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

#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/

@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!

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 crime.

@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@lemmy.ml @music@fedibb.ml

Some might notice an analogy in which if you kill a single man, you're a murderer; kill millions and you're a politician.

@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 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

This is what happens under fascism.

@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@lemmy.ml @music@fedibb.ml That essay is such a complete misunderstanding of the issue that the author is either an idiot or a bad actor.

@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.

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

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.