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Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.

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[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I'm no lawyer, I don't even play one on TV, so upfront apologies if I'm hanging my ass out.

That said, it sounds to me like Doctorow might have a point here. Suppose Universal et al. gets a precedent-setting ruling and slays OpenAI. LOL, LMAO even, but then what? What's to keep the current entertainment cartels from making deals with Microsoft or the husks of the AI companies to rev up their own (now) fully legal and licensed bullshit engines? The only winning legal play is Giant Asteroid.

[-] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

He says some pretty ignorant stuff in this post that undercuts his argument, though:

Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don't want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai's CTO's use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.

This isn't hypothetical. Remember last summer's actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?

The writers' and actors' strikes, in an overwhelmingly unionized workforce, did not say "hey, we as a labor force want a cut of the dirty GPT lucre". Instead, they said not today, satan to studios working with GenAI at all. And won. Those writers and actors, who are overwhelmingly huge supporters of copyright and moral rights, defeated the rich assholes at the Big Five not by throwing up their hands and giving all their creative output to the glurge machine, but by unionizing and painful, hard-won solidarity.

Whether SAG-AFTRA and the AFM (or non US equivalents) can organize as effectively for musicians and lyricists is unclear. But Cory, who claims to be a leftist, is defaulting to "you as a musician should work for free" and not "you as a musician should organize to counter the power of capital", and that's about as leftist as Grimes posing with The Communist Manifesto.

[-] Evinceo@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

Cory, who claims to be a leftist

I read one of his books and I gotta tell ya, his idea of scifi was 'what if the people negatively impacted by DRM were oppressed minorities instead of just first world complainers.'

[-] Evinceo@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

Suppose Universal et al. gets a precedent-setting ruling and slays OpenAI. LOL, LMAO even, but then what? What’s to keep the current entertainment cartels from making deals with Microsoft or the husks of the AI companies to rev up their own (now) fully legal and licensed bullshit engines?

I think it remains to be seen if you can train a base model without something as big as common crawl. A precedent that Universal needs to give you permission could also be a precedent that everyone must give you permission for you to scrape them.

[-] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 6 months ago

The point is that these big companies have enough money to get permission from whoever they want, so we'll still end up with proprietary models destroying industries, but only the big corpos will be able to use this tech effectively and everyone else will have to beg. A future like the 70s where the only OS' and programming languages were proprietary, or the 90s where all the DBs were proprietary. A paradigm where a powerful tech (good or not) is only available to the rich or for rent, is never a good one.

[-] 200fifty@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

Yeah but this presumes "the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em," right? Like, when all the operating systems or databases are proprietary, that's bad because those things are really useful and help you do things better and faster than you would otherwise.

But this argument applied here is like, oh no, what if large entertainment companies start making all their movies out of AI garbage, and everyone else can't do that because they can't get the content licensed? Well... what if they do? Does that mean they're going to be making stuff that's better? Wouldn't the best way to compete with that be not to use the technology because you'll get a higher-quality product? Or are we just giving up on the idea of producing good art at all and conceding that yes we actually only value cheapness and quantity?

Also, just on a personal level, for me as a J. Random Person who uploads creative work to the internet (some of which is in common crawl), but who doesn't work for a major entertainment corporation that has rights to my work, I would really prefer to have a way to say "sorry no, you can't use my stuff for this." I don't really find "well you see, we need to be able to compete with large entertainment companies in spam content generation, so we need to be able to use your uncompensated labor for our benefit without your permission and without crediting you" particularly compelling.

[-] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The point is that this tech is not only made for one reason (replacing artists and authors etc). It has plenty of other valid uses, such as an assistant, a sex toy, personal entertainment etc and probably a lot we don't know due to how young it is. I don't want to pre-emptively see all the valid uses locked-in to proprietary models and everyone becoming a serf to openAI to use them.

Call me radical, but I don't agree that anyone should have the right to tell others how to use their creative work. If you share it, it's out of your hands. All culture is a remix and has always been this way until the last 120 years. Copyright and Patents have always been a mistake and should be abolished as they achieved the opposite of what they promised.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago

I happen to copyright my output (obviously not here or in other comments). The question I ask myself is: would I be ok if a Nazi organization used my photos in their propaganda? I'm not ok with that, so I like to retain control over who can use my stuff. If someone acceptable were to ask me, I'd let them use my work without compensation.

[-] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Death of the Author applies here. One can't prevent how others interpret their work. The same way a neonazi org might use your work for propaganda, is how leftists repurpose Stonetoss comics for their own purposes. Or rather, it's not that you can't prevent it, it's that the means by which you would try to prevent it, would create a functional dystopia.

If someone acceptable were to ask me, I’d let them use my work without compensation.

Personally speaking, I hate permission culture.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago

I remember having this sort of conversation 20 years ago, and it didn't convince me then.

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 4 points 6 months ago

I don't really agree with this. Artists can't (and shouldn't want to) entirely control interpretation, but they still have a responsibility. If your work is palatable to nazis or advertisers or whatever kind of parasite, you need to reflect on why and make it less so, or you're complicit in my book. I say this as an artist who's repeatedly moved on to new forms of expression as fashion catches up.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago

Me asserting copyright means I can express myself however I want, and Nazis can get their images from Unsplash or make it themselves. There's no risk of complicity on my part.

[-] 200fifty@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.

Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers' work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute...

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

writer protection is not where copyright came from

[-] zogwarg@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The Berne Convention (Which the US only joined in 1989) is from 1886 and more concerned with author's rights than the typical american flavor, and was kickstarted by successful writers such as Victor Hugo, it's fundamentally commercial in nature but was at least partially sold/incepted has protecting a writer's labour:

« La loi protège la terre; elle protège la maison du prolétaire qui a sué; elle confisque l'ouvrage du poète qui a pensé(…)14. » — Honoré de Balzac, in a 1834 "Letter addressed to the French writers of the XIX century" advocating for author's rights.

Translated: "The law protects land, it protects the house of the proletarian who has sweat; it confiscates the work of the poet who has thought (...)"

From the body of the convention, in some regards it does place the author higher than the publisher:

Article 11

In order that the authors of works protected by the present Convention shall, in the absence of proof to the contrary, be considered as such, and be consequently admitted to institute proceedings against pirates before the courts of the various countries of the Union, it will be sufficient that their name be indicated on the work in the accustomed manner.

For anonymous or pseudonymous works, the publisher whose name is indicated on the work shall be entitled to protect the rights belonging to the author.

He shall be, without other proof, deemed to be the lawful representative of the anonymous or pseudonymous author. It is, nevertheless, agreed that the courts may, if necessary, require the production of a certificate from the competent authority to the effect that the formalities prescribed by law in the country of origin have been accomplished, as contemplated in Article 2.

EDIT:

And contains from 1886 already the spirit of fair use.

Article 10

The following shall be specially included amongst the illicit reproductions to which the present Convention applies: unauthorized indirect appropriations of a literary or artistic work, of various kinds, such as adaptations, musical arrangements, etc., when they are only the reproduction of a particular work, in the same form, or in another form, without essential alterations, additions, or abridgments, so as not to present the character of a new original work.

Article 7

Articles from newspapers or periodicals published in any of the countries of the Union may be reproduced in original or in translation in the other countries of the Union, unless the authors or publishers have expressly forbidden it. For periodicals it shall be sufficient if the prohibition is indicated in general terms at the beginning of each number of the periodical. This prohibition cannot in any case apply to articles of political discussion, or to the reproduction of news of the day or miscellaneous information.

Article 8

As regards the liberty of extracting portions from literary or artistic works for use in publications destined for educational or scientific purposes, or for chrestomathies, the effect of the legislation of the countries of the Union, and of special arrangements existing or to be concluded between them, is not affected by the present Convention.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago
[-] 200fifty@awful.systems 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I'm sorry for my imprecise wording, I was feeling flippant and I know what I said isn't totally accurate. not a big history person here honestly. I'll try and stick to joke-commenting next time. but also can you just say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.

iirc even though the origin of copyright is not really specifically about author protection, part of the broad-strokes motivation for its existence involved "we need to keep production of new works viable in a world where new copies can be easily produced and undercut the original," which was what I was trying to get at. maybe they picked a bad way to do that idk I'm not here to make excuses for the decisions of 16th-century monarchs

also again I'm not a copyright fan/defender. in particular copyright as currently constituted massively and obviously sucks. I just don't think copyright-in-the-abstract is like the Greatest Moral Evil either, bc I'm not a libertarian. sorry ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[-] zogwarg@awful.systems 2 points 6 months ago

Agreed, earliest stuff is definetly exclusive royal grant of printing overall to a particular person/guild/company. But some author protection is baked into the first international treaties about copyright, and those treaties are old.

[-] 200fifty@awful.systems 4 points 6 months ago

The copyright clause in the US constitution (1789) also frames it in terms of granting rights to authors to "promote the progress of ... useful arts". Strictly speaking author protection is not the origin of copyright but also I was snarkily responding to a person who was arguing in favor of AI-training-as-fair-use and implying copyright was 120 years old, not trying to do a detailed explication of the origins of copyright law

[-] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 months ago

It also kickstarted one of the biggest enclosures in recent memory, where profiteers went around and copyrighted indigenous and folk songs and then went against everyone using them.

[-] 200fifty@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That seems bad but also not super relevant to the point under discussion! Unless your point is that it's bad when a cultural commons is exploited for business profits -- in which case, I agree, but, well...

[-] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It's as relevant as we make it in our discussion, no? You brought up the theoretical noble intentions of the copyrights, so I felt compelled to mention their actual results.

[-] 200fifty@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I mean, it seems like you're reading my argument as a defense of copyright as a concept. I'm ambivalent on the goodness or badness of copyright law in the abstract. Like a lot of laws, it's probably not the ideal way to fix the issue it was designed to solve, and it comes with (many) issues of its own, but that doesn't necessarily mean we'd be better off if we just got rid of it wholesale and left the rest of society as is. (We would probably be left with excitingly new and different problems.)

As I see it, the actual issue at hand with all of this is that people are exploiting the labor/art/culture of others in order to make a profit for themselves at the expense of the people affected. Sometimes copyright is a tool to facilitate that exploitation, and sometimes it's a tool that protects people from it. To paraphrase Dan Olson, the problem is what people are doing to others, not that the law they're using to do it is called "copyright."

this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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