we" can't make use of these AI models.
PS: A good example is how health insurance companies purposefully drive up costs of medications and healthcare. They can afford it and can negotiate in large quantities, we can't.
This might not seem important right now, but advances in robotics are happening too, and a small LLM that can write "code" for executing tasks and manual labor could enable actual people or actual small businesses to do "subsistence farming". You build your open source robot like you can build a 3D printer, plop a smartphone in as a control unit, and you get free food for life or make cabinets or build whatever. But not if they extend IP law to AI models because open source couldn't afford to license the training data and they are considered piracy. Obviously this will take time yet.
IP and patents are a tool for monopolization and oppression because they want you to forever pay rent.
I see what you mean, and entirely agree with the concept of technological developments being for the people, but the example of insurance companies is evidence against this, since the person that invented insulin as a treatment for diabetes made it free for everyone by refusing to patent it, then health insurance companies took it upon themselves to charge exorbitant amounts for 'their version' of it.
It's another one of those where people with good intentions are exploited by companies to make a profit
I would much rather have a world where people didnt have to patent their inventions just to protect their ability to make any money from it because of the big corps taking it and making bank through mass production
Yeah the post is inaccurate because it skips over the fact that these companies don't even pay for the books.
"The training process [also] implicates the right of reproduction." -- Part 3, III, B, U.S. Copyright Office Guidelines on generative AI.
If you have a reasonable suspicion your copyrights are being violated, you might want to talk to a lawyer so you can at least engage in discovery.
This chap will be really mad when he learns what the first D in DVD is.
I’m pretty sure by “digitize”, they meant “rip”, and I’m pretty sure you knew that and are just being pedantic.
It stands for "dastardly", because the blasted things stop working if you are in a different country than what it says on the box.
Decide to go on holiday to visit a friend or family member in another country, and bring a DVD so you can both have a nice movie night together? Nope, won't work, because you live in a region 1 country, but they live in a region 3 country, even though it's the same video format. But if you had a VCD from the nice aunty working at the flea market, that worked fine no matter where it went, even if the subtitling was horrendous.
At least with a video cassette, it was an obvious format compatibility issue, and some nicer videotape players could switch between PAL/NTSC/SECAM.