I’m changing the order some, because I want to get this off my chest first of all.

Ultimately, I’m not set on any ideology here. I’m regularly more concerned with making things work. And that’s my goal here, too.

That’s not what I’m seeing. Here’s what I’m seeing:

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

First, you start out with a little story. Remember my post about narratives?

You emphasize what “needs” to be achieved. You try to engage the reader’s emotions. What’s completely missing is any concern with how or if your proposed solution works.

There are reputation management companies that will scrub or suppress information for a fee. People who are professionally famous may also spend much time and effort to manipulate the available information about them. Ordinary people usually do not have the necessary legal or technical knowledge to do this. They may be unwilling to spend the time or money. Well, one could say that this is alright. Ordinary people do not rely on their reputation in the same way as celebrities, business people, and so on.

The fact is that your proposal gives famous and wealthy elites the power to suppress information they do not like. Ordinary people are on their own, limited by their capabilities (think about the illiterate, the elderly, and so on).

AIs generally do not leak their training data. Only fairly well known people feature enough in the training data so that a LLM will be able to answer questions about them. Having to make the data searchable on the net, makes it much more likely that it is leaked with harmful consequences. On balance, I believe your proposal makes things worse for the average person while benefit only certain elites.

It would have been straightforward to say that you wish to hold AI companies accountable for damage caused by their service. That’s the case anyway; no additional laws needed. Yet, you make the deliberate choice to put the responsibility on individuals. Why is your first instinct to go this round-about route?

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

But market prices aren’t usually arbitrary. People negotiate but they usually come to predictable agreements. Whatever our ultimate goals are, we have rather similar ideas about “a good deal”.

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

All very reasonable ideas. Eventually, the question is what the effect on the economy is, at least as far as I’m concerned.

These tests mean that more labor and effort is necessary. Mistakes are costly. These costs fall on the consumer. The big picture view is that, on average, either people have less free time because more work is demanded, or they make do with less because the work does not produce anything immediately beneficial. So the question is if this work does lead to something beneficial after all, in some indirect way. What do you think?

So I believe we first need to address the blatant piracy before talking about hypothetical scenarios.

No. That is the immediate hands-on issue. As you know, the web is full of unauthorized content.

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

Well? What’s your pitch?

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

That is not happening, though?

And Fair Use now says the labour of the small guy is free of charge for the big company.

You compare intellectual property to physical property. Except here, where it becomes “labor”. I don’t think you would point at a factory and say that it is the owner’s labor. If some worker took some screws home for a hobby project, I don’t think you would accuse him of stealing labor. Does it bother you how easily you regurgitate these slogans?

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

Good question. That’s an economics question. It requires a bit of an analytical approach. Perhaps we should start by considering if your idea works. You are saying that AI companies should have to buy a copy before being allowed to train on the content. So: How many extra copies will an author sell? What would that mean for their income?

We should probably also extend the question beyond just authors. Publishers get a cut for each copy sold. How many extra copies will a publisher sell and what does that mean for their income?

Actually, the money will go to the copyright owner; often not the same person as the creator. In that way, it is like physical property. Ordinary workers don’t own what they produce. A single daily newspaper contains more words than many books. The rights are typically owned by the newspaper corporation and not the author. What does that mean for their income?

Alas, we have reached the max comment depth. I cannot reply to your latest comment.

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

I see what you mean now. It’s tricky. It’s just another way in which copyright talking points cause problems.

You’re saying that using/copying something you have in a database for AI training should always be legal. However, copying something to add it to the database should be judged as if it was done for enjoyment. EG everyone who torrents a movie should be treated the same, regardless of purpose. This will certainly cause problems for some scientific datasets.

Whether you downloaded a legal copy depends on whether the party offering the download had the right to do so. Whether that is the case may not be apparent. The first question is: What duty does someone have to check the provenance of content or data?

Torrents of current movies and the like are very obviously not authorized. For older movies, that becomes less clear. The web contains much unauthorized content. For example, the news stories that people copy/past on Lemmy. What duty is there to determine the copyright status of the content before using such data?

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

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

What about streams, live TV, radio, and such things? Are you allowed to record those for training or not?

While Fair Use is a broad limitation/exemption, it’s still concerned with specific exemptions.

That’s not quite right. Ultimately, Fair Use derives from the US Constitution; from the copyright clause but also freedom of speech. Copyright law spells out 4 factors that must be taken into account. But courts may also consider other factors. There is also no set way in which these factors have to be weighed. It’s very open.

Well, it is. In the United States, willful copyright infringement

There are minimum conditions before prosecution is possible. I think uploading can always be prosecuted.

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

Well, over the last few decades it has only been going in the other direction.

How does this fit together with calling copyright infringement theft?

Let me make a suggestion. This is your real opinion. This is what you believe based on what you see. The rest is just slogans by the copyright industry, which you repeat without thinking. The problem is that you are basically shouting yourself down; your own opinion. The media, a big part of the copyright industry, puts these slogans out. Their lobbyists demand favors and harsher laws from politicians. And when the politicians look at what voters think, they hear these slogans. That’s one thing I mean when I say the copyright industry defrauds us.

Airbus pays like 100x the price for the same set of nuts and bolts than someone else. A kitchen appliance for industrial use costs like 3x the price of an end user kitchen appliance. Because it’s more sturdy and made for 24/7 use.

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

People do have to pay more if they license a picture to show to their 20 million customers or use it in an advertising campaign, than I do for putting it up in the hallway.

Actually, even in the copyright industry, such terms are from universal. Of course, you will have to pay more for the right to make copies than for a single copy. And even more for the exclusive copyright. Those things are different. However, it’s usually a flat fee. Can you figure out what economic reasons might exist for a creator being paid per copy or per viewer?

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

“No exceptions” means, for example, that a LLM would not be able to answer questions about politicians, actors, musicians, maybe not even about historical figures.

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

On second thought, I believe many celebrities, business people, politicians, … will gladly offer more training data that makes them look. They’d only remove data that makes them look bad. Sort of like how the GDPR works. Far from demanding a licensing fee, they’d pay money to be known by the AI.

I’ve told you how my server was targeted by Alibaba and it nearly took down the database. […] But I’m prevented from exercising my rights.

I agree that the situation is far from ideal. But let me point out that you do not have a right to other people’s computer services. That’s the issue with Alibaba hitting your server, right? It’s a difficult issue. Mind that an opt-out from AI training does not actually address this.

This application of Fair Use is in favour of the feudal lord companies and to the detriment of the average person.

How so?

That’s a good start.

What I think doesn’t work is saying every normal citizen needs to buy books and Zuckerberg gets to pirate books. In a democracy law has to apply to everyone. And his use-case doesn’t matter here. I can also claim I pirated the 10TB of TV shows and movies for transformative or legitimate use. It’s still piracy.

The laws do apply to everyone equally, though few people are able to litigate for years against the copyright industry.

Your concern is obviously the use case. If the use case doesn’t matter, then quotes and parody are illegal, as well as historical archiving and scientific analysis.

I guess you just want AI training to not be fair use. That raises the question of how this should work.

Maybe you think that different standards should be applied to Zuckerberg, after all. Your focus on him makes it seem a little like that.

Perhaps you simply have something more european in mind. Europe and in particular Germany do not have fair use. There is a short list of uses that do not require permission. That means that every time some new use becomes desirable, the law must be changes. This is obviously stifling for progress in science and culture. Think of HipHop with its use of samples. It’s hard to imagine some artists successfully petitioning the government to legalize the practice before experimenting with it. You couldn’t have developed a search engine that simply copies all web pages for indexing. Something like the Internet Archive, or the Wayback Machine, would be impossible. It would just be a few tech geeks against the copyright industry, including the media.

So, how should this be done?

And other law works the same way. If I steal chocolate in the supermarket, that’s also theft no matter what I was planning to do with it. So that’s out.

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

The government only cares for large-scale, industrial infringement, like EG operating a Netflix-like streaming service. Small scale infringement is not even criminal in the US. I believe, even in Europe, people who torrent movies or such are rarely criminally prosecuted.

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

A billion dollar company with a service used by millions of people should pay more than a single researcher doing it for 5 people.

That’s an interesting idea. It’s not how we do anything else. You don’t usually have to pay more for the same thing, depending on who you are or how much you use it. I expect, it would be quite devastating if that were the rule.

Should this policy idea apply only to copyright or generally? If only copyright, why?

And if they scraped my personal data, I need a way to get that deleted from the dataset.

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

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

Then much public content can’t be used, after all. The likes of Reddit, Facebook, or Discord will be able to charge licensing fees for their content, after all. It’s very typically European. You rage against Meta’s monopoly but you also call for laws to enforce and strengthen it. I think it’s the echo of feudalism in the culture.

Sorry, misunderstanding. I wasn’t asking what you hope to happen.

You have ideas on how copyright should work wrt AI training. Make these ideas explicit, and then try to systematically analyze what the economic effects are.

Law can be a little bit like programming. A law has certain conditions. If these conditions are met, then certain legal effects follow.

If certain conditions are met, then someone has the exclusive copyright. If this copyright is violated, then damages must be paid. And of course, there are more rules to determine if copyright was violated or how those damages should be determined.

So under what conditions does AI training violate copyright? What would the legal consequence be? Then, what would that mean for the economic system on the whole?

Hmm. It looks like we are back to narratives again. Systematic analysis does not seem to come easy to you.

Now we’re talking property. But we were just talking about investment and we’ve just established those two are distinct and not the same.

“Investment” and “rent-seeking” are concepts in economics. Like, say, “function” or “variable” are concepts in programming.

“Property” is a legal institution. It relates to “investment” a bit like a machine code instruction relates to programming. They are, sort of, the underlying facts on which higher concepts rest.

And that’s not arbitrary at all. The author sat at his desk for 6 months specifically. Sure the resulting product is arbitrary when selling it for money, but that wasn’t what we were talking about.

I guess you didn’t get what I was trying to say. Let me put it like this:

If they wrote a story that takes place in the universe of a video game, then they need to get permission first. They need to ask whoever owns the rights to the video game, or else it is “theft”.

Conversely, if the story is original, and anyone wants to make a video game in that universe, then they need the author’s permission.

This remains so until 70 years after the death of the creator of the video game/story. At least, it is 70 years now. It may be made longer again at any time.

That is arbitrary, no?

Today’s land holders on the internet are companies like Meta, Google etc.

Not just them, but yes. How do you think they manage that?

And that’s kind of the reason for my rejection here

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

I think in the realm of what we’re discussing, it means an AI company is then the client of the book authors

Ahh. But they are not. That’s what we’re discussing.

Let me make this clear: All intellectual property is arbitrary. I fear many copyright people have convinced themselves otherwise.

The government could grant the exclusive right to sell coffee in an area. That was done at one point. It could give the exclusive right to make shoes to some corporation. That was normal before the time of the French Revolution. The German constitution explicitly protects the right to chose one’s profession. The origin of this lies in such feudal practices.

The US Constitution limits copyright because the founders were quite aware of how these feudal privileges were abused. European copyright descends from agreements between mostly monarchical empires. Rent-seeking was/is an intended feature, which is why Europeans are so easily defrauded by the copyright industry.

When you photograph an image, you have to get permission. Makes sense. When that image is in the background of a video, you may have to get permission. Makes less sense. You rarely have to get permission from makeup artists, hairdressers, and clothes designers. Why not, actually? Isn’t that “theft” on a grand scale?

Historically, it makes sense. Originally, copyright was for printing. The only images you could print were engravings. It would have been hard to justify that the tailors, maids, or butlers should get a cut. And also, they were not a demographic that could expect to be favored with an economic rent from the elites.

And today? There are many photos that derive more value from the clothes and general appearance of the model than from anything else. And yet, the photographer owns the copyright and only needs to get permission from the model. How should that work?

By the by. Painters and some intellectuals raged against photography in much the same way that they rage against AI now. There is an essay by Charles Baudelaire that illustrates this nicely.

I see. I think this is the big one:

Or am I mistaken and I can pay an artist for their investment but not pay a rent?

A return on investment is not the same as an economic rent.

Let’s go back to the farmer example. You agree that a monopoly on the food supply is a bad thing. It can and will be abused.

Sidenote: You suggested that the government should produce textbooks to prevent abuse. Would that also be your solution here? Would that be preferable to the current arrangement?

Now, let’s look at the situation of a farmer more closely. A farmer has to do a lot of work before they can harvest. They also need stuff like seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel, machinery, spare parts and maintenance, and so on.

In the old times, one held back part of a grain harvest as seed grain for next year. That is an investment in the economics sense. You don’t consume everything, but keep it so that you have more in the future. The finance meaning is subtly different but never mind.

Farmers gets a return on investment. They invest money and labor so that there is a harvest in the future. They could sell the equipment they already own to have more spending money now.

A ROI is part of a farmers’ income but is not economic rent.

Back to authors. An established author will get an advance before they write the next book. That’s investment by the publisher. If they don’t get an advance, then the author is making the investment, but let’s ignore that for simplicity. Investments are always risky. In this case, some books don’t sell well and don’t make back the money.

As a publisher, how much money would you invest in future books to maximize your profit? It depends on the expected payout and the cost of money.

Cost of money: You could borrow the money. Then the cost of the money is the interest on the loan. Or you could use the money for something else, eg buying safe government bonds. In that case, the cost is an opportunity cost. It’s what you miss out on by not investing elsewhere.

Expected payout: It’s the average profit/loss on each book. It is something you estimate based on experience.

The more books there are on the market, the lower the average profit. There must be a limit to how much of their income people are willing to spend on books. At some point, you have a lot of similar books chasing the same audience. That lowers the average. To maximize your profit, you invest in the production of more and more books, until the average return on each book is equal to the cost of money.

I’ll leave it at that for now.

Hmm. You seem to treat an economic rent as being the same as a return on investment. Any particular reason for that?

I for example think writing the textbook when you’re the professor and selling that to the students is a very bad thing. I’m not fine with that at all.

You aren’t fine with that. But why are you fine with the copyright industry doing it to everyone in the country?

Now I’m even more confused.

Your professor abused their monopoly. That’s the sort of thing I’ve been condemning. You are basically fine with that. You just think they should adjust their price policy to income. Well, yes, that would be the profit maximizing move. You make everyone pay as much as they are able to. That’s what the copyright lobby wants. But I have to point out: There is no reason why they should lower the price for you. After all, you were able to pay. Rather, there seems to be room to raise the price.

Do you actually think this kind of monopoly abuse is a good thing?

Now what is a picture? It’s kind of a summary, a depiction of the outer appearance. And snapping a picture of a book cover would make sense for Fair Use. That’s kind if what it’s made for. If you now snap a picture of each and every one of the 400 pages inside, that’s where law says Fair Use stops.

No, that’s not what the law says. I think, the problem is that we have different ideas over how Fair Use in the US actually works. I’ll have to think about that.

Let me try to follow this.

A cocoa farmer is paid for some uses of their cocoa beans but not others. For example, Nestle has to pay to turn their beans into chocolate and sell it in supermarkets. On the other hand, no one has to pay to take a photo of their beans and sell it to Nestle for ads. Right? I’m with you so far.

I don’t get the next step. Because some uses are free, all uses should be free? Then Nestle gets a subsidy and we pay the farmers some other way?

In the US, it almost certainly wouldn’t be fair use if it meant that the author doesn’t get paid. Of course, you don’t get paid for the fair use, but there are a lot of things you don’t get money for.

You’re talking about authors not being paid at all. What’s that about?

You said you praise the American Fair Use model. I said I don’t like it to work in that way.

I understand, But why do you want a fair use model that means that authors don’t get paid at all?

Why do you want fair use to work that way?

Why does a book author work 6 months and doesn’t get paid for his job and an AI researcher works for 6 months and needs to be paid?

Why do you not want book authors to be paid now?

My single argument here is: Look at the AI industry and compare what you just said. They’re doing exactly the same thing, just 20 times worse.

Sorry, but you have not understood the concept yet.

You demand that AI companies should work for free and give things away for free. But they also should pay people that make no contribution.

I’ve laid down how the big AI companies do nothing for the benefit of other people.

They do, just like farmers. If people did not find their services beneficial, they would not pay.

the resources for that cost like $100 million

This is called a barrier to entry (Marktschranke).

It doesn’t have to be very bad. For example, you can’t just become a farmer. You must buy a farm. There are problems with that, but they aren’t big. Food is cheap and plentiful.

The people who make AIs want to be paid for their work. The people who build and maintain the datacenters, the hardware, the electricity, and so on. Should they work for free?

The problem starts when people want more than that.

I really have a wide selection of sci-fi books available

Have you ever noticed how many of these books were written in the USA and cheaply translated into German?

Let’s tackle monopolies: Everyone can read a book in case they can get ahold of it. And with some intelligence and time, everyone can write a book. That’s a monopoly in your eyes

No. I think you misunderstood. An exclusive copyright is a monopoly by definition.

The incident with Meta torrenting books for example had them on the opposite side. They took care to “leech”.

They were legally required to do that. Downloading the books for their purposes was fair use. Uploading would certainly not have been.

I don’t understand how this accusation makes the slightest bit of sense. These torrents are a violation of EU copyright law. Your argument means that these torrents shouldn’t exist in the first place. You are not demanding that Meta should be allowed to upload these books. You’re saying they shouldn’t be allowed to download them, either.

I see. Thank you. I’m afraid you don’t quite understand what rent-seeking means. Let me try a hypothetical example.

Food is pretty cheap. But suppose a single company had a monopoly on supplying food. How much would people be willing to pay? People would give almost anything they have.

The reason food is cheap, is because there is no monopoly. If someone charges more than the competition, you go to the competition. You get a market price. It’s complicated but one thing that goes into the price of food is the cost of labor. Many people must work to supply food.

These workers could do other things with their time. But also, other people could do their work of supplying food. No one has a monopoly. Eventually, the cost of labor depends on how much money you must offer to people to be willing to put up with the work.

If someone had a monopoly on food supply, they could charge fantastic prices. Their cost would not change. The difference between the market price and the monopoly price is the monopoly rent.

Let’s take this closer to AI training.

Let’s say there’s some guy who’s searching through libraries and archives for stuff to digitize so that it can be sold to AI companies for training. He finds an archive of old newspapers. How much would the market price for scans of these newspapers be? Let’s ignore copyright for now.

Maybe the potential buyer could send someone else to scan the papers. So our guy could only ask to be paid for the labor in scanning the papers.

So our guy will not say where he found that archive. That is his trade secret. The potential buyer would have to send someone to search for that archive and scan it. That means our guy can ask to be paid for his labor in finding the archive AND scanning it. The potential buyer will only hire someone else to do that if our guy asks too high a price.

There is a way our guy can get more. If he destroys all remaining copies of these newspapers, then he has a monopoly. Now he can ask for as much as the potential buyer is willing to pay. That’s a monopoly rent.

Now copyright… Those newspapers are probably under copyright. If our guy is in Europe, he will have to get permission by the rights-holder to scan the papers. Copyright is a monopoly enforced by the state. The rights-holder can now extract the monopoly rent from our guy.

If the publisher has gone out of business, the rights-holders may be hard to find but he has to make the effort. In practice, this means that there is really no point in making the effort to preserve European culture and history. The copyright people don’t just harm technological progress and the European economy, they harm European culture. That’s parasitic.

You’re making the argument that OpenAI and others are trying to get paid. That’s not rent-seeking. Ideally, our laws ensure that seeking money makes you work for the benefit of other people.

Farmers work for money, and everyone else gets a lot of good, cheap food out of it. If you demand that farmers should work for free, then you’re demanding that many of us should starve.

as an Europen I’ve been prohibited from downloading and using Meta’s LLMs for some time.

The vision models are not for the EU. Meta trained them on Facebook data. The EU did not allow that. Meta said that this would mean that their models would not have the necessary knowledge to be useful for European users, and disallowed their use in the EU. It also means that some EU regulations don’t apply, but they did not give that as a reason, I think.

In any case, it seems quite fair to me. If Europe does not want to pitch in, but only makes demands, then why should it reap the benefits?

Some other recent open models by Tencent and Huawei are also not for the EU. That is in response to the AI Act. I am surprised that it is not a standard clause yet.

And they’re making use of them. It is not I can just download it and do whatever because that were Fair Use as well… They retain rights, and many of them.

No. They can’t override fair use. That’s the point of fair use. You cannot do what you like with it because you are in Europe and don’t have fair use.

I really don’t understand how that is supposed to make sense. You demand that American companies should be giving more free stuff to Europe. But also, they should be following European laws in the US and pay rent-seekers for the privilege. It’s ridiculous.

No, I am talking about copyright. Net neutrality has nothing to do with any of this.

I don’t see how that is about copyright.

Make sure AI companies aren’t rent-seeking either. Because currently that’s big part of their business model.

Back that up or retract the statement.

It’s definitely inspired by her performance on “Her”. Sam Altman himself made a reference, connecting his product and that specific movie.

What you are saying is that someone who sounds a bit like Scarlet Johanson must get permission from her to speak in public.

Maybe there is a language issue here. But from what you are writing, you are not against rent-seeking. You demand privileges and free money for special people; a new aristocracy. You even want privileges for Meta, even though you use these privileges as arguments why these privileges should exist. This is all absolutely ridiculous.

Here’s rent-seeking in the German Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentenökonomie

The current thing is Meta is very vocal about the EU AI act.

And they’re not wrong.

That doesn’t quite back up what you claimed, though. You wrote: “They want everyone else to lose rights, while they themselves retain full rights,”

Their claim of Fair Use seems straightforward. That’s not everyone else losing their rights. I am not aware where they lobby for “full rights” for themselves, whatever that means.

And Meta are super strict with trademark law and parts of copyright when it’s the other way around. I lately spent some time reading how you can and cannot use or mention their trademark, embed it into your website. And they’re very strict if it’s me using their stuff. The other way around they want free reign.

There are different kinds of intellectual property. Trademarks are different from copyright. Then there’s also trade secrets, patents, publicity rights, privacy, etc.

Generally, you can use any Trademark as long as you don’t use it for trade or harm the business that owns it. I’m not going to look it up but I’m guessing that the rules are around not giving a misleading impression of your page’s relationship with Meta.

As for copyright, when you are in the US you can make Fair Use of their materials, regardless of what the license says.

That you can’t do that in Europe is not Meta’s fault.

I mean manifacturing a supply chain for them where they get things practically for free.

Oh. You’re talking about Net Neutrality and not copyright. I’m afraid I don’t know enough about the network business to form an opinion on that.

I don’t think what happened to you was a subsidy, though. You’re offering something for free, and apparently Alibaba took advantage of you for that. That’s just how it is, sometimes.

We were talking about a specific lecture that questions the entire concept of copyright as we have it now.

I touched on a lot of subjects. In a nutshell, I am against rent-seeking. No more, no less.

stealing Scarlett Johansson’s voice,

BTW, that turned out to be a false.

They want everyone else to lose rights, while they themselves retain full rights, little to no oversight

Can you back this up? They certainly do not have the same reach or influence as the copyright industry.

subsidising big companies

What do you mean by that?

They can invest some $100 million in training models, but it’s then not copyrighted either.

AI models may not be copyrightable under US law. I’m fairly sure that base models aren’t. Whether curating training data, creating new training data, RL, and so on, ever makes a copyrighted model is something that courts will eventually have to decide.

They are probably copyrightable under EU law (maybe protected as databases). That’s an EU choice.

But it really has to be same rules for everyone, including big corporations.

The rules are different in different countries. They are not different for corporations.

That’s a bit of an odd question, given my praise of American Fair Use. The USA has had copyright, including Fair Use, for longer than much of Europe. The predecessor of modern copyright law was created in the 1700s in the UK. There is a German scholar, Eckhard Höffner, who argues that this caused book production to plummet in the UK. He also says that the German-speaking lands produced more books, more different books, than the UK in the century before such laws arrived.

The American founding fathers were men of the Enlightenment. They, or some of them, understood the problems with such government sponsored monopolies. Therefore, the US Constitution limits copyrights and patents. It’s an interesting clause. Congress is empowered “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. It’s about progress first; very much a product of the Enlightenment.

I don’t know if there was ever a discussion if entertainment should qualify at all for copyright protection. I have to try to look it up at some time.

In 1998, US copyright was extended by 20 years. Now it is life of the author +70 years. That has been called the Mickey-Mouse-Protection-Act, because it meant that the original Mouse enjoyed another 20 years of copyright This was roundly criticized by economists and even lead to a case before the Supreme Court. Obviously, making copyright retroactively longer does not encourage any kind of creativity. It’s in the past. Well, the case was lost, nevertheless.

For many left/liberal people, this is corruption; just the Disney company getting what it wants.

The EU countries had expanded their copyright years earlier, without resistance or even comment. Smug Europeans may feel superior when Americans rage against the corporations. But the truth is often like this, where Europeans simply quietly accept such outrages.

The original copyright in the US (and before that in the UK) was 14 years. Copyright protection required registration. It worked like the patent system. The interesting thing is that patents still work a lot like that. One must register and publish them and then they last for 20 years. Patents still have a 20-year duration. Meanwhile, copyrights have gone from 14 years to life+70 years, no registration required.

Patents are public so that people can learn from them. That has been used as an argument for patents. The alternative would be that everyone tries to keep new inventions secret. This way, people can learn and try to circumvent patents; find other ways of achieving the same thing. That’s an interesting observation in light of AI training, no?

I haven’t answered your question. In my experience, pro-copyright people will always refuse to argue over what should be covered by copyright or how long. They demand an expansion and use psychological manipulation to get it. If you do not let yourself be manipulated, they change the subject and will argue if copyright should exist at all. I have never met a single person who was able to defend copyright as it exists. Perhaps you can answer own question now.