Taggart :donor: (@mttaggart)
infosec.town
Japan determines copyright doesn't apply to LLM/ML training data. > On a global scale, Japan’s move adds a twist to the regulation debate. Current discussions have focused on a “rogue nation” scenario where a less developed country might disregard a global framework to gain an advantage. But with Japan, we see a different dynamic. The world’s third-largest economy is saying it won’t hinder AI research and development. Plus, it’s prepared to leverage this new technology to compete directly with the West. I am going to live in the sea. https://www.biia.com/japan-goes-all-in-copyright-doesnt-apply-to-ai-training/

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/8121669

Taggart (@mttaggart) writes:

Japan determines copyright doesn’t apply to LLM/ML training data.

On a global scale, Japan’s move adds a twist to the regulation debate. Current discussions have focused on a “rogue nation” scenario where a less developed country might disregard a global framework to gain an advantage. But with Japan, we see a different dynamic. The world’s third-largest economy is saying it won’t hinder AI research and development. Plus, it’s prepared to leverage this new technology to compete directly with the West.

I am going to live in the sea.

www.biia.com/japan-goes-all-in-copyright-doesnt-apply-to-ai-training/

  • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
    505·
    10 months ago

    Um - your examples are so old the copyright expired centuries ago. Of course you can copy them. And you can absolutely use an image of the Mona Lisa without accreditation or licensing.

    Painting and selling an exact copy of a recent work, such as Banksy, is a crime.

    … however making an exact copy of Banksy for personal use, or to learn, or to teach other people, or copying the style… that’s all perfectly legal.

    I don’t think think this is a black and white issue. Using AI to copy something might be a crime. You absolutely can use it to infringe on copyright. The real question is who’s at fault? I would argue the person who asked the AI to create the copy is at fault - not the company running the servers.

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
        102·
        10 months ago

        Huh? What does being non profit have to do with it? Private companies are allowed to learn from copyrighted work. Microsoft and Apple, for example, look at each other’s software and copy ideas (not code, just ideas) all the time. The fact Linux is non-profit doesn’t give them any additional rights or protection.

      • iegod@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        They’re not gatekeeping llms though, there are publicly available models and data sets.

    • silverbax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      10 months ago

      Thanks for your response. I realize I muddied the waters on my question by mentioning exact copies.

      My real question is based on the ‘everything is a remix’ idea. I can create a work ‘in the style of Banksy’ and sell it. The US copyright and trademark laws state that a work only has to be 10% differentiated from the original in order to be legal to use, so creating a piece of work that ‘looks like it could have been created by Banksy, but was not created by Banksy’ is legal.

      So since most AI does not create exact copies, this is where I find the licensing argument possibly weak. I really haven’t seen AI like MidJourney creating exact replicas of works - but admittedly, I am not following every single piece of art created on Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, or DALL-E, or any of the other platforms, and I’m not an expert in the trademarking laws to the extent I can answer these questions.

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

        Thanks for your response

        Always happy to discuss copyright. :-) Our IP laws are long overdue for an overhaul in my opinion. And the only way to make that happen is for as many people as possible to discuss the issues. I plan to spend the rest of my life creating copyrighted work, and I really hope I don’t spend all of it under the current rules…

        The US copyright and trademark laws state that a work only has to be 10% differentiated from the original in order to be legal to use

        The law doesn’t say that.The Blurred Lines copyright case for example was far less than 10%. Probably less than 1%, and it was still unclear if it was infringement or not. It took five years of lawsuits to reach an unclear conclusion where the first court found it to be infringing then an appeals panel of judges reached a split decision where the majority of them found it to be non-infringing.

        Copyright is incredibly complex and unclear. It’s generally best to just not get into a copyright lawsuit in the first place. Usually when someone accuses you of copyright infringement you try to pay them whatever amount of money (in the Blurred Lines case, there were discussions of 50% of the artist’s income from the song) to make them go away even if your lawyers tell you you’re probably going to get a not guilty verdict.

      • Jojo@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        I really haven’t seen AI like MidJourney creating exact replicas of works

        I don’t have a source to cite, but I did read an article that showed a bad faith actor deliberately trying to use ai to copy images directly, and while the results weren’t exact replicas, they were reasonable facsimiles of the original, to the extent that if a human has created it without ai, it would have been blatant copyright infringement, despite not being quite identical.

        I wish I had the examples on hand to show, but it was months ago, and unfortunately I have not the skills nor time to retrieve it.

    • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
      44·
      10 months ago

      To be at fault the user would have to know the AI creation they distributed commits copyright infringement. How can you tell? Is everyone doing months of research to be vaguely sure it’s not like someone else’s work?

      Even if you had an AI trained on only public domain assets you could still end up putting in the words that generate something copyrighted.

      Companies created a random copyright infringement tool for users to randomly infringe copyright.

    • Mango@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      10 months ago

      Your example is a dude who paints unsolicited on other people’s property. What kind of copyright does a ghost have?

      • Jojo@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        A surprising amount, though it would potentially be quite difficult to prove.

        • Mango@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          10 months ago

          I should paint some shit on your house and then sue you for displaying it.