• 21 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • It isn’t fair use, See most of faq @ fairuse faq.

    “Fair Use” is often the subject of discussion when talking about online copyright with regards to online video content or music sampling, but it’s notably a flawed defense as it generally has no legal definition for how much of certain content can be used or referenced. The very first line of that faq has the following note:

    How do I get permission to use somebody else’s work?
    You can ask for it. If you know who the copyright owner is, you may contact the owner directly. If you are not certain about the ownership or have other related questions, you may wish to request that the Copyright Office conduct a search of its records or you may search yourself. See the next question for more details.

    All artists / writers and others are asking LLM model producers to do is a) Ask for permission or B) Attribute the artists work in some kind of ledger, respecting the copyright of their work. Every work you make (write/play/draw/whatever) has a copyright that should be respected by companies and are not waived by EULA or TOS (ever) and must be respected in order for author attribution as a concept to work at all. There is plenty of free, permissive copyrighted content on the internet that can be used instead to train an LLM, but simply asking for permission or giving attribution would at least be a step in the right direction for these companies and for the industry as a whole.

    Defenders of AI will note that the “use” of art in LLM is limited and thus protected by fair use, but that is debatable based on the content of the above listed FAQ.

    How much of someone else’s work can I use without getting permission?
    Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports. There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work. Whether a particular use qualifies as fair use depends on all the circumstances. See, Fair Use Index, and Circular 21, Reproductions of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians.

    You can see that the use cases above (commentary, criticism, news reporting and scholarly reports) does not qualify LLM companies to use or train their models with copyrighted data for privatized industry. Additionally, you’ll note that “market disruptive” uses cannot be protected by fair use in it’s definition, meaning that displacing artists with AI automatically makes LLM use of copyrighted material an infraction of copyright that is not protected by the fair use clause.

    Regardless, this will need to be proved in court and even if it passes certain criteria, it will not apply to all infractions. Fair use is a defense, not a protection, and thus LLM producers will have to spend time in court in order to defend individual infractions. There’s no way for them to catch all copyright infringement with one ruling, it needs to be proved on a case-by-case basis.

    IANAL but this is my 2 cents on the matter.




  • Consider the fact they may be using a 3rd party application, like ErsatzTV or similar, to create a “virtual” tv station that just plays videos in sequence after being added to a channel.

    You can always reach out to the user in question if you’re concerned though. I generally wouldn’t open my plex up to users unless I had regular communication with them anyway, but that’s a personal thing I think…

    Edit: Another thing to note is that, depending on the user’s tech savvyness, they might not be aware that you can see what content they’re watching. If you aren’t close friends, it might turn them off the service to have an admin approach them about the content that you yourself are hosting. Consider this and really weigh whether it’s your own business or not. And obviously, to be clear, you definitely shouldn’t be charging for this service so make sure that you’re not putting yourself in potential legal problems.


  • I mean, I sort of get why the developers say it’s Discord’s policy even if it’s a bit misleading.

    Game developers don’t really want to moderate their own discord server and simply want to use the strictest automated filtering system available and this just happens to include phone number linking. The operators of the servers themselves do not have access to these phone numbers and they are only stored by discord directly to prevent spam.

    I would personally prefer games to not have their communities tied to discord, akin to how forums were big deal for games back in the day, but even then they do need some kind of automated way to filter out all the crap. This is a problem with moderating any community, including a lemmy/kbin/mastodon, and I don’t blame them for simply picking the strictest option to ease the burden on the 1 or 2 people who are charged with managing these servers (especially if they are unpaid or volunteers, which is a whole other can of worms that shouldn’t happen…)


  • His supporters want cannabis legalization too. Doesn’t mean he’s gonna support it.

    Not entirely fair when he has essentially pushed for decriminalization and pardoned many people charged with bogus drug possession crimes in states that unfairly target minorities with drug crimes. I think he’s been pretty good short of broad legalization – but you can’t blame him when it’s still illegal in the majority of states.

    This is coming from a state with legal pot though, so I understand the frustration if you live in one of those backwards states that hasn’t gotten with the times. It’s important to remember how the Rs feel about recreational drugs before casting stones though (spoiler: they don’t like them).


  • According to most sites TOS, when we write our posts we give them basically full access to do whatever they like including make derivative works.

    2 points:
    1 - I’m generally talking about companies extracting data from other websites, such as OpenAI scraping posts from reddit or other such postings. Companies that use their own collection of data are a very different thing.
    2 - Terms of Service and Intellectual Property are not the same thing and a ToS is not guaranteed to be a fully legally binding document (the last part is the important part.) This is why services that have dealt with user created data that are used to licensing issues (think deviant art or other art hosting services) usually require the user to specify the license that they wish to distribute their content under (cc0, for example, would be fully permissible in this context.) This also means that most fan art is fair game as licensing that content is dubious at best, but raises the question around whether said content can be used to train an AI (again, intellectual property is generally different from a ToS).

    It’s no different from how Github’s Copilot has to respect the license of your code regardless of whether you’ve agreed to the terms of service or not. Granted, this is legally disputable and I’m sure this will come up at some point with how these AI companies operate – This is a brave new world. Having said that, services like Twitter might want to give second thought of claiming ownership over every post on their site as it essentially means they are liable for the content that they host. This is something they’ve wanted to avoid in the past because it gives them good coverage for user submitted content that they think is harmful.

    If I was a company, I wouldn’t want to be hinging my entire business on my terms of service being a legally binding document – they generally aren’t and can frequently be found to be unbinding. And, again, this is different from OpenAI as much of their data is based on data they’ve scraped from websites which they haven’t agreed to take data from (finders-keepers is generally not how ownership works and is more akin to piracy. I wouldn’t want to base a multinational business off of piracy.)