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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Why should they? Copyright is an artificial restriction in the first place, that exists "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (in the US, but that's where most companies are based). Why should we allow further legal restrictions that might strangle the progress of science and the useful arts?
What many people here want is for AI to help as many people as possible instead of just making some rich fucks richer. If we try to jam copyright into this, the rich fucks will just use it to build a moat and keep out the competition. What you should be advocating for instead is something like a mandatory GPL-style license, where anybody who uses the model or contributed training data to it has the right to a copy of it that they can run themselves. That would ensure that generative AI is democratizing. It also works for many different issues, such as biased models keeping minorities in jail longer.
tl;dr: Advocate for open models, not copyright
All laws are artificial restrictions, and copyright law is not exactly some brand new thing.
AI either has to work within the existing framework of copyright law OR the laws have to be drastically overhauled. There's no having it both ways.
I'm a programmer and I actually spend most of my week writing GPLv3 code.
Any experienced programmer knows that GPL code is still subject to copyright. People (or their employer in some cases) own the code the right, and so they have the intellectual right to license that code under GPL or any other license that happens to be compatible with their code base. In other words I have the right to license my code under GPL, but I do not have the right to apply GPL to someone else's code. Look at the top of just about any source code file and you'll find various copyright statements for each individual code author, which are separate from the terms of their open source licensing.
I'm also an artist and musician and, under the current laws as they exist today, I own the copyright to any artwork or music that I happen to create by default. If someone wants to use my artwork or music they can either (a) get a license from me, which will likely involve some kind of payment, or (b) successfully argue that the way they are using my work is considered a "fair use" of copyrighted material. Otherwise I can publish my artwork under a permissive license like public domain or creative commons, and AI companies can use that as they please, because it's baked into the license.
Long story short, whether it's code or artwork, the person who makes the work (or otherwise pays for the work to be made on the basis of a contract) owns the rights to that work. They can choose to license that work permissively (GPL, MIT, CC, public domain, etc.) if they want, but they still hold the copyright. If Entity X wants to use that copyrighted work, they either have to have a valid license or be operating in a way that can be defended as "fair use".
TLDR: Copyright and open source/data are not at odds with each other. FOSS code is still copyrighted code, and GPL is a relatively restrictive and strict license, which in some cases is good and in other cases not depending on how you look at it. This is not what I'm advocating, but the current copyright framework that everything in the modern world is based on.
If you believe that abolishing copyright entirely to usher in a totally AI-driven future is the best path forward for humanity, then you're entitled to think that.
But personally I'll continue to advocate for technology which empowers people and culture, and not the other way around.
You won't achieve this goal by aiding the gatekeepers. Stop helping them by trying to misapply copyright.
GPL is a clever hack of a bad system. It would be better if copyright didn't exist, and I say that as someone that writes AGPL code.
I think you misunderstood what I meant. We should drop copyright, and pass a new law where if you use a model, or contribute to one, or a model is used against you, that model must be made available to you. Similar in spirit to the GPL, but not a reliant on an outdated system.
This would catch so many more use cases than trying to cram copyright where it doesn't apply. No more: