You know, the more I think about it, the more I agree that LLM companies really ought to get permission or at least include attribution whenever they use Wikipedia content, since LLMs have always served a commercial purpose. Which would also comply with Wikipedia's CC BY-SA 3.0 content license.
The share-alike aspect of the CC BY-SA 3.0 license would bother LLM makers the most I think. But they'd just have to live with it.
I don't think Bard and Chat-GPT are evil. But they are products intended to reduce the amount of time it takes people to find things on search engines, which is only sort of related to finding the truth.
For an encyclopedia, which exists to provide truthful information, to rely on chatbots, the chatbots must draw only from reliable sources, sift out junk sources, measure the relative value of sources, and understand how those sources fit into the broader context of the article. Right now, no chatbot exists that can do these things. So a ban, or at least a strict human review policy, on using chatbots to write articles should be on the table, even if some bad faith actors will just ignore it.
So I echo Wikipedia's concern over bots using their own writing as training. It would quickly result in a thousand Jar-Edo Wenses -- the same self-referential wrongness that got us on the eight-spiders-per-year diet.
If chatbots don't generate Wikipedia content, though, I don't see much issue with them scraping Wikipedia for training, even if it does inure to the benefit of massive tech corporations. Worst case, they become better products.
Right, my point was that trademark isn't about protecting a product's design, recipe, taste, etc., as davimack alluded to, which relates more to the other areas of IP law, but about protecting the product's identity in commerce.
Trademark law is about marks used in trade, e.g. names of products or logos. It's not about the product itself; it's about how you identify the product. Having a registered trademark allows you to prevent others from using similar marks that could confuse consumers or that could dilute your trademark. But there are limits on what you can trademark.
This particular example is absurd because "cafe con" is not a creative name that only refers to Cafe Con Tampa but literally just Spanish for "coffee with." If this Cafe Con Conexiones used a similar logo, that would be different. But simply using the Spanish language in a common, unremarkable way does not infringe another's trademark.
Better according to whom? By what metric? And why? Art isn't a race towards a platonic ideal, a competition to create the song to end all songs, but an act of human expression. Even the most mass-produced music, music made by a hundred writers and producers and focus groups and designed specifically to top charts, contains something personal to the artist, some specific cultural context that enabled its existence -- some emotional undercurrent. AI feels no creative impulse; it generates content according to complex statistical models. Good for writing a ditty, maybe a decent tool for songwriters to get fresh inspiration, but not much else. I wonder what music these AI prophets listen to. What do they get out of it? Have they ever heard a song and felt something? Have they ever watched human beings perform and listen to music and share joy with each other?
Worth noting that this decision took the Oversight Board by surprise:
"The Board welcomes that Meta has followed the Board’s recommendations to introduce a crisis policy protocol in order to improve Meta’s policy response to crises, and to undertake an assessment about the current security environment. However, the Board calls on Meta to provide additional details of its assessment so that the Board can review the implementation of the Board’s decision and recommendations in this case, to define varying violation severities by public figures in the context of civil unrest, and to articulate the way that the policy on public figure violations in the context of civil unrest relates to the crisis policy protocol."
Bit of a lukewarm reception by Meta's own advisory board.
I also found the ACLU's reaction interesting. They tweeted that reinstating Trump was the "right call" because the public has an interest in hearing from an ex-president. Very speech-maximalist position.
Me, I have doubts about the benefits of giving this megaphone back to Trump, political significance be damned.
promoting the right to manage one's own property (esp as to moderation and speech) and criticizing the current state of copyright are not inconsistent positions. copyright is a property right, but pretty much everyone agrees that it's gone way too far and exceeded its original purpose of encouraging artistic expression and scientific advancement. you can disapprove of the extent of a right without opposing the existence of that right and all related rights.
a good reminder for lawyers everywhere that no matter how much the client pays you, you can never ever sacrifice your integrity or your license, because those are worth more than any amount of legal fees. you gotta learn to tell your clients no.
no, drug dealers are definitely trying to make new customers out of children by giving them valuable substances in a package that hides what the substance is so that anyone who gets addicted to it has no idea how to get more. genius A+ marketing strategy
I agree that blue laws are bad and should all be repealed.
but the constitution does not require separation of church and state, only that the government cannot make laws intended to advance or inhibit particular religions. this may sound like a distinction without a difference, but it's why people in public office routinely reference gospel, openly base their views off religion, and put their hands on bibles to get sworn in -- the constitution doesn't prohibit any and all mixing of religion with the state. "separation of church and state" is a good principle, and it should be the goal of secular democracy, but it's never been the law. that's why we don't have that general court decision you're referencing.
establishment clause challenges used to be evaluated under the so-called "lemon test," but SCOTUS replaced it last term with a much more abstract "history and tradition" analysis. don't ask me what that means lol, no one knows. it's already causing confusion in the lower courts. so I agree that the establishment clause should be stronger than it is now.
It speaks volumes that all of these attempts at revolutionizing news and news consumption center on how the news is formatted, not how it's gathered.
No amount of simplification or fancy article structure or bullet point-ification can elevate a poorly reported story. The news industry is bleeding money and cutting investigative journalism departments left and right while partisan investors are buying up local outlets and bad faith actors are spreading disinformation. Arbitrarily segregating news from any semblance of opinion will not address those problems. Nor will it address the wider public's growing distrust of news and deepening ignorance of how journalists actually do their work.
Worse, it plays right into that ignorance by buying into the false idea that the news can exist without occasionally favoring certain views. Sometimes, one view is right and the other is wrong. You cannot accurately report on the color of the sky without offending the Sky Is Red party. Balance for the sake of balance does not bring us closer to the truth.
I once attended a talk by one of the expert witnesses in the blurred lines case. she showed us her musical analysis and how the songs were similar, how each section started the same number of bars in, how both songs modulated at the same spot, etc etc, pointing out stuff that she said was "unusual" and therefore strong evidence of copying
but the entire time I was thinking... but they still sound different. maybe they have the same bones, but the effect is not the same. and why should that mean the creator of the older song gets a judgment against the creator of the new one? why does the law have to get involved here?
I think that was the moment I started to doubt this whole system. you can always find a musicologist who says the songs are too similar. the end result is artists like sheeren have to live in fear of litigation every time they make new music.
maybe a just copyright system is possible for music. but we don't have that.
pretty clear that the sponsors view art as an institution, or a market, and not as something that people do
"The aim of this amendment is to increase aid to artistic creation by setting up a levy on the lucrative commercial use of works in the public domain." like what? increase aid to artistic creation by taxing... artistic creation? right, that makes total sense
and what's "commercial use"? is it advertising? is it all art that makes money? if the latter, congrats, you've made it even harder for independent artists to survive. vive la resistance.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I agree that LLM companies really ought to get permission or at least include attribution whenever they use Wikipedia content, since LLMs have always served a commercial purpose. Which would also comply with Wikipedia's CC BY-SA 3.0 content license. The share-alike aspect of the CC BY-SA 3.0 license would bother LLM makers the most I think. But they'd just have to live with it.
I don't think Bard and Chat-GPT are evil. But they are products intended to reduce the amount of time it takes people to find things on search engines, which is only sort of related to finding the truth. For an encyclopedia, which exists to provide truthful information, to rely on chatbots, the chatbots must draw only from reliable sources, sift out junk sources, measure the relative value of sources, and understand how those sources fit into the broader context of the article. Right now, no chatbot exists that can do these things. So a ban, or at least a strict human review policy, on using chatbots to write articles should be on the table, even if some bad faith actors will just ignore it. So I echo Wikipedia's concern over bots using their own writing as training. It would quickly result in a thousand Jar-Edo Wenses -- the same self-referential wrongness that got us on the eight-spiders-per-year diet. If chatbots don't generate Wikipedia content, though, I don't see much issue with them scraping Wikipedia for training, even if it does inure to the benefit of massive tech corporations. Worst case, they become better products.
Right, my point was that trademark isn't about protecting a product's design, recipe, taste, etc., as davimack alluded to, which relates more to the other areas of IP law, but about protecting the product's identity in commerce.
Trademark law is about marks used in trade, e.g. names of products or logos. It's not about the product itself; it's about how you identify the product. Having a registered trademark allows you to prevent others from using similar marks that could confuse consumers or that could dilute your trademark. But there are limits on what you can trademark. This particular example is absurd because "cafe con" is not a creative name that only refers to Cafe Con Tampa but literally just Spanish for "coffee with." If this Cafe Con Conexiones used a similar logo, that would be different. But simply using the Spanish language in a common, unremarkable way does not infringe another's trademark.
Better according to whom? By what metric? And why? Art isn't a race towards a platonic ideal, a competition to create the song to end all songs, but an act of human expression. Even the most mass-produced music, music made by a hundred writers and producers and focus groups and designed specifically to top charts, contains something personal to the artist, some specific cultural context that enabled its existence -- some emotional undercurrent. AI feels no creative impulse; it generates content according to complex statistical models. Good for writing a ditty, maybe a decent tool for songwriters to get fresh inspiration, but not much else. I wonder what music these AI prophets listen to. What do they get out of it? Have they ever heard a song and felt something? Have they ever watched human beings perform and listen to music and share joy with each other?
Worth noting that this decision took the Oversight Board by surprise: "The Board welcomes that Meta has followed the Board’s recommendations to introduce a crisis policy protocol in order to improve Meta’s policy response to crises, and to undertake an assessment about the current security environment. However, the Board calls on Meta to provide additional details of its assessment so that the Board can review the implementation of the Board’s decision and recommendations in this case, to define varying violation severities by public figures in the context of civil unrest, and to articulate the way that the policy on public figure violations in the context of civil unrest relates to the crisis policy protocol." Bit of a lukewarm reception by Meta's own advisory board. I also found the ACLU's reaction interesting. They tweeted that reinstating Trump was the "right call" because the public has an interest in hearing from an ex-president. Very speech-maximalist position. Me, I have doubts about the benefits of giving this megaphone back to Trump, political significance be damned.
And with seven Masnick articles cited in the table of authorities, eight Techdirt articles total. That's gotta be a record.
oh, and also a good reminder to lawyers to NOT GO ON CABLE TV AND TALK ABOUT YOUR CASE WHILE YOU HAVE A RULE 11 MOTION PENDING AGAINST YOU, DUMBASS
promoting the right to manage one's own property (esp as to moderation and speech) and criticizing the current state of copyright are not inconsistent positions. copyright is a property right, but pretty much everyone agrees that it's gone way too far and exceeded its original purpose of encouraging artistic expression and scientific advancement. you can disapprove of the extent of a right without opposing the existence of that right and all related rights.
a good reminder for lawyers everywhere that no matter how much the client pays you, you can never ever sacrifice your integrity or your license, because those are worth more than any amount of legal fees. you gotta learn to tell your clients no.
twitter would fare better with a literal, actual bear as CEO. just put a bear in the office and see what it does. couldn't be worse than this
a glenn greenwald publication misrepresented the truth to generate outrage? shocked, I tell you. simply shocked
no, drug dealers are definitely trying to make new customers out of children by giving them valuable substances in a package that hides what the substance is so that anyone who gets addicted to it has no idea how to get more. genius A+ marketing strategy
I agree that blue laws are bad and should all be repealed. but the constitution does not require separation of church and state, only that the government cannot make laws intended to advance or inhibit particular religions. this may sound like a distinction without a difference, but it's why people in public office routinely reference gospel, openly base their views off religion, and put their hands on bibles to get sworn in -- the constitution doesn't prohibit any and all mixing of religion with the state. "separation of church and state" is a good principle, and it should be the goal of secular democracy, but it's never been the law. that's why we don't have that general court decision you're referencing. establishment clause challenges used to be evaluated under the so-called "lemon test," but SCOTUS replaced it last term with a much more abstract "history and tradition" analysis. don't ask me what that means lol, no one knows. it's already causing confusion in the lower courts. so I agree that the establishment clause should be stronger than it is now.
It speaks volumes that all of these attempts at revolutionizing news and news consumption center on how the news is formatted, not how it's gathered. No amount of simplification or fancy article structure or bullet point-ification can elevate a poorly reported story. The news industry is bleeding money and cutting investigative journalism departments left and right while partisan investors are buying up local outlets and bad faith actors are spreading disinformation. Arbitrarily segregating news from any semblance of opinion will not address those problems. Nor will it address the wider public's growing distrust of news and deepening ignorance of how journalists actually do their work. Worse, it plays right into that ignorance by buying into the false idea that the news can exist without occasionally favoring certain views. Sometimes, one view is right and the other is wrong. You cannot accurately report on the color of the sky without offending the Sky Is Red party. Balance for the sake of balance does not bring us closer to the truth.
What do you think copyright is?
if eric andre is giving serious statements without a hint of sarcasm, it must have been pretty bad
I once attended a talk by one of the expert witnesses in the blurred lines case. she showed us her musical analysis and how the songs were similar, how each section started the same number of bars in, how both songs modulated at the same spot, etc etc, pointing out stuff that she said was "unusual" and therefore strong evidence of copying but the entire time I was thinking... but they still sound different. maybe they have the same bones, but the effect is not the same. and why should that mean the creator of the older song gets a judgment against the creator of the new one? why does the law have to get involved here? I think that was the moment I started to doubt this whole system. you can always find a musicologist who says the songs are too similar. the end result is artists like sheeren have to live in fear of litigation every time they make new music. maybe a just copyright system is possible for music. but we don't have that.
pretty clear that the sponsors view art as an institution, or a market, and not as something that people do "The aim of this amendment is to increase aid to artistic creation by setting up a levy on the lucrative commercial use of works in the public domain." like what? increase aid to artistic creation by taxing... artistic creation? right, that makes total sense and what's "commercial use"? is it advertising? is it all art that makes money? if the latter, congrats, you've made it even harder for independent artists to survive. vive la resistance.
I look forward to Paypal arguing in arbitration that $2500 liquidated damages is a reasonable amount and not an unenforceable penalty.