Technology

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml I don't believe in copyright law anymore than I do in landlords. Information is free.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml If corporations couldn't get away with doing things that would get an individual fined or arrested, how would they maintain their competitive edge? Profits above everything, baby!

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml

#Copyright does not protect the concept and themes of artistic presentation. So training autocomplete tools like #ChatGPT or generative art tools along the lines of #StabilityAI on huge amounts of copyrighted material available on the web doesn't seem to trespass on the rights actually created by copyright law. That is, neither the trained model parameters nor the output qualifies as a infringing copy.

The fact that big corporations have heated the rhetoric with even small-scale copyright infringement being characterized as if it were an existential threat rather than free marketing perhaps misleads people to think copyright grants the owner total control of the future of their creations. But law is about statutes and precedents, not feelings, which is why big corporations aren't likely to train their models on billions of copyrighted works if there was a credible risk of paying statutory damages on a per-work basis.

If there is a moral right to the "something" that has been gifted to these models by their training, it has not been well described, let alone recognized in law as property of the creators. How is this "something" which an AI model steals supposed to be distinguished from the piecewise appreciation for the art as summed over all human viewers?

So perhaps the real problem is the moral outrage created by the corporations who for decades equate copyright infringement with being ambushed by a gang of seagoing rapists, kidnappers, killers, and robbers (pirates). Towards that end, Germany is discussing adding copyright infringement as a form of "digital violence" making the analogy more exact.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/05/germany-wants-to-include-copyright-infringement-under-its-planned-digital-violence-law/

yeah, as others have already said, this isn't how copyright law works: it's how law in general works.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml and that's how America works; The bigger you are, the smaller your crimes.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml i have the feeling that in using the platforms offered by these companies you have given them permission to use your work.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml Big crime little crime paradox... also see corporations are people too 😉

This is what happens under fascism.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music yeah, sounds about right—see also the comparisons of e.g. wage theft vs shoplifting for what strikes me as a somewhat similar example of this kind of disparity

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@lemmy.ml @music@fedibb.ml And now you understand capitalism.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml Sometimes I don’t have to wonder why giving up on pursuing any of my creative talents seems like the depressingly reasonable thing to do.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml I don't think you understand the problem.
You see, companies have long struggled due to piracy.
They have to come up with solutions to piracy, and implement them. That is hard work and doesn't do a thing against piracy, and heck it even didn't lower their revenue, because it was proven that those that pirate stuff, also buy stuff.
Therefore, it only makes sense that if you have a lot of money, you don't have to pay...

Wait, I lost my train of thought.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@lemmy.ml @music@fedibb.ml

one death is a tragedy a million is a statistic

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml Except (correct me if I'm wrong here) this sounds like a call for expanding copyright -- but it's *still* not "stealing a car." It never was stealing a car, and making the copyright maximalist argument feels as wrong now as then. Training a neural net isn't stealing (yet), corps like MSFT /Alphabet will be able to weather any changes to IP law, but imo this rhetoric is going to hurt the legions of small artists discovering and working with this new medium.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror." Jean Rostand

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml A post I saw over the weekend proposed a browser extension that replaces mentions of "AI" with "the Torment Nexus". An alternative find-replace could be "AI" to "copyright laundering"!

@ajsadauskas I never used Napster. I found out Google’s own YouTube was giving me free music. While searching for why my hard drive space was being used up so quickly ( remember pre-terabyte drives… pre-Gb?) In my Windows system cache folders were massive files. Always after I had listened to YouTube. Google was basically storing every song I listened to on my own hard drive. Google was just lazy. Even MySpace had a js routine called cache-buster. Thanks Google.

I argue that copyright law is as pointless as it is to circumvent legally.

For instance, Google any song.

Did a YouTube video show up? The copyright law is fucking useless.

@ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml Pirating things from big corporations has never been wrong. Should honestly be encouraged if it wasn't for the law...