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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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If you own a web site and believe that it is "stealing" for AI bots to read your site's content and learn from it, do you also believe that search engine indexing is "stealing"? Search engine indexing involves the search engine bot downloading all the public content of your site and building a model (the index) from it. That is how it's possible for search engine users to find your site.
If you do believe search engine indexing is "stealing", have you blocked Googlebot, Bingbot, BaiduSpider, DuckDuckBot, YandexBot, etc. in your
robots.txt?"Publishing" means making public.
If you write a book, you own the copyright to the book. But the fact that the text of your book contains a particular word, e.g. the word "mesothelioma", is a public fact. You don't own that fact.
A search engine for book content can read your book, and record the fact that it contains the word "mesothelioma" in its model; and then when someone searches for that word, it can return a link to your book.
Creating the index meant that the search engine internally made a copy of the text of your book. However, serving search results is not a copyright infringement; rather, it is stating the true fact that your book contains that word.
Similarly, if you write a book about how asbestos causes mesothelioma, that fact is not your property. If someone borrows your book from the library, reads it, and learns that fact, they do not owe you money. Even if they go around telling everyone about mesothelioma, they still do not owe you any money.
If they are an academic, the rules of academic publishing say that they are supposed to cite your work as a source — telling their readers that they learned something from your work. But if they don't, that's still not copyright infringement; it's plagiarism, which is not a crime but rather an offense against academic honor.
search engines point to your site though. You are getting back something. An LLM won‘t give a reference. It’s something else altogether.
And there is no „robots.txt“ to block LLM training scrapers.
Just because you publish something doesn’t imply you forfeit copyright.
Their work isn't being reproduced and sold. Seems like fair use. I hate to say it but I'm with google on this. Things would get much with these lawsuits succeeding
No, but it is being used commercially for a profit.
This seems like a situation copyright law never saw coming.
If I read a bunch of copyrighted books, and answer questions based on the knowledge I have acquired from them, I do not owe the authors anything.
TLDR: maybe it’s like a library? Libraries pay for books, even digital copies.
Presumably somebody bought a copy of the book, even if you found it on the coffee table.
This seems more like going through the trash for anything legible, reading billboards and taking free newspapers. It just happens that a lot of the stuff put out at the curb was copyrighted material. In fact, almost every website has © in the footer, so clearly the sentiment is “don’t copy my original content”, especially without credit. But if the AI is not reproducing, in whole or in part, the copyrighted material then it does seems a bit late to try to claw back value just because someone else found a way to monetize what you put out on the open web. I think that’s what’s going to have to be proven, one way or another.
Maybe another way to look at a LLM is as an enormous library, but instead of borrowing books and periodicals, as a user you are borrowing the pre-digested knowledge directly. Libraries have complex agreements in place with publishers, so that rights holders are compensated. Say what you will about these contracts, but they are a precedent. What is perhaps without precedent is how to handle the rest of the trash this library is indiscriminately gathering up.
And that's fair use. But I'm more on the side that a lot of things should be more fair use and modern content creators have ruined the internet. I would much prefer if the Sara Silverman's and others realized they cant both try to use the internet for free promotion while also preventing specific people from consuming that content. I'd love if they all left. I don't need these people as much they need us
See my edit. You own the copyright to your work but you do not own ① facts about your work, or ② facts contained in your work. The creators of reference works, for example, cannot assess a royalty fee from people who learn information from those reference works.
robots.txtis consulted by all manner of automated tools, not just search-engine indexing.