EFF to Courts: Don't Let AI Hype Rewrite Copyright Law
EFF to Courts: Don't Rewrite Copyright over AI Hype
The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns courts against expanding copyright protections in response to AI hype, drawing parallels to past panics over the VTR, player piano, and camera. It argues that the 'market dilution' theory, which would restrict fair use, undermines copyright's constitutional purpose. Citing research and examples of AI-assisted art, EFF urges courts to uphold existing principles and not stifle innovation.
Using copyright to lock in existing gatekeepers and massive rightsholders’ profits helps neither the public nor individual artists.
- anonyfox
Independend of AI I am fully supporting the idea to abolish copyright in general, full stop. Allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation and culture changes. Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes, but the general everyday stuff, incluing music and literature and code and so on is something to strip default rights away to allow faster progress. and oh the poor artists: next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore, streaming income is close to zero usually even if popular, the only real world industry to defend are the parasites that do not create art to begin with but siphon production/distribution channels. you might disagree with me, just wanna make clear that some people like me are against this copyright theater before AI blew up in popularity.
- UtopiaPunk
Copyright is broken and needs major reform, but copyright must exist in some form as long as we are operating under the current economic system. If we want a society where some people have the job of creating art, then they must be compensated for their art. The leverage that artists have to demand compensation is controlling who access to their art. Said another way, the artist owns the right to make copies of their art. That is protected by law.
I think copyright as it exists is abused by large companies and stifles culture. Broadly speaking, I think copyright should be a much shorter term, lasting more like 20 years rather than the 100+ years that is typical (life of the author + 70 years). The exact term is debateable, but the purpose should be to allow the artist sufficient time to monetize their creation for themselves, and then allowing the art to belong to the broader culture. There should be a worthwhile financial incentive to create art.
My utopian dream would be a radically restructured society where we do not expect people to have "artist" as a career. Instead, people would work 15 hours a week doing the work that must be done to contributue to society. The compensation from that 15 hours of work guarantees all their needs to live in modest comfort. People then have more leisure time to pursue whatever they find self-actualizing, which for many will mean creating art and sharing it with the world.
- teeray
I think the asymmetry of fair use is what feels the most wrong about copyright and AI. Forever, fair use has been limited with an iron fist: you can’t rip that DVD because it’s copy-protected; You can only use 10s of that song in your school project. Then these AI companies wield fair use like a sledgehammer in a way that nobody has been able to for decades to enormously profit. Maybe it’s technically correct, but it feels like mass exploitation of a loophole that the legal system has previously taken a dim view towards (see: Aereo).
- fny
Under the current state of affairs, copyleft material can be laundered through LLMs without triggering proprietary weights from becoming open.
Something feels broken.
- trashburger
20 years of copyright from creation, just like patents. The first two Shrek movies should be public domain by now.
- gwbas1c
I think we need to adjust copyright to balance market needs and preservation needs. AI works best when we can strike a balance between the needs of the creator to get compensated and the need of the general public to use content in ways the creator didn't anticipate.
- ThePhysicist
To be fair AI as we have it today wouldn't exist if everything was copyrighted and copyright was enforced very strictly across the web. Not sure if it's fair use and I get that it's not great if these companies try to monopolize knowledge (if they even can do that) but overall being more lax on copyright for fair use is good. Especially scientific knowledge should be openly accessibly to anyone, imagine what we could achieve if we could train LLMs on everything and make it accessible to everyone.
- bogwog
Guess it's time to stop donating to the EFF. They're completely off the mark this time.
The random loser generating slop in his bedroom isn't necessarily the one infringing, it's the AI company that took all of our work and is reselling it that is infringing. This is an obvious blind spot in copyright law and no reasonable person would consider that to be fair use. The challenge I think is communicating to a layman how AI training works.
For the people currently in the grips of AI psychosis: new regulation here is good for AI too. AI models will not get more creative without new human training data, but the current exploitative situation means people are not incentivized to keep creating. Human artists who create new things should be rewarded by the market, as copyright law intended. Even if their work only ever ends up feeding some gen AI model, they should still be entitled to compensation in some way (eg royalties). They worked hard so that you don't have to.™
Instead, AI companies are the ones being rewarded for it. That's not sustainable for anyone.