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Comment Re:Of course not (Score 1) 19

Where did I say it should be the priority? What I'm saying it would be profitable for more Sony and Nintendo games to come to XBox because the additional sales will go well beyond the cost of porting and any potential losses from people picking an XBox over a Switch or PS5 because of the availability of the title.

Comment Re:If it's not fair use (Score 1) 64

It is?

I assume that you're replying to the part about fair use turning prima facie infringements into non-infringing uses, but it's difficult to tell.

If so, well, that's the statute at work:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work ... is not an infringement of copyright.

You don't think it's at all strange that the Supreme Court insists on explicit analysis of all four fair use factors, yet if while doing so you refer or even rely on the work's transformative nature, hey, don't sweat thinking about the right to prepare derivative works, close enough I'm sure.

No factor is determinative in fair use, even though often enough the fourth factor is. Always do the full test, every time. And recognize that much comes down to which side of the bed the judge got up on. It's not as bad as the copyright utility doctrine and conceptual separability, but it's not great. Look at time shifting; people extoll it as a classic fair use but really it fails on three out of four factors and is middling at best on the fourth, and was originally going to go the other way. Prof. Litman has a nice write-up about it. And for every example of fair use, there's always a counter example where the same sort of thing came out differently due to a minor factual difference.

Anyway, got a cite where a court held that a prima facie infringing use was a lawful fair use and which was nevertheless still an unlawfully infringing use meriting damages and/or injunctive relief? I'd love to read it. Closest thing that comes to mind was some of the section 1201 stuff from ages ago, distinguishing fair use from circumvention.

Indeed, the very problem I was trying to point out.

Doesn't sound like a problem to me.

Comment Re:If it's not fair use (Score 1) 64

Unless you're a copyright lawyer I'd avoid the "I'm a lawyer" credential in these discussions.

Oh boy, guess what? Even have an LL.M in IP.

the initial step being obvious fair use

There's really no such thing as an obvious fair use. It's always fact-intensive, always case-by-case. And there's always the risk of times changing. Format shifting comes to us from the RIAA v. Diamond case, and it's terrifying to think of how differently that gone had it been litigated just a few years later when the iTunes Music Store was open. I'll agree though that the use of pirated books for training was a bad idea, in that it does not help how a court will perceive the AI developers. Never a good idea to piss off a judge, and it's clear these guys were not thinking.

Still, there's no market for AI analysis of books as far as I know, and the use was transformative in nature given that no one appeared to be reading them, they were just grist for the mill. This is actually more favorable to fair use than Google Books, which is intended for some human to ultimately use to get to read snippets of text in search results. Imagine how strong Google's case would've been if they'd said that searching for a string of text points you to a book with no snippet or anything else to tell you what's inside. Maybe a page or chapter number, for all the good that does.

Once you get over the training hurdle though, it looks like pretty smooth sailing. The model is demonstrably lossy. It's too abstract to mesh with the concept of an abridgement or condensation. You might be able to get snippets here and there out of it, but I would imagine that given a few examples to dive deep into analyizing, OpenAI can show that they appear because they're built out of common chains of text from multiple works, or are overrepresented due to multiple copies of the work. (Kind of like how the image-generating AIs are said to like to make fake Getty Images watermarks because it saw so many of them in training data, so it must be important)

Personally, I like their chances. Either way, it'll be interesting to see.

Comment Re:If it's not fair use (Score 1) 64

2/ the nature of the copyrighted work;

Users are allowed more freedom with regard to non-fiction, since the facts therein are uncopyrightable, and the general organization may be as well. Fiction, being more creative, enjoys a bit more protection from potential fair users.

There is no way a fair use defense will pass muster here. Of course, I'm not a lawyer. But I have talked to a few about the scope of fair use before reusing data in my projects.

I'm a lawyer. I would suggest you take a look at the court opinions concerning Google Book Search. You may be surprised. Try Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., 954 F. Supp. 2d 282 (S.D.N.Y. 2013) which was at the trial level, and then Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., 804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015), when it went up on appeal.

Comment Re:If it's not fair use (Score 2) 64

What constitutes a derivative work though? A quote? An analysis? Using the ideas of a book in abstract to answer a question the book touches on?

Gotcha covered:

17 USC 501(a): Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 122 ... is an infringer of the copyright ....

17 USC 106: Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: ... to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work ....

17 USC 101: A âoederivative workâ is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a âoederivative workâ.

So there's your answer.

A quote is not a derivative work because it's not based on a preexisting work. Instead, that's a reproduction of part of the work (a separate exclusive right under 106, however). A literary analysis is not a derivative work, but if you dug too deep and merely produced an annotated work or adaptation, then it would be. It's not too hard to stay on the correct side of that line.

Using the ideas of a book in abstract to answer a question the book touches on?

Ideas can always be used. Facts -- or things claimed to be a real-life fact -- can always be used. But be cautious again of digging in too deeply. Castle Rock Entertainment Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group, 150 F.3d 132 (2d Cir. 1998) was a case where someone wrote a book of Seinfeld trivia questions. The questions weren't about the show, per se, but about the contents of the show. (That is, they did not ask on what soundstage it was filmed, but things like what is the number of the apartment, or what tagline did character X say repeatedly in a particular episode, that sort of thing) This was held to be copying many little fragments of the show itself, and thus infringing. And it wasn't held to be fair use.

Comment Re:If it's not fair use (Score 1) 64

This would cause problems for text-to-speech used by the blind... a machine reading her work and then plagiarising it, reading it out loud to someone? THEIVES!

I remember this being a big area of interest about 15 years ago, but there doesn't seem to have been much about it lately. So long as it's done in real time and just for the reader, and not an audience, I would be inclined to say that it's not infringing the reproduction right, derivative right, or most significantly, the public performance right.

Comment Re:If it's not fair use (Score 2) 64

If it's not fair use, and the court rules that it's not, do we then have to buy a new license every time we want to read a book once more?

You've never had to buy a license to read a book. Perhaps if you're doing other things in association with your book reading, you might need a license for that but not for just reading.

How does a machine reading a book fundamentally differ from a human, and why would the act of reading constitute a copyright violation?

We've yet to invent a general-purpose AI. These things aren't reading books the way we do. My understanding is that they're basically compiling statistical models, and figuring out how each word or part of word relates to others. Kind of a more complicated version of playing the autocomplete game on your phone, where you input one word in a text chat and then just choose whatever the next suggested word is. The sentences you get make sense for a little while, but become run-ons and start to loop.

Analyzing a work isn't a copyright infringement. Predicate work needed to reach the point of conducting an analysis might, though. And the output of the software might as well.

Am I misreading this, or is Sarah Silverman's argument really that she doesn't want machines reading her work without a pay-per-read license?

That and also not wanting machines to be able to write things that sound like something she might write. Licensing isn't all that relevant, as in many cases a license would simply not be granted.

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