RIAA Of Six Years Ago Debunks RIAA Of Today’s AI Lawsuit Claims
from the insert-spiderman-v.-spiderman-meme dept
There have been a bunch of lawsuits over the last couple of years from traditional content industries suing AI providers, claiming copyright infringement. We’re still a long way from figuring out how all of these lawsuits will shake out. We’ve made it clear that we’re skeptical of these lawsuits, largely because you would have to basically ignore a bunch of important and useful copyright precedents to reach the conclusion that training on copyright-covered works infringes on copyright.
Of course, this is copyright, where logic and precedent are often ignored based on who a judge hates more. So, we shall see. But, we’ve definitely seen a lot of people cheering on these lawsuits, mainly in the false belief that it’s about “artists” vs. “big evil tech companies” and therefore the “artists” should win.
Reality is always a lot more complex and nuanced. If these lawsuits succeed, it will not help artists get paid. Instead, it will again increase the reliance on middlemen who have a long history of screwing over the artists. Just the fact that the RIAA is currently run by a guy who famously got his job at the RIAA just months after sneaking language into a bill to fuck over musicians should tell you all you need to know about the RIAA’s actual interests.
Also, if the cases decide that training is a licensable scenario, it will kill smaller and open source AIs and make it so only the largest of the largest tech companies can create LLMs. So instead of being a victory over “big tech,” it will hand the market to big tech.
And that’s not even getting into the damage it would do to the ability to read the open internet (which itself could be judged a licensable event) or the ability of researchers to scan and collect data about the open internet.
Just be careful what you wish for.
Earlier this week, the RIAA gleefully announced that it was suing two of the bigger music generator AI services. It filed one lawsuit against Suno in Massachusetts and another against Udio in New York.
Both lawsuits are effectively the same. And, they’re both ridiculously weak. They are both based on the premise that training on copyright-covered works requires permission. But, again, we’ve been there and done that. Training is a form of scanning or reading, and that’s either not a copyright-triggering event at all, or it’s fair use.
The lawsuits do not name what copyright covered content was actually copied beyond some handwaving about “all of it.” This is not sufficient for a copyright claim. The lawsuits argue that because it can tell these apps to make songs like musicians on RIAA member labels, that proves it’s infringing. From the Suno complaint:
Plaintiffs could have proceeded with this action based solely on eliciting that reasonable inference of copying. Nevertheless, Plaintiffs’ claims are based on much more. In particular, Plaintiffs tested Suno’s product and generated outputs using a series of prompts that pinpoint a particular sound recording by referencing specific subject matter, genre, artist, instruments, vocal style, and the like. Suno’s service repeatedly generated outputs that closely matched the targeted copyrighted sound recording, which means that Suno copied those copyrighted sound recordings to include in its training data. In addition, the public has observed (and Plaintiffs have confirmed) that even less targeted prompts can cause Suno’s product to generate outputs that resemble specific recording artists and specific copyrighted recordings. Such outputs are clear evidence that Suno trained its model on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings.
Which… doesn’t matter? Again, training is clearly fair use, and “specific subject matter, genre, artist, instruments, vocal styles, and the like are not copyright-covered expression. All of those things are not elements subject to copyright.
If you want proof of that, just look at what the RIAA itself has said in cases a few years ago, following the Blurred Lines decision that initially suggested that music “styles” should be covered by copyright. The RIAA realized, quite quickly, that this might make a huge portion of the labels’ catalogues infringing and freaked out. In one case, the RIAA filed an amicus brief noting that such overprotection would be incredibly damaging.
… new songs incorporating new artistic expression influenced by unprotected, pre-existing thematic ideas must also be allowed.
That’s the RIAA’s own argument just six years ago. And now they’re arguing that such unprotected thematic ideas are protected. But only when tech companies are making use of them apparently.
Again, in that brief, the RIAA cogently argues against what the RIAA is now arguing in these complaints:
Most compositions share some elements with past compositions—sequences of three notes, motifs, standard rhythmic passages, arpeggios, chromatic scales, and the like. Likewise, all compositions share some elements of “selection and arrangement” defined in a broad sense. The universe of notes and scales is sharply limited. Nearly every time a composer chooses to include a sequence of a few notes, an arpeggio, or a chromatic scale in a composition, some other composer will have most likely “selected” the same elements at some level of generality.
To keep every work from infringing — and to keep authors from being able to claim ownership of otherwise unprotected elements — this Court has stressed that selection and arrangement is infringed only when there is virtual identity between two works, not loose resemblance. The same principle should be recognized for music.
Um. So, considering that the complaints are not showing “virtual identity between two works” then the RIAA itself has made the case for why these models are not infringing.
In that same brief, the RIAA itself admits that there can be only “thin” copyright coverage on general themes at most, to avoid making music inspired by others to be infringing:
To prevent nearly every new composition being at risk for liability, copyright claims based on ��original contributions to ideas already in the public domain,” Satava v. Lowry, 323 F.3d 805 (9th Cir. 2003), are seen as involving a “thin copyright that protects against only virtually identical copying.” Id. at 812; see also Ets-Hokin v. Skyy Spirits, Inc., 323 F.3d 763, 766 (9th Cir. 2003) (“When we apply the limiting doctrines, subtracting the unoriginal elements, Ets-Hokin is left with . . . a ‘thin’ copyright, which protects against only virtually identical copying.”); Rentmeester v. Nike, Inc., 883 F.3d 1111, 1128-29 (9th Cir. 2018). This Court has long recognized this principle in claims involving visual art that allegedly creatively combines public domain elements, as with the sculptures in Satava or the photographs in Ets-Hokin and Rentmeester. The same should apply to music.
Perhaps Suno and Udio should take a page from the RIAA’s own legal arguments in responding to these complaints against them.
I am sure RIAA folks (and anti-AI folks) will rush in to explain why “this is different,” but it’s not. It’s literally the same argument. Does copyright actually protect genre, themes, and the like? Of course not. It would be a ridiculous and dangerous outcome should that come to pass.
Now, I know the RIAA will claim that it’s not suing over the output of these tools, but rather just pointing to those things as proof of infringement on the training side. But, again, training by scanning copyright-covered material for a totally transformative use (which includes learning from or being inspired by) is quintessential fair use.
The training is fair use. The fact that it can output songs with a similar theme matters not one bit to the copyright question, as the RIAA itself admits.
Of course, this case will go on for years and years. You can never predict how courts will rule on copyright issues, but these two cases seem particularly weak and silly. This is especially true given how it shows the RIAA going back on its own previous claims from just a few years ago.
And, just to close out this piece, I’ll note that RIAA CEO Mitch Glazer, again, the very guy who snuck words into a totally unrelated bill to literally take copyrights away from artists and hand them to music labels, is quoted in the press release about this lawsuit talking about how it’s not fair to “exploit” an “artist’s life’s work” for profit, even though that’s exactly what all of his member labels have done for nearly all of their existence.
Filed Under: ai, copyright, fair use, music, music generators, training
Companies: riaa, suno, udio, universal music group
Comments on “RIAA Of Six Years Ago Debunks RIAA Of Today’s AI Lawsuit Claims”
The RIAA has literally only existed to serve the purpose of lying and stealing on behalf of the wealthy.
“How dare people learn how to do OUR Grift!” says RIAA exec.
Not that complex
From a copyright point of view, a LLM is really just a large lossy archive format. So the RIAA, as evil as they are, is not that far off.
All the RIAA should have to show that a prompt that is not basically the entire work causes a covered work or something substantially similar, to be produced, and they have to show that the work in question was in the LLM training data.
Being parasites on the economy, the RIAA seems to think that just alleging that maybe they could show the above is enough.
Of course I doubt the courts will come to a reasonable conclusion because computers.
Re:
The premise of the post is false, in that LLMs are not a lossy storage format.
Re: Re: LLMs are arguably a form of data compression
LLMs are not an intentional lossy storage format, but people keep writing papers equating them with compression:
* “Language Modeling Is Compression” https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668
* “Compression Represents Intelligence Linearly” https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09937 (“Recently, language modeling has been shown to be equivalent to compression”)
* And this paper using Gzip as an LLM: https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.426.pdf
So, if you’re going to argue that LLMs shouldn’t be equated to compression formats, it’s that the legal analogy — the facts to the law — is inapt, not that it’s factually wrong to liken a language model to a compression format.
Re: Re: Re:
You are equating two different things IMHO, a lossy compression format isn’t the same as a lossy storage format and I have a hard time imagining what a lossy storage format actually is except a litany of read errors.
I guess I find the used terms to be very sloppy in how they describe how an LLM process and stores data since, in simple terms, it simply generates, encodes and then stores statistical data about content.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
This is a misunderstanding. Yes, they are “compression” to the degree that anything that holds any information is “compression”, including the human brain. What they aren’t is a compressed replica of originals.
When you “memorize”, say, what a house looks like, you’re only capturing a tiny fraction of the perceptible details of that house – but through your imagination you can fill in the gaps, even from the most vague of recollections.
When it comes to compression of data, some percentage of any raw data is imperceptible or barely perceptible to humans. Compressed file formats compress data by throwing this out. Maybe you throw out 5-to-1, 10-to-1, even more. But what happens when you you throw out more? Now you’re not just throwing out imperceptible details, but perceptible ones, and with enough compression, you’re throwing out basically the entire structure of the work.
22 million new songs per year are uploaded to Spotify. The raw data size of music represented by producers is surely at least 1e16 bytes (10 exabytes), and probably about an order of magnitude higher than that (1e17 / 100 exabytes). The model weights on a service like this by contrast might be more like 10GB. About 7 orders of magnitude difference. For every 10MB of music, the models contain 1 byte. In case the point isn’t clear: the models are not storing the specific details of songs. They’re just capturing generalities about the essence of music (rhythm, pacing, tone, transitions, sounds of instruments, etc). All of the actual details are “imagined in”, because said details were thrown away during the “compression”.
Both biological brains and neural networks operate in latent spaces. People talk about latents as a “computery” concept, a vector of floats, but latents are just a freezeframe of a deep layer of activations that have been pinched down from a much higher resolution input field. In biological brains, a latent space can be represented as the firing rates of a cluster of neurons that acts as a bottleneck. Neurons leading up to a latent (biological or ANN) can be classified as a compressor, and neurons leading away from a latent can be classified as a decompressor. The decompressor “imagines in” the details that don’t exist in the latent because they were thrown away in the compression process.
You can provide any latent to the decompressor. Even entirely random values, werein the decompressor will imagine in a random scene. The key is that latent spaces are always coherent, because the compression process has thrown out that which is incoherent. Latent spaces are interesting because you can interpolate lineraly between any two concepts (with coherent answers along the entire interpolation), and do mathematical operations on concepts themselves (for example, “king – man + woman ~= queen”).
But to reiterate: the models are NOT storing music. They’ve “compressed” the music dataspace down to general concepts about music.**
** One does have to add in a caveat about overtraining. If a model keeps encountering the same thing over and over, it’s going to increasingly store more information about that thing (at the cost of storing more generalities about everything else). This can be desirable – for example, if an image model keeps encountering the American flag, you do want it to learn the precise shape of the American flag. But apart from common motifs that should be learned, you don’t want the model wasting its limited weights on memorizing specific aspects to specific works. So proper deduplication is important.
Re: Re: Re:
A couple of preprint papers isn’t much to base your claims on.
Re: lol
There are Suno insiders on Reddit laughing at the lawsuit. They have proof all training data was negotiated from indie artists. I hope that’s true.
Perhaps one better: Rather than simply re-issuing the RIAA’s arguments, perhaps Suno and Udio should ask for Judicial Notice of the RIAA’s previous positions, especially if they made such arguments in court (rather than to empty air/The Media/The Internet).
For those of a certain age who can get the reference, the copyright industry is to the “progress of arts and sciences” what Alfred Bester and the Psi Corps was to the poor telepaths who had no choice but to trust in them.
If there were rogue artists who wanted to get away from copyright, you can bet that the legal goons the RIAA employs would come after them and have them sent to jail.
Re: Oh, right...
Oh, you mean that Alfred Bester. I initially thought that it was a reference to the author of The Demolished Man – which it was, but of course at one remove.
Re: Re:
i wonder if Slippery Jim ever read Fondly Fahrenheit.
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establishing the fact that AI processes violate copyright is very simple if you know a concept called “Effort calculation”. Cheap products shouldnt be created with techniques that are very expensive to reproduce. Reproducibility is one of the most important features of all technology development. When cars replaced horses, it meant that humans got a requirement to keep car factories and mining for metals up and running for next 2 million years. Same applies to your copyrighted works. If your book depends on wikipedia’s expensive-to-recreate library of user written texts, it is less valuable than a work that builds the same material from scratch. The deep dependencies cannot be maintained endlessly.
Wikipedia and user-generated content is our times examples of what copyright laws were designed to prevent. the fact that some cutting edge technology cannot be reproduced in the future even though millions of lives depend on its existence is failures that our generation will need to solve eventually.
Re:
I’m willing to concede that Tero is a not paticually bright AI that’s gotten out into the wild.
Re: Re:
That would explain the obstinance, the weird phrasing, and the obsession with one particular subject.
Wouldn’t explain the inability to learn, though.
Re:
Establishing the fact that your perspective isn’t based on copyright law is very simple if you understand copyright law.
Sure, nobody is allowed to record beautiful music on expensive musical equipment because this rando on the internet thought project management concepts should be shoehorned into copyright law.
No, not at all.
What the hell is this a reference to?
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Re: Re:
if it is very simple, why your message failed to do it.
Re: Re: Re:
Because of the bit that you cut from the quote: you don’t understand copyright law.
Re: Re: Re:2
Sadly it was YOUR TASK to establishing the facts. Whether I do or do not understand copyright law has no bearing on whether you are able to implement YOUR TASK to its graceful finishing line.
Re: Re: Re:
Right here:
Effort calculation isn’t an aspect of copyright law. You’re making a (stupid) moral argument based on your own arbitrary preference and pretending it’s already written into the law.
You would have been more accurate if you had said, “establishing the fact that AI processes violate copyright is very simple…if you just make up fake copyright law, don’t care about facts, and believe your own bullshit.”
Re: Re: Re:2
Real products need to have some meat in them. If you build a product that barely passes the legal requirements, there is no fucking reason for anyone to purchase your product. You claim that meshpage is not popular, but how is your product that have trouble passing the minimum legal requirements ever going to get customers trust the product? Proper product development isnt shipping products that cause fires, spread diseases or lets rats run wild in the neighbourhood. Something better is expected from you as a product developer, and thats why effort calculation is important activity.
Re: Re: Re:3
Did you respond to the wrong comment or confuse me with someone else? I am not a product developer and I don’t know what the fuck Meshpage is.
I’m just schooling you on US copyright law. Cut yourself off for the evening and get some electrolytes before you pass out.
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Re: Re:
I think this shows the craziness of the pirates and copyright minimalists. They think that copyright law stands alone in the world and something like project management concepts are incompatible with the law. This kind of thinking is completely bogus, the law needs to work with all (legal) activity that you can do to a copyrighted work, including project management, specification, programming, testing, releasing, publishing, error correction, bugfixing, firefighting, copying (by copyright owner), customer response creation, money collection, and tons of other activities like book burning…
trying to frame copyright law in such light that its incompatible with these activities is very odd position.
Re: Re: Re:
This is a straw man that shows you not only don’t understand copyright law, but you also didn’t understand what I wrote.
It’s not about compatibility or incompabibility. It’s about not being a part of the actual law. You made up an arbitrary standard that is not a part of the actual written law to argue that conduct is against the law. You don’t get to just make up new aspects of law just because you feel they should be included.
It would be fine if you had said that it should be part of the law if you actually acknowledged that it wasn’t currently a part of the law. But actually claiming that “establishing the fact that AI processes violate copyright is very simple if you know a concept called “Effort calculation”” is just untrue bullshit. It doesn’t violate copyright law and effort calculation is not a part of the law!
Copyright law and related case law already covers these scenarios. Again, you’re demonstrating you don’t understand the law.
Re: Re: Re:2
He doesn’t understand his own comments, either.
Re: Re: Re:2
Yes, this is how the law works. When I find that wikipedia didn’t follow effort calculation, I can sue them for copyright infringement based on effort calculation theory. When the activity clearly requires more effort than what they spent creating the egypt pyramids, its clearly outside the allowed area in copyright law. All you need is a tool from effort calculation: a package that wraps each effort spent to create the material into copyright law’s “pirate material substitutes the original in these places in the world”. This analysis needs a little bit of help from some other area of the law, explicitly the labor laws, and the prevention for too long working days for your slaves.
Re: Re: Re:3
[citation needed] …and remember that we’re talking about US copyright law in this particular scenario. What is the statute of US copyright law that references effort calculation?
The hilarious part of this is that I decided to research “US copyright law and effort calculation” to see if there was any caselaw or examples of it coming up. Aside from results where a document about effort calculation having a copyright notice on it, I only found a stack exchange conversation that you participated in 9 years ago in which you tried to sell the idea of effort calculation for a game designer deciding whether or not to include a public domain work in their game. Ironically, you admitted then “I couldn’t say anything about the issue in legal terms…”
So in the last 9 years, what trove of US copyright caselaw have you stumbled across to make you so confident in your assertion that actual US copyright law cites effort calculation as a relevant topic.
The stack exchange thread and this one just make it look like you have a pet topic you like to talk about and you overestimate the interest of other people in it.
You can sue anyone for anything in the US. That doesn’t mean your reasons are written into law or that you will win the lawsuit.
No, not clearly at all. This has nothing to do with copyright law. I can create a copyrightable photograph by clicking a button on a camera with little to no effort in an instance and it has the exact same copyright protection as a novel that someone spent 20 years writing.
The only thing that’s clear is that you’re just talking out of your ass.
Re: Re: Re:4
damages calculation is at the core of copyright law.
The damages calculation in the two examples is completely different. From a photo with record button press, you get maybe $500 damage award. From 20 years worth of book writing infringement is near the $150,000 maximum amount.
Re: Re: Re:5
The core of copyright law is determining what’s eligible for copyright and what’s infringing and what’s fair use.
Maybe, maybe not. You might get the full damages for the photograph if it’s considered valuable, such as a photograph of a historical event. You might get next to nothing for a 20 year novel project that had no chance of selling well or getting published by a major publisher.
But again, effort calculation is not written into copyright law. If it were, you could cite the statute. Stop offering random non sequiturs. Quote the law.
Re: Re: Re:6
I think this is wrong way to do it. The reason is that infringement determination is a boolean property on the activity space, and as such, it cannot determine how far you are from the illegal dividing line where your activity turns out to be illegal. Effort calculation can determine a number, and the illegal efforts are well known for each individual team size. Based on the number, effort calculation can say how far you’re from illegal activity. This way you know beforehand that you need to focus your efforts to avoid the illegal area, instead of randomly stumbling into minefield like what you’re doing with reading just the lawbooks.
Re: Re: Re:7
Your failure to quote the law is tacit admission that you’re wrong.
That’s what courts are for and we have to four factors test for determining if something is infringement or fair use. You really don’t know much about copyright law and are just making up your own world here that is unrelated to reality. Look at caselaw. There are cases where the dividing lines are articulated.
The RIAA isn’t a court. IP addresses have been adjudicated in the US to not identify an individual alone. You’d need other corroborating evidence.
Re: Re: Re:8
See all your nice copyright law knowledge was reduced to this bullshit about identifying who is responsible, simply because internet contains ip addresses and some random files are available through it.
Re: Re: Re:6
RIAA’s answer to this would be that it has already been established that you’re infringing (based on the ip address evidence and the fact that the investigator managed to download these files from the ip address that belongs to you)
The only thing remaining is damages calculation.
Re:
Shame of Finland, why do you hate learning?
Is it because you hate that fact that no one has monopolized it yet?
Re: Re:
It just fills your head with useless bullshit.
Enough is enough. Any activity that you practice too often is not useful any longer, recardless of how big advantage it has over other activities at the beginning.
Shaking the status quo is the key.
Re: Re: Re:
And considering that Meshpage continues to fail to break into the market of web and game design, it’s proof that you’ve done a terrible job of it.
Neither is the government of Finland publicly executing or organ harvesting citizens based on accusations of copyright infringement.
The truth is that you’ve peaked by making a handful of games for consoles that aren’t even dominant in the market right now, and you decided that the best option was to take grievous personal offense at the fact that your name hasn’t been made into a state religion yet. Tough. Not even copyright law is equipped to help you out there.
Re: Re: Re:2
That’s because my trailer is not yet finished.
Since the trailer is not ready yet, of course there might be some issues with the popularity.
Re: Re: Re:3
New movies get trailers, new programs get time as trialware. Since Meshpage didn’t, you have only yourself to blame that it’s unpopular.
Re: Re: Re:3
If you can’t get a trailer done on time, a trailer that you’ve put so much weight and emphasis on as key to your imaginary success… that’s really no skin off my nose.
It’s not anyone’s moral obligation to excuse you for your failures, or compensate you because you think you’re not successful enough.
Not to mention you already have a trailer, and its quality makes even the most basic engine proof from video game programming university look like a triple A product.
Re: Re: Re:4
My previous trailer is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZxCE-RsBDc
But as you can see, it’s not as high quality as I would like, so creating new one is a good task for my summer holiday.
Re:
Am I really going to have to learn to read the poster/by-line first, before I bother reading the comment?
wide child like eyes
Do… do…. do you think they could just destroy each other and leave us alone?!
Re:
When someone nearby says, “Let them fight“, I respond:
In the movie, the professor saying “let them fight” wasn’t in the city between Godzilla and the MUTO.
Are you willing to be the “collateral damage”?
Re: Re:
Considering all the the damage the RIAA already caused…
Re: Re:
In that movie, big monsters exist. If you use the phrase from the movie, I’ll ask, “do you want big monsters to exist?” Or maybe your particular pet context isn’t relevant to how the quote is being used…?
Re: Re: Re:
I’d ssuggest if you have such difficulty understanding metaphor, you should avoid online discussion in english. American speakers use metaphor extensively alongside idioms, and arguements will rapidly become nonsense for you.
Having multiple corporations with massive budgets fighting it out might stop them all. It might not. But the battlefield they play in impacts us. We are left with the legal precidents and impacted services and economic volitility. Its a pretty simple metaphor, frankly.
Re: Re: Re:2
If you’re going to be condescending, don’t be guilty of simple mistakes. If you’re going to criticize someone’s linguistic skills, don’t misspell “ssuggest” or fail to capitalize a proper noun like “english” or misspell “precident.”
I am an American speaker who uses metaphors a lot and I was criticizing your bad use of a metaphor. The idea of allowing two negative forces to fight each other can be valid and collateral damage may be unavoidable (and not even up to you). And the alternative of trying to fight both forces is likely more difficult.
Re: Re: Re:2
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Not this “buuuuh if you want to see copyright maximalism suffer then it means you’re a copyright minimalist which really makes you a copyright maximalist!” dog and pony show again, BDAC.
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Re: Re: Re:3
Spoken like a true copyright minimalist, you pirate.
Re: Re: Re:4
Ironically, the wealthy and the corporations are the true pirates. They take from the actual creators and exploit and violate copyrights with near-perfect immunity. Copyright law as it exists steals from artists and the public.
Re: Re: Re:5
no. The corporation stopped using my publish-bit when they stopped paying me.
This is called “customers” in ordinary business.
No, it just limits how far toward the world your work can spread. You wouldn’t let 15 year old school children to reconfigure the nuclear power plant next door, even if those teenagers had powerful ideas about how to shut down the facility for green hippy ideals — let the customers (of electricity) suffer.
Re: Re: Re:6
I’ve literally had corporations violate my copyrights with immunity. This has nothing to do with customers in ordinary business. It has to do with the fact that corporations can hire whole companies and teams of lawyers to pursue copyright violations, but smaller copyright holders have to do all their own attempts at enforcement with their own time and money. You can’t even collect damages without registering your copyright, so it costs money on top of either hiring a lawyer or spending your time pro se.
This is another weird non sequitur from you. The safety issue of letting unauthorized non-engineer, non-employee children mess with a nuclear power plant has absolutely nothing to do with copyright.
Re: Re: Re:5
It also runs on a “guilty until proven innocent” system of law, at least in regards to the DMCA. To wit: No one has to provide proof of infringement before they file a DMCA takedown claim.
Re: Re:
We already are the collateral damage.
I'm not sure that existing IP thinking will handle this
By “handle”, I mean “provide us with a framework to think about about this issue and perhaps legally codify it”. Here’s what I mean, and let’s just stick to music for the moment.
Many musical works quote other works (or these days: sample them) and for the most part we seem to recognize that these are ways of creating a new work with a snippet of an old one. The quoted part isn’t the main body of the work — it’s just a few notes or a few seconds, and while editing it out would certainly change the new work, this would leave it largely intact and able to stand on its one as a new composition.
The new works being generated by AI (after having ingested a corpus of existing music) aren’t like this: they’re musical autocomplete on steroids. They’re algorithms, not composers, and they’re capable of churning out an endless parade of songs AND doing it quickly…something a human couldn’t do.
So what happens when someone trains an AI with the entire recorded catalog of, let’s say, the Foo Fighters, and then tells it to write 100,000,000 Foo Fighter-esque songs, and then copyrights every single one of them? By “what happens” I mean “what do the actual real live Foo Fighters do?” because given a library of 100M FF-esque songs, there’s a substantial probability that the next one they write will heavily overlap with one of those, and then they’ll be infringing, and then bad things happen.
The people running AI companies of course don’t care: apparently they think all jobs but their own are expendable. (I’m looking right at OpenAI’s Mira Murati, “Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”)
I don’t know what to do about this, but I think that our current ways of thinking and our current legal mechanisms aren’t ready for it. And, unfortunately, the sociopaths running AI companies don’t care how much damage they do and how many people they hurt, so we would be foolish to rely on their self-restraint — they don’t have any. We need to find a new way to think about this, and having thought about it, we need to find a new way to codify this.
Re:
That’s why copyrighting works by monkeys and computers is right out.
Re:
Writing a song in a particular style isn’t copyrightable, so unless those AI generated FF songs include Grohl’s voice(which would make them infringing), there’d likely be no legal repercussions at all.
Re: Re:
Robin Thicke used to believe the same thing until Marvin Gaye’s surviving family taught him otherwise.
Re:
They can’t because copyright requires human authorship.
Re: Re:
Such authorship doesn’t have to be direct, so a copyright can still exist with whoever programmed the LLM or the company they work for getting the rights.
Re: Re: Re:
The WIPO and the UK probably don’t align with the US on the purpose of copyright law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
Re: Re: Re:2
Really not seeing what point you’re trying to make.
Re: Re: Re:3
The point is that in the United States, AI-generated works—formally known as “AI slop”—don’t have copyright protections. You can point to a list of computer-animated films all you like, but those films were made by actual people. I suggest you try to understand the difference between people using modelling/rendering/animation applications to create animated films and a person typing a command into an LLM to generate thirty seconds of horrible animation based on material that said person has no right to use under current copyright law. If you can’t fix that problem yourself, that’s on you, not me. And before you think to do it: Repeating your (not-so-)“bulletproof” argument won’t make it any more effective than it was the first time around.
Re: Re: Re:4
I rejected AI for meshpage when it was originally offered, mainly for the copyright and the requirement to have large database of assets. Meshpage works with small amount of data. It doesn’t need terabytes of photos as input. Just one image is enough. If you load two images, you can fade between them.
Re: Re: Re:5
To be fair, you rejected any kind of intelligence for Meshpage.
Re: Re: Re:
This article is about US copyright law.
Re: Re: Re:2
So Moana is in the Public Domain already? Thanks!
Re: Re: Re:3
You can consult with the Copyright Office on that.
Re: Re: Re:4
*whoooooooosh!*
Re: Re: Re:5
No, no whoosh.
“The Human Authorship Requirement The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being. The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.”
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf
Re:
It’s not going to, because this was never the goal. So long as the RIAA can funnel money from anywhere into the pockets of the middlemen, i.e. them, that’s all they actually care about. It doesn’t matter whether the money goes to the artist or the record label or the Martin Shkreli who happens to be holding onto the ownership rights. Because the RIAA is getting a cut.
I’d absolutely agree that Murati sounds completely tone-deaf or intentionally psychopathic here. On the other hand, there are some jobs involved with the creative industry that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Namely, the bulk of corporate lawyers poring painstakingly over chord progressions trying to find a case worth suing over.
Consider that Ed Sheeran might have to actually start recording his songwriting and music production sessions, just so he doesn’t get hit with another Marvin Gaye estate lawsuit. Consider that this might have to be normalized for every musical creator going forward. That’s going to involve a significant amount of labor and resources. Sure, it technically creates jobs. Sure, a lot of money was made by the legal system. But was it worth it? Is this behavior worth encouraging? Is this economic activity actually valuable or constructive?
Re:
The law as it was in 1980s already handled this situation. The legal scolars accepted that its possible to collect large collection of copyrighted works to same location in the world and some limited advantages could be found from that centralization. But given that the effort to create the material from scratch was too large, the activity was marked illegal, on the theory of copyright. Basically no-one could be wiser on how the original authors could be compensated when the content collection used/relied on their work. The organisations handling the collections simply lacked funds to license all the works that they wanted to use and thus those collections were usually pirated. Now the same stuff is happening again with AI and the people handling the collections are hoping they don’t need to pay anything for the permission to use the material.
What is missing from these attempts is called “effort calculation” and genuine attempt to calculate the amount of money the authors deserve for the quality material that they have. It has taken years to collect these databases and the numbers of work hours and salary expectations of the people involved is simply missing from the discussion. The AI copyright issues won’t be solved until someone has actual numbers what it takes to build it from scratch.
Re: Re:
Sweat of the brow does not exist in copyright law. Copyright law does not reward you based on your effort, only first to publish.
You’d know this, if you actually followed the law – not the bastardized draconian system you desperately want to be true so you can plunder the monetary resources of your countrymen.
Remember when they tried to ban portable mp3 players?
I will admit, when I was learning how to play instruments in music class back in the 80’s and 90’s, I read music from AC/DC, Metallica, Disney songs, even We Are The World. Should it be the death sentence for me then?
terop said:
Hey, terop, if any and all copying is copyright infringement, then you violated the law with the segment I quoted above.
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Re:
sure, but to collect your $1 you’re entitled with the amount of copying, you need to activate a lawsuit that costs $10k. if you think its eregious infringement, be my quest.
Re: Re:
Since you don’t understand the law, here’s a relevant link with which you can educate yourself: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504.
Re: Re:
Not really. Under the rules of your stricter copyright law, you’d have to pay that $10k up front to defend yourself. Also Meshpage would have to be taken offline until you’ve been proven innocent of infringement.
But we all know you won’t do it because you’re a hypocritical grifter.
Re: Re: Re:
That wouldn’t be appropriate response to your invalid claims of superiority. The god complex that you possess gives you access to the mental institute front door, but not much anything more than that. Then a robot sent from the future to kill you will actually save your ass before the world explodes in a huge bang.
Re: Re: Re:2
Since nobody actually claimed to be superior to you, all you have done is announce it to the world that you view us that way.
Re: Re: Re:2
The response was in accordance with your rules of stricter copyright law, in that all potential infringement must be preemptively prevented.
You’ve already failed to do so with your usage of infringing assets.
Re: Re: Re:3
You don’t have viable alternative to this stricter copyright law stuff. (hint: viable keyword is kinda powerful and you’re unable to overcome its requirements)
This is true statement. Leaving possibility for infringement is a failure of the process. Especially the copyright owner’s exclusive bits must be properly protected against pirate groups activities.
Happily it’s not as impossible to do than some pirates proclaim. If your tests indicate that encoding pirated material to the software input slots is possible, limiting the size of the input is perfectly good approach to cut more eregious infringements away from the consideration. This is what AI tools could be doing when they get sued by entertainment industry, if they just limit the amount of input to reasonable short snippets, then would-be copyright owners could identify to own only short snippets of material, and the full AI database would be free from infringement.
Re: Re:
Be our… quest. Be our quest
Put Ash Ketchum to the test
Send him out to collect monsters in small balls
That is the best!
It’s a mistake to think that this is about the training data. Ultimately what many in the AI Bad crowd want is for this technology to not be allowed to exist anymore, and they think that the training data argument will be the most effective way to achieve that goal.
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The RIAA’s lawsuit is a good thing and I hope they win
Training AI isn’t a form of fair use, it’s a form of piracy. These AI song generators can create almost complete copies of songs like All I Want For Christmas
It’s not even slightly grey area. It’s just obvious piracy
Re:
Who knew every would-be musician can never learn to play anyone else’s music because that’s “piracy!”
Re: Re:
The exclusive author’s bits are DISPLAY, PERFORM, DISTRIBUTE.
guess what you wanted is a permission to do the perform -operation. And if you pay a little more, the display bit gives you permission to advertise the song with leaflets.
Re: Re: Re:
You’re missing the point here. Most musicians learn other people’s songs before they start writing their own. If training AI isn’t fair use, then a human learning to play a song also wouldn’t be fair use. This false claim would mean musicians can’t learn other musicians’ songs.
Contrary to the claim, it absolutely is fair use to learn how to play someone else’s song, to listen to someone else’s song, to practice and perform (privately) someone else’s song. Just adding “with AI” doesn’t magically make the same process illegal.
Re: Re: Re:2
We had the same stuff with computer games. The difference is that between the time when learning to play those computer games, and the time when you need to build your own, there’s a delay of 20 years. During that 20 year time, your brain will mangle the learned information to format where the end result is completely unique and original. Still software/game developers will need to use practices like refusing to play popular computer games in order to not clone the best ideas from the modern games. When we did phones for global market, there was clear rules of not buying competitor phone, since it would ruin our copyright story that our developers are not “glancing” toward competitor offerings.
Music/Song area is slightly different than games, since the available space where notes live is significantly smaller than in computer games, and thus collisions with other people’s songs are more common.
Good authors know the danger of looking too carefully the offerings of your competitors. And thus refusing to implement certain note sequences which are known to be infringing is clearly appropriate.
Re: Re: Re:3
Holy shit, dude. You’re still missing the point. We’re not talking about established professional musicians. We’re talking about how anyone who wants to learn to play a musical instrument usually learns by playing other people’s songs. There is no goddam copyright violation for learning to play someone else’s song (we’re talking US Copyright Law here). You’re talking about avoiding infringement when composing and publishing professional work. I’m talking about a ten year old student who takes up an instrument for the first time with no intention of ever writing or publishing music learning to play chopsticks in his first piano lesson. That’s not a copyright violation!
Re: Re: Re:4
The requirements coming from copyright are less strict for young people and people who are not professionally publishing the material. Noone cares if you play guitar on your own livingroom. But when your hobby gets serious enough that a bar pays you $10k bucks to arrive to the location at correct time and attract customers to listen your songs and singing, then copyright gets more and more stricter. With top10 artists in the world, the copyright is so strict that only world champion copyright experts can figure out how to fulfill the onerous requirements.
but your 10 year old grandson does not need to care about that (unless he visits tiktok and posts his songs there).
Re: Re: Re:5
There is no age distinction for copyright.
Again, you’ve lost the point. The same ability of a 10 year kid learning a copyrighted song in a music lesson is the same ability of person to train an AI in music composition. That is the topic we’re discussing.
It doesn’t get more or less strict. That’s a different aspect of the law.
You really have very little concept for what US copyright law involves.
You’re still missing the point. We’re arguing about what was claimed regarding learning music. It’s the same principle regardless of who is doing it. We’re not talking about publishing at all.
Re: Re: Re:6
The correct analysis is end-to-end view of the data flows. When you input some material to your grandson and next week local school band plays the same song in school, its dangerous time for the kid. Repeating the input as it is, is called cloning, since it doesnt use 20 years of spaghetti-like mangling of the copyrighted material. Teach the kid to put his experiences from 20 years ago to the songs he creates and the originality and uniqueness will reward him plentifully. While remembering how awful the past was, there’s always some learning material that can be extracted from the memories.
They tried to implement this manging to the AI, i.e. stable diffusion and chatgpt are never outputting the exactly same stuff than what was inputted, but it extends and finetunes the answers. Sadly it’s missing the 20 year delay. The lack of delay is significant because during the 20 year time, the world is changing significantly and the old stuff no longer is relevant. But when AI uses fresh news articles and bases the result to current events, it lacks the originality and uniqueness that is the hallmark of proper copyright work.
Re: Re: Re:7
I swear you’re a bot or just pasting responses from an older LLM here. How is it possible that you pivot to non sequiturs at every possible chance? I don’t belittle people for language issues because I only speak English and bad English, but is it a language barrier? Usually the Europeans I encounter are really great with English but you just seem to not get a damn word I say.
Why do you keep saying grandson when nobody said anything about a grandson? You invent random arguments and now you assign hypothetical people ages and relations that don’t exist also.
It’s not called cloning. Nobody calls learning to play existing music “cloning.” You’re becoming more and more incoherent as time goes on.
Does this involve past life regression therapy? How does a 10 year old kid have experiences from 20 years ago?
Are you just quoting fortune cookies and inspirational posters now?
That sounds like you’re admitting that the output of an LLM isn’t copyright infringement.
I create copyrighted content. Sometimes I create copyrighted content in a day, inspired by current events and recent experiences. Sometimes, sure, it involves experiences from the past, but that’s not a requirement. But, also… NONE OF THIS IS RELEVANT!!! Copyrighted work just has to be human authored work. The copyright status isn’t dependent on the age of the influence of the creator. Also, waiting for 20 years of influence to catch up before creating a work would eliminate a large amount of great works. You’re functionally saying nobody under ~35 should bother publishing because it won’t be worth it.
You’re just not making any sense or responding to the actual statements I’m making.
Re: Re: Re:8
Not all of it is copyright infringement. Their database scraping system could have stumbled on some free software and the only thing users need to do to get permission is to accept the license. And thats the only way to get the permission. Now how do users of chatgpt know which open source licenses they need to accept to get the permissions needed. The permissions are never automatic, the users will need to accept the license and the user should always have option to reject the license.
Re: Re: Re:9
Except the LLM isn’t using the original content. The third party (the user of the LLM) doesn’t need to accept licenses to which it is not a party.
Re: Re: Re:10
even if the LLM is randomly jumping from one place to another in a book, all the words it uses are still coming fro the book, i.e. it is indeed using the original content.
Re: Re: Re:11
You’re confusing training with output. And you don’t understand copyright law, so you’re ignoring that you can indeed divide up a work into individual words which are not able to be copyrighted. You could take a novel and repeat all the words in the novel in a random order and it likely wouldn’t be an infringement because the order of the particular words, the expression rather than the parts, is the copyrighted aspect.
Re: Re: Re:12
yes, but your statement that the LLM doesn’t use the original content is factually wrong. I don’t know what made you say that the LLM’s output is somehow disconnected from the input data, but the exact same words that the input data is using will be present in the LLM’s output and thus it indeed uses the original content (even if their use was allowed by copyright law because of enough scrambling). But because your statements contain false stuff, courts cannot reach decision whether the use is allowed or not. More accuracy is needed.
Re: Re: Re:13
Re: Re: Re:13
You’re both confused about how LLMs are trained and produce output and confused about how copyright works, so your analysis is useless on two fronts. The output is not the exact same words. The composition of the output is prediction of the next word in a sentence. It composes new sentences every time.
If using the “same” words (not talking about word order, just words) were in fact a copyright violation, you would be violating copyright just by learning the English language. But the “same” words cannot be individually copyright. And learning a language can’t be a copyright violation. And spitting out random words based on an observation of how words are often paired together is not a copyright violation.
Re: Re: Re:14
Usually I’ve considered that a 5 word sequence is unique enough that it cannot be accidentally copied without seeing the previous article that used the same sequence. So for uniqueness sake, copyright only applies once you have 5 word sequence. For popular ones are “Hasta La Vista, Baby”, even though that’s just 4 words, its well known from terminator 2 movie and the movie people get copyright on it. (maybe except for the spanish language which is the origin of the sequence, but english-speaking countries, the terminator 2 made it popular).
Re: Re: Re:15
First, I said I wasn’t going talking about word order, so this is another non sequitur.
Second, what you consider isn’t law. I keep explaining this but you seem to be under the illusion that US copyright law works however you want it to. That is some weird magical thinking.
Five words in a particular order also isn’t likely enough for copyright protection. Repeating five words is also likely fair use, even if the five words in a particular order are famous, because five words out of a novel or movie are such a small amount of the whole work and repeating the words doesn’t diminish the market for the original. You quoting Terminator 2 here in the comments doesn’t substitute for watching the movie. It might even make people want to watch it again. You seem to be assigning trademark properties to copyright.
You also seem confused about how US copyright works in regard to elements that are able to be copyrighted. Just because a movie is copyrighted doesn’t mean everything in the movie is protected and even if everything were protected, that still doesn’t rule out fair use or even duplicate copyright of individual elements in different content.
For instance, if a movie shows a photograph the copyright of which is owned by someone else, the original copyright owner still retains their copyright on the photo. The movie company doesn’t magically own the copyright on the photo just because it appeared in the movie.
For the T2 quote, it’s definite fair use to use that line in a parody or even a reference. It’s entirely possible it’s so short that it isn’t even protected. Someone might say those words in that order without ever having heard them from the movie.
Re: Re: Re:6
There is. Its less likely that young people get sued for multiple reasons:
1) their work has no support from large publishers
2) their popularity isn’t as high as professional artists
3) copyright owners are vary of suing young people because their legal compass is not yet fully developed
This means that young people dont see full wrath of the copyright law very often and thus age distinction really exists in the copyright law, it is just hidden in the original lawyer’s text.
Re: Re: Re:7
Suing young people was entirely part of the RIAA’s playbook in the early 2000s. Weren’t you supposed to worship the ground the RIAA walked on? They absolutely went after young people, children especially, because they knew children could be traumatized and terrified into compliance – as well as their parents.
The only reason why young people get sued less today is because even the RIAA wised up to the fact that it makes them look like bullies. But you don’t seem to have that issue, you psychopath.
Re:
Okay then.
I represent a dead Carolingan kimg, and you’re in violation of his copyrights because you learnt English.
And pray tell, who’s losing profits as a result of someone making AI generated Christmas carols… in June?
Funny how nobody screaming “piracy” can start pointing out damages besides imaginary numbers stacked together to demand settlements out of blind grandparents.
Re:
so, you built a global distribution network that spans all continents and major cities. There’s thousand employees involved, each demanding $5000 euros per month salary. Now the damages are coming when this distribution network is idling/not getting sales when customers used pirate material and didn’t need your content…
=> proper damages calculation for piracy is in millions..
Re: Re:
People often pirate more than they can afford to purchase or license. Are you suggesting they would magically have more money if they didn’t pirate? A pirated copy is not a lost sale.
Re: Re: Re:
You’re supposed to claim here that the content isn’t valuable enough and the competitors are eating our lunch because they are more recognizable in the marketplace. But no, you went with the customer not having enough money.
So I guess the complaints about product quality was some bullshit.
Re: Re: Re:2
Yes, because I didn’t make every argument possible, all other arguments I didn’t make must be bullshit. That’s definitely sound logic and not at all a lazy attempt at refuting the point.
My point is that a pirated copy isn’t the same thing as a lost sale. I proved that by pointing out that you can pirate so much more than you can afford, so even if you wanted to pay for it all, you couldn’t. The IP holders can’t make money you don’t have to give them.
The product quality argument is sound, but not an argument regarding a pirated copy being equivalent to a lost sale. The product quality argument (more accurately a service quality problem though) explains one reason why piracy occurs.
Re: Re: Re:3
Pirated copy is significantly worse than a lost sale. First, the copy calculation can only account for the copies that you own yourself. Copyright owner is the only one allowed to make an infringement claim, so huge pirate collections are going free simply because the original author didn’t bump into it. Second, also the other pirated content is changing user purchase behaviour. If customer is watching reruns of pirated matrix movies, they dont have time for my content. The piracy collections are always larger than what one author owns from the world.
Thus if you find your own content being copied, i.e. qualified for pirated copy calculation, the situation is significantly worse than what your naive one to one mapping between copies and lost sales.
Re: Re: Re:4
You completely misunderstood the point. It’s explicitly not a one to one mapping of copies and lost sales. That relationship is functionally impossible to calculate because you’d need to be omniscient to see all the possible factors. But what we do know is that not all who pirate would or are able to purchase, so it’s significantly less than a lost sale.
It’s cute that you think your content competes with the Matrix. A lot of people rewatch old media whether it’s paid for or not because that’s the specific media they want to watch. Nostalgia can be very powerful. I’m not looking at your content because I’ve never heard of you until now. Meanwhile I have the memory of watching the Matrix in theaters on opening night and fond memories of particular scenes.
What you’re describing is a lack of exposure and that’s on you. Cory Doctorow has released a lot of his content for free via a creative commons license because he saw that lack of exposure was a bigger barrier for sales than piracy. And he makes a lot of sales.
I’m also a content creator. I’ve had my copyrights violated by large corporations. I’ve already had them violated by small time random people. Ask me which one is a greater violation? The corporations, of course! Hell, copyright extension alone is a violation of the rights of the public. Corporations subvert democracy with their lobbying dollars paid for by the content they hoard while paying the actual creators a pittance. One might perceive not giving money to the corporations is a public service and a moral duty.
Apparently you’re not familiar with all the firms who run automated takedown campaigns on behalf of content owners. Your ignorance isn’t a good substitute for reality.
Re: Re: Re:5
Yes, bullet time with their time-stopping mechanism is indeed quite powerful. But it’s utilizing over 100 year old film technology, with that much effort poured to the tech, it better be significantly better than whatever other people can do.
My tech at https://meshpage.org is just 10 year old technology, and I didn’t have hollywood’s camera equipment budget available for the development. Just one person spent their 10 years on it, and meshpage.org is showing the results of that activity. While I can’t match hollywood’s camera tricks, its sometimes useful to evaluate the technologies in the pipeline which are not yet fully finetuned. This avoids bad suprises when you get fully developed tech and it doesn’t do what you expected.
But eventually the web will be full of 3d models. Whether it happens with my tech or someone elses, I don’t know. But at least promising tech is now available and it’s just for the markets to decide whether it’ll be a success or a failure.
But we are now revealing bad news. The money people voted with their money and their money is boosting the piracy market. This was clear from the paperwork of the RIAA’s AI lawsuit where the tone is “investors said they would not have invested to the company, had the company have a license to RIAA’s song catalog.” because “it’s better to develop it without constraints”… so the money folks went with the piracy and opted to receive damage awards from copyright infringement lawsuits instead of paying smaller amount of cash up front when the RIAA needed it.
Re: Re: Re:6
Are you a non sequitur generator or just intentionally obtuse? I didn’t mention bullet time and even if that were a part of my nostalgia for the movie, the nostalgia was the point, not the specifics of anything in the movie itself. I could have been talking about why I rewatch Steel Magnolias frequently (I don’t but the point is that it could have been any old movie).
That wasn’t an invitation to advertise. But also, why do you think that software for displaying 3D models in browser competes with Hollywood movies? People aren’t avoiding your tool (not “content”) because they’re pirating movies. They aren’t using your tool because they don’t need to. There are plenty of alternatives and people don’t even need to host it themselves. They can just link to any of several websites like Thingiverse or Printables or TurboSquid or Yeggi, etc, etc. where they can host their models.
It definitely explains why your arguments about copyright are terrible and illogical since you don’t even seem to understand what industry and market you’re in or that your tool isn’t the same thing as content like a movie or music or a book.
Re: Re: Re:7
This is because we had an option to develop video streaming technology further. We just rejected that area because piracy groups exist in the area and are making the area unsuitable for legal businesses. The video streaming area’s best content that everyone buys like hot cakes is hollywood movies. When we rejected the option to develop hollywood area further, we were suddenly competitors of hollywood movies instead of wannabe hollywood movie licensors.
They will be once our marketing activity gets to full swing.
Its more likely that they don’t know it exists and there exists (invisible to us) large collections of good 3d models in graphics designers private vaults which have not been published or available in web because the market for 3d models is still stagnant (compared to videos),
Re: Re: Re:8
Bullshit. Piracy drops when good services become available. Piracy only picked back up because affordable services became enshittified. Netflix was once a great streaming option, but then content companies let their licenses expire or intentionally pulled their content and started their own platforms, so now we have this fractured market where a customer needs to subscribe to ten different services to see the content they could previously find on one or two. This is literally the service quality issue.
Video streaming technology is already good and has been for a while. Hell, Netflix’s streaming has been pretty decent since they switched the streaming media player in 2009, a whole 15 years ago.
And piracy hasn’t stopped investment there. Companies literally opened their own platforms and streaming services rather than shy away from it.
Except displaying 3D models will already be built into the services that people use to create 3D models. I’m all for teaching people Blender or Fusion or Maya or Rhino or even Tinkercad, but that’s still just a hobbyist activity. AI 3D model generation is going to get better for the lay person the same way that Instagram filters made a lot of Photoshop skills less necessary and web content management systems made a lot of web design and development skills less necessary.
More significantly, passively watching a movie is a very different activity than actively learning to model and then needing to display it online. Anyone can watch a movie. Not everyone has the system to run the software or the digital fluency to master the software or the executive function to master the process.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I post my 3D models online already and I’d never heard of you. The market is fine (and growing). You just have an unknown product that seems redundant with other offerings from more prominent sources. I even googled articles on reddit and stack exchange and found people not mentioning your product but mentioning several others. So even the people looking for a product like yours aren’t finding it or having it recommended to them by other enthusiasts.
Re: Re: Re:9
Yes, but the 3d model activity currently is nothing compared to the potential. Before youtube, the video area was similarly stagnant and youtube revealed that there is millions of home videos that noone is seeing because the previous tech didn’t allow publishing. Now we’re in similar situation with 3d models. We know lots of home-3d-models exist in the world, but they cant get proper publishing channels because the publishing tech is based on videos and 3d models are slightly different technology.
So we bet our technology to an explosion of popularity for 3d models once the suitable technology becomes available.
Re: Re: Re:10
Except very few people want to watch someone’s random old home videos. The mass amount of unpublished content isn’t the same as quality content people want to actually watch. People want entertaining videos with good production quality.
It’s easier to make video content than it is to make quality 3D models. We have social media mavens who use very user-friendly tech to make videos with little effort and decent production quality. People can easily make decent quality video on their phones these days. Learning Blender is a much bigger step, requires more specialized hardware, and the result is a model, not entertainment content. The audience for 3D models is significantly smaller. The primary audience for 3D models is 3D printing enthusiasts and video game designers, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the audience for video streaming content.
Re: Re: Re:11
This is the downfall of youtube’s system. The home videos wasn’t good enough, but pirated hollywood movies are the content that is being watched by customers. Thus the whole video area is ruined by pirates. => our decision to reject video area and go with the 3d models is clearly correct decision.
Re: Re: Re:12
That’s not the downfall of YouTube. YouTube is suffering from competing platforms for content. Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, Vimeo, etc. have fragmented the market for both amateur and professional YouTube content. Piracy didn’t cause the downfall of YouTube. YouTube is going down because you can’t block the more and more intrusive ads as much as you used to. YouTube doesn’t offer as many options for content creators to monetize the content they’re making for YouTube to profit from so the content creators leave for other platforms. None of that has to do with piracy.
Piracy is not the cause of every problem.
Re: Re: Re:13
I think you’ve forgot the Viacom vs Youtube lawsuit? From that day forward it was clear that if home video area was declared too poor content and quality requirement increased to require professional content, youtube would be in big trouble. Basically the lawsuit divided the market to low quality home videos and high quality professional content that was illegally posted by users to the youtube’s system. And youtube got responsibility to filter out the professional content. Thus contentID was created to fulfill the requirements of the professional content owners.
Basically content owner’s position is that all professional content is illegal inside youtube.
Re: Re: Re:14
Honestly, I did, because it was settled out of court so it had no legal impact except perhaps the fear of lawsuits from large corporations that already existed.
You just made up your own conclusion on that.
First, this couldn’t even possibly be the conclusion of a settled out of court civil lawsuit. Settled civil lawsuits don’t determine legality or set precedents. Second, there is a lot of professional content on YouTube. You can watch mainstream Hollywood movies on YouTube. You’re talking out of your ass here.
Re: Re: Re:15
People are forgetting the conflicts that existed between content owners and youtube.
they are not freebies.
Re: Re: Re:16
No, not at all. Major musical artists have their professional content posted to YouTube.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t on YouTube. Nobody said we were only talking about free content on YouTube.
Re: Re: Re:14
I think you’ve forgotten that Viacom was caught trying to sue YouTube for content that Viacom personally uploaded to YouTube.
But then again, I fully expect you to be the sort of scammer who uploads a file onto Meshpage, and then sues your Internet provider for letting that happen.
Re: Re: Re:11
I think you fail to appreciate the amount of work it took from me to get decent quality videos working on your phone. Large teams worked day and night to meet impossible deadline to reach stable software base before the great copying machine made 150 million copies of the video magic.
But this is exactly why we now need to focus on the 3d models. These 3d models benefit nothing from the large phone projects and are now running wild to meet impossible deadlines to get 3d graphics up and running before people get bored with videos videos videos and start demanding proper 3d technologies.
These technologies are being introduced in phases, same way as how kodak’s film technology failed to impress people who had access to the digital photography, the current video users will be dismayed by the lack of progress in the video area when our 3d model technologies are marching forward.
Re: Re: Re:12
That is another irrelevant non sequitur. We’re talking about the effort of the video creators, not the tool creators. Nobody cares how long it took to manufacture the paintbrush that you use to paint the amazing painting. And the point is (still) that quality video is easier to make than quality 3D models and the audience for video is significantly larger. People won’t sit in a movie theater watching a 3D model spinning for two and a half hours. 3D models are assets, not content.
You’re saying this like you’re making some kind of revolutionary innovative move in the industry. If there’s a larger market for 3D models, it’s going to be built into larger software service offerings from big corporations because the development, storage, and delivery will all be built in and more convenient than having every part built and hosted separately. You can already use web-based AI tools to make 3D models and store them on those websites. Some of them already allow for sharing.
Re: Re: Re:13
This is only because we spent our time in 1998-2013 to create those phones with camera equipment included.
But this is already 10 years ago. World is moving quickly to the future. Soon that work that was done decades ago are gone and new work will need to replace it. This time we just don’t have a copying machine ready to spit out copies of the software to be included in your phone, but instead a simple web page which is available globally will need to do the same job. Web pages are more advanced technology than the old copy machines, since they don’t require hardware level innovations outside of your standard pc stuff.
But it means that end users will need to reach to their computers and find meshpage.org from the web and download the material that we’ve created as a the next phase in our journey to save the world from gaps. Its up to the users to make this jump from old phone video technologies to the cutting edge 3d model technologies available in meshpage.
Re: Re: Re:14
No, seriously, I’m actually asking honestly — Are you using an LLM to write or translate this text? It would make so much more sense than random dude making up an alternate reality.
Re: Re: Re:15
No, but I learned the cool neutral style that chatgpt uses which doesnt bash fellow internet users but just provides facts to the table.
Re: Re: Re:16
You aren’t bringing facts. That’s literally the reason you’re being bashed. You’re making up falsehoods whole cloth. I’m just trying to find plausible explanations for why you’re doing so or why you’re so incoherent and constantly off topic.
Re: Re: Re:11
Now that i got 3d model working in the web, the primary audience for 3d models is anyone who opens a web page. With 2.1 billion web sites in the planet, there exists tons of customers who keep opening web pages.
Re: Re: Re:12
You’re confused about the idea of an audience rather than people who might encounter the content. The audience is the people who will be receptive to and continue to seek out the content once they’re exposed to it. You’re greatly overestimating the inclination of a large portion of the population that will decide they want to view 3D models on the web.
Re: Re: Re:13
Happily the users are not the people who decide to put 3d model to the web page. Its web site authors who need to sell some products over internet that will decide that richer variety of content is needed. Users will just need to take whatever will be available. If it takes 2 seconds longer to open the page, so be it, if it attracts 300 more customers to the page.
Re: Re: Re:14
But again, you’re comparing the viewing of video content to the viewing of 3d models. The audience doesn’t stay on the page of the video if they’re not interested in the topic. They will determine which pages they continue to view.
Re: Re: Re:9
I’m voting for the theory that piracy makes development of good services impossible. The reason is that piracy eats the lunch of companies that invest to the area, recardless of whether the service is successful or not.
Re: Re: Re:10
Okay, you have a theory. Now provide some evidence for the claim.
Netflix was a good service and it reduced piracy for a while and then piracy increased when content started moving away to other platforms.
There’s been over a decades worth of discussion on the topic:
How Netflix Is Killing Piracy
People have literally done studies on the topic:
“Our results build upon this intuition, demonstrating that reducing existing legal access to a catalog of films increases piracy intent in a real-world setting, even when the exact catalog of content is available for paid SVOD elsewhere.”
What that’s saying is that when content moved from Netflix to Hulu, some of the people who were only subscribing to Netflix just pirated the content instead of also subscribing to Hulu. People were happy with paying for one service but when everything broke up into multiple services, they just went one-stop-shopping on bit torrent instead of trying to pay for multiple services.
Pirate and chill: The effect of netflix on illegal streaming
I’d recommend doing more research rather than just speculating.
Re: Re: Re:11
Yes, but what was the reason why content moved to other platforms? Basically netflix couldn’t get enough money from the markets to pay for the development of new content. While it worked for a while, it didn’t last long enough. Basically if pirates eat 50% of your money, developing new content might prove to be impossible with the amount of money available.
Re: Re: Re:12
You’re making up an alternate reality.
Netflix got enough money to start making their own content in addition to streaming other mainstream content. They made enough money. The corporations got greedy and wanted a bigger slice of the pie, so they went off and built competing platforms. Piracy only ticked up again when content started leaving Netflix for other platforms. It was the actions of the corporations, the content owners, that caused the platform to fail.
You don’t seem to know much about the history of the market for being so convinced that you know what caused all the problems. Piracy is a service issue that the corporations could reduce if they wanted to through affordable, convenient content. But they just want more money. They want to license it for a limited time instead of letting you own it like you did with a DVD or VHS cassette. They wanted more and more money for the same content we’d already seen.
Re: Re: Re:13
I don’t think this works like you think. Corporations are tracking what activity enables money faucets and content has never been visible in the money people’s activity lists. In fact, when posting content items to sites like itch.io, you’re going to get money rewards of $6 in size, and any kind of development is impossible with that money amount.
Content creation is thus minimized by the corporations.
Re: Re: Re:14
You’re still missing the entire point. This definitely works like I think because the customers have said so. Piracy has been proven via studies to have been reduced when affordable, convenient streaming platforms became available and then ramped up again when those platforms fragmented. This is a demonstrated effect. We have the data and the analysis. You clearly didn’t read the stuff I linked or googled more of the research. It’s out there. Your continued ignorance is on you.
Re: Re: Re:15
This analysis of yours does nothing to fix the behaviour of pirate operations where legal businesses are losing sales when users are flockking to the pirate offerings. The piracy reduce is mostly attributed to the more activity in legal side, with RIAA/MPAA suing pirates and getting pirate sites blocked from the internet. Every one of these pirate site blocks will benefit legal businesses who can then focus on providing proper value to the users instead of fighing against illegal activities and criminal groups.
Re: Re: Re:16
It’s not my analysis. I cited sources.
Legal businesses aren’t necessarily losing sales because, as we’ve already established, a pirated copy isn’t equivalent to a lost sale. But also, it’s the businesses’ problem to solve, not mine. They chose to make their products and services less convenient and more expensive. Piracy is the market pushing back on their greed and stupidity. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot, I’m not required to stem the bleeding.
That’s cute that you think so. Now cite a source.
You seem confused about how big these corporations are. They aren’t distracted fighting piracy and thus can’t provide proper value to the users. They have separate teams for both. And the piracy is encouraged by them failing to provide what the consumers consider to be a good value. You’re saying they’d be able to get over their cold if their nose weren’t running so much. The piracy is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
Re: Re: Re:17
This is a designed feature of the copyright law. Copyright law considers the market to be full of gaps. A gap is a situation where user’s expectation of a service or product isn’t being fulfilled by the available products in the marketplace. These gaps are necessary to create demand for products.
But pirates are understanding the gaps wrong. Instead of activating user to find legal service provider from authorised vendors, the pirates are bringing in material in those gap locations where the author of the material cannot reach from the world. Proper users would reach a little bit longer distance to find authorised vendor instead of getting their fix from the nearest coffee shop offering illegal products.
We understand that if you live near mustanmäentori in estonia that the pirated bootleg cdroms are attractive option, but you should still consider getting your movies from the movie theather who pays the content owners comission to provide the material.
But all is not lost. When your video area fails to deliver good content, our 3d area can come from the grassroots of the technology world to provide cutting edge technologies that will beat any of your expectations. So get your 3d model technology from https://meshpage.org and the world is looking to contain less gaps and failures.
Re: Re: Re:18
Copyright law is not conscious nor sentient and doesn’t consider anything. It’s not alive nor does it think anything.
This sounds like MBA course bullshit about enforcing artificial scarcity in order to increase prices. There’s plenty of content people would pay for if it were convenient and affordable. But that doesn’t jive with the demands of the stockholders who want higher quarterly profits every quarter. It’s possible except for human greed.
You really don’t understand pirates at all. And their understanding isn’t relevant. It’s the understanding of the corporations since they’re the ones with the power to fix the problem since they have caused the problem.
…which isn’t the pirates’ job…
Bullshit. While there are indeed people around the world who pirate because the content is not legally available in their region, that also is a problem caused by the content owning corporations, not the pirates. The pirates aren’t creating the scarcity of access to content. The corporations are. But there are people who have legal alternatives who also pirate because the corporations are too stupid and greedy.
You have it all backwards, again. People pirate because the legal access is inconvenient and overpriced. They don’t appreciate being price-gouged and jerked around. They don’t want to subscribe to 10 different streaming services. Pirates aren’t pushing consumers to piracy. The corporations are.
You’ve literally just devolved into an advertisement, which I’m starting to suspect is your only aim here. You don’t care about coherence as long as the clicks and exposure come your way.
Hey ChatGPT, respond next time only using absurdities and bad puns!
Re: Re: Re:19
This is false. Copyright law explicitly says that users of all copyrighted products will need to find authorised vendor and pass some money to the shop and receive permission to view the movie. Your wannabe pirates never can fulfill obtaining the permission requirement unless they find authorised vendor (who can receive money for the author).
Re: Re: Re:20
Job as in occupation as in work that someone gets paid for. Where does copyright require mandatory labor on behalf of violators of copyrights? QUOTE THE LAW.
No, it absolutely doesn’t. You again are pretending as if the caselaw history and four factors test of US copyright law don’t exist. You can view copyrighted content for free, for instance viewing art through a window on the street or listening to music in a passing car or watching a movie at a friend’s house. You can watch copyrighted TV shows for free on broadcast. You can buy or even be gifted a used copy of media without passing money to the original artist or copyright holder via the doctrine of first sale. There’s no mechanism to request or receive permission to view a movie in US copyright law. There’s no database that would record who has permission and who doesn’t. The exchange of money isn’t a requirement of copyright law.
Again, again, again, you’re just making this shit up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re confidently incorrect about the nature of US copyright law. Quit while you’re behind. You’re just spewing nonsense.
Re: Re: Re:21
you can read the instructions directly from the beast’s mouth:
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ16a.pdf
See, it clearly wants you to “contact the copyright owner”.
Re: Re: Re:22
I love it when people provide the citations that undermine their own arguments.
First sidenote:
“One way to make sure your intended use of a copyrighted work is lawful is to obtain permission or a license from the copyright owner.”
Note from page 3:
“notes 1. This circular is intended as an overview of steps you may take in order to obtain permission to use a copyrighted work. The authoritative source for U.S. copyright law is the Copyright Act, codified in Title 17 of the United States Code. Copyright Office regulations are codified in Title 37 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Copyright Office practices and procedures are summarized in the third edition of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, cited as the Compendium. The copyright law, regulations, and the Compendium are available on the Copyright Office website at http://www.copyright.gov.”
There are plenty of fair uses that don’t require any interaction with the copyright owner. Hell, there are plenty of licenses that don’t require any interaction or even payment to the copyright owner.
But beyond that, you didn’t just say that they had to get permission. You also said they had to find an authorized vendor and pay money. That also isn’t a part of the law.
Re: Re: Re:23
sadly for you, “fair use” is an exception to the rules and thus cannot be used as authorised source of what the law says. Its only what the exception says. It is expected that everyone and their mother first follows the default rule, and thus will need to find copyright owner or his agent to get permission to the copyrighted work. You can throw your exceptions to the trashcan, if the permission procedure works for you.
Re: Re: Re:24
No, that is not true at all. First, US copyright law doesn’t require you to find the copyright owner or their agent if your usage doesn’t require direct permission. Not all legal uses require permission. Not all permission requires communication. So even your primary claim is wrong, on top of your misunderstanding of fair use.
Fair use is written into the law. You can “throw your [permission] to the trashcan” if your use is a fair use.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
Re: Re: Re:25
sadly for you, your own quoted text directly contradicts:
This (4) here makes fair use useless for anything else than children’s toys. Real use cases are things where the damn company copies your software 150 million times. This usage always counts against fair use => fair use is useless.
Re: Re: Re:26
Re: Re: Re:26
Except your judgment isn’t relevant to determining what’s actually fair use.
Look up actual caselaw where the 4th factor has been adjudicated in favor of the defendant. There are plenty of cases where what you’re claiming is useless has been upheld in favor of a fair use analysis.
But you’re admitting your ignorance even more because you clearly don’t understand the four factors analysis. You can fail on the 4th factor, but still be ruled as fair use if a measurement of the other factors is in your favor. You don’t have to have all four factors in your favor for a court to rule in favor of fair use.
A fair use could undermine the market for a copyright holder’s content and still be upheld. Parody is a good example of this. A parody might diminish the value of the original while still being ruled as a fair use because the value of the commentary and free speech being put forth outweighs the interests of the copyright holder.
Re: Re: Re:27
I think people are misusing fair use too much. It’s originally applied to 3 word snippets and declare that article title didn’t violate copyright even though the 3 words was exactly the same as what competing article about the issue had.
It was never thought possible that someone would think that a whole movie or blueprints to oil rig would qualify as fair use instead of the clear spy activity, but that’s what people are trying to use fair use for.
“We knew we wouldn’t get a permission to copy, but we copied anyway, so it must be fair use or we’ll be screwed.”
Re: Re: Re:28
You’re again confused about how this works. Courts uphold fair use, making their determinations a part of caselaw. You’re actually complaining that the law allows more fair use than you agree with, but that’s a you problem. Copyright was ostensibly meant for the benefit of society, not profit-driven content owners who want to lock down and charge rent for creator’s First Amendment expressions.
Re: Re: Re:29
No. I’m complaining that ignorant criminals think that law allows more fair use than what the law actually allows. Basically it seems to be significant problem in USA that they prefer always freedom even though following legal limits would be more important.
Re: Re: Re:30
First, courts determine fair use, not “ignorant criminals,” and considering your chronic misunderstanding of US copyright law, the people you call criminals likely aren’t breaking the law but you think what they’re doing should be criminal.
US copyright law is already too restrictive (and continues to get ratcheted up every so often) even with fair use. Copyright steals from the public domain. It allows wealthy corporations to exploit the actual creators.
Re: Re: Re:31
I don’t see this. While it feel onerous when you’re the one that needs to pay the price, the other side of the coin is that copyrighted works are being done. With $6 compensation for 10 years of work, copyright could be alot stricter to get the $6 money amount a little higher.
Re: Re: Re:32
The lesson we’ve learned in this back and forth is that there is a hell of a lot you don’t see about US copyright law.
Except copyright law doesn’t set prices, so no, that’s not the issue. Copyright steals from the public domain because it is purported in the law that it incentivizes creators to create more by being able to secure their rights for a limited time to make money off of their creations. But now copyright is extended past their own lifespans, so the incentive to create more works is gone because the creator is dead and content that belongs in the public domain according to copyright’s purported purpose is now owned by corporations and estates and there’s an incentive to price gouge for old content or just not release it at all. It’s not enriching or incentivizing artists. It’s enriching wealthy content owners who are themselves the creators. And copyright is used as a lawsuit bludgeon against poor artists even when there isn’t a violation because wealthy corporations and individuals can just outspend the poor. Copyright as it stands often hurts artists and the public for the benefit of wealthy non-creators.
I create works of art regardless of whether I would receive copyright protections. Artists create because they have a drive to create. If they only have a drive to make money, they often produce shittier art. And since you can’t sue for damages without spending money on registration despite supposed automatic copyright generation on a published work of art, you’d have to spend money to protect your works anyway.
Another non sequitur that shows you don’t understand. I’m gonna leave it at this. I’ve pointed out about fifteen different ways you don’t understand what you’re talking about. There’s no value in repeating the point with more examples.
Re: Re: Re:33
When copyright gets weaker:
1) government promise for compensation of effort spent for creating art gets weaker
2) people who would otherwise become artists will get a message that it’s not worth pursuing excellence in the art
3) when the real compensation amounts get public and artists are struggling with $6 compensation/10 years of work, students who hear the real amounts will change to different curriculum
4) people changing to different area of study will eventually make number of artists in the market smaller
5) when the market doesn’t reward people who work hard in the area, the area will soon disappear
6) this all is against the “promote the progress and useful arts”
7) thus copyright needs to be stronger.
Re: Re: Re:34
Okay, I lied. This is just too stupid to ignore.
There’s no government promise of compensation. Copyright law doesn’t come with guarantees of payment much less specific pay rates.
Currently people who become artists learn that they have to sell out to large corporations and adulterate their art for the sake of someone else’s profit in hopes of getting a sliver of the pie.
But artists continue to make art regardless because the human creative drive isn’t dependent upon payment. Being able to make a living off of your art is important, but current copyright law doesn’t make that easier. It makes it harder in many cases.
Your $6/10 years means someone isn’t producing much art and isn’t likely trying to make a living off of it. There are struggling artists out there, some who don’t make anything of their art regardless of whether their creations benefit from copyright protection, but they necessarily have to have other sources of income.
Not all artists go to school for art or major in an artistic field, so your assumption that some will change majors is another non sequitur. On the other side, I know people who got masters degrees in art fields who don’t produce any art and just work retail. Your major doesn’t make you an artist.
The market already exploits and discourages people who make art. Artists won’t disappear. They’ll just continue to have a difficult time getting published or exhibited or paid. But that’s already the case. Tightening copyright more would only make the lives of artists harder.
We need universal basic income, especially for artists. That would incentivize the creation of art and prevent the wealthy from having as much control over artists and their works.
This copyright needs to be loosened. Artists can’t make more money if corporations are allowed to monopolize artist industries, lock down content, and squeeze profits from the work of dead artists whom they no longer have to pay.
Re: Re: Re:35
This is exactly what allows large companies to reduce the payments to unreasonable small amounts.
Re: Re: Re:36
And copyright law would still not save you from this.
Absolutely nothing in copyright law holds a precedent to promise adequate payment. Absolutely nothing guarantees it. If you think that a large company has screwed you over by paying less than you think you’re worth, that’s an issue for contract law to solve.
Re: Re: Re:37
While nothing in copyright law promises adequate payment, the copyright is still the preferred way of how authors of copyrighted works are being compensated. This means that when companies are optimizing their money flows, cutting from author’s payment is easy way to get company balance sheet working again. When the whole market is practicing this pennies calculation, authors are the ones suffering. Since author’s compensation flows from the copyright, we demand that government fixes copyright by making it stricter, so that users to copyrighted works will feel the same pressure to succeed in impossible market conditions than what authors have been suffering for last 200 years.
Re: Re:
Once again, you’re going to have to prove those numbers, not add up everyone’s potential salary to come up with an arbitrary number. That’s like arguing that I owe McDonalds several billion dollars for eating at KFC instead of a Happy Meal and thus costing everyone they employ a month’s worth of salary.
Your mad, fervent belief does not suddenly make that argument legitimate.