[HN Gopher] Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Tra...
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       Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training
        
       Author : version_five
       Score  : 72 points
       Date   : 2023-05-31 20:58 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (technomancers.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (technomancers.ai)
        
       | waboremo wrote:
       | Is the wording accurate here? This is essentially the only source
       | besides the untranslated article and the machine translated
       | version sounds confusing (whether it applies to what is created
       | by AI or what can be consumed in training).
        
         | resoluteteeth wrote:
         | What actually happened was that Takashi Kii of the
         | Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan was arguing that the
         | current laws (from 2018) are problematic because they are
         | extremely loose and allow even illegally obtained content to be
         | used for training, and he asked Keiko Nagao, Minister of
         | Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to confirm
         | that this is the case.
         | 
         | She confirmed that under current laws that's true but said that
         | they need to keep an eye on it because there's a balance
         | between the development of new AI technology and protection of
         | copyright.
         | 
         | The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and
         | Technology is also in the process of compiling information
         | about case law on copyright and AI but there don't seem to be
         | any current plans to amend the law again in either direction.
         | 
         | (You can see the whole exchange here although the translated
         | autogenerated subtitles on youtube may not be great:
         | https://youtu.be/fyxx_0KmaKw?t=4457 )
        
       | georgewsinger wrote:
       | Japan also ranks 3rd (behind the USA & India, with larger
       | populations) in ChatGPT usage:
       | https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/
       | 
       | There's also been discussion of their government using ChatGPT to
       | reduce red tape:
       | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-18/japan-gov...
       | 
       | It's cool to see Japan and Japanese culture taking techno-
       | optimist stances on AI.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | nmkag wrote:
       | "Despite having the world's third-largest economy, Japan's
       | economic growth has been sluggish since the 1990s. Japan has the
       | lowest per-capita income in the G-7. With the effective
       | implementation of AI, it could potentially boost the nation's GDP
       | by 50% or more in a short time. For Japan, which has been
       | experiencing years of low growth, this is an exciting prospect."
       | 
       | And I could potentially be a billionaire. Where is this based on?
       | It seems to me that if AI boosts the GDP for the benefit of the
       | 1% who steal all intellectual output ever produced, the rest will
       | suffer.
       | 
       | This is a horrible decision from Japan.
        
         | surgical_fire wrote:
         | > This is a horrible decision from Japan.
         | 
         | Eh, I doubt it.
         | 
         | AI is potentially something that can massively increase
         | productivity. With a declining population in the foreseeable
         | future, an increased productivity may well be a boost that they
         | need.
        
           | Guthur wrote:
           | Boost for who though? if it works out there'll be more for
           | less. Wages won't increase, the number of jobs won't increase
           | the price of assets will inflate. None of these are good
           | things for 99% of us.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | Looks like AI is more tightly coupled to the employee (user)
           | than the employer. AI needs prompting and supervision, that
           | is a human skill that is tied to the employee. When the
           | employee moves to another company, they take their AI skills
           | with them and original company can maybe retrain the model
           | with his data, a stop-gap measure. I think there currently is
           | no AI that works without human involvement in critical
           | scenarios.
        
       | WhatIsDukkha wrote:
       | So this means llm trained on libgen and ... which is huge.
       | 
       | Current models are only trained on "open" texts.
        
       | IvanAchlaqullah wrote:
       | Miyazaki will definitely hate it. The last time someone demoed AI
       | animation he said "I would never wish to incorporate this
       | technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an
       | insult to life itself." [1]
       | 
       | And that was before stuff like GPT-1 or Stable Diffusion exist.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/hayao-miyazaki-
       | ar...
        
         | shagie wrote:
         | There is a pair of videos on this subject that I find rather
         | good and informed. They are from the channel "The Art of Aaron
         | Blaise" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Blaise )
         | 
         | Disney Animator REACTS to AI Animation!
         | https://youtu.be/xm7BwEsdVbQ (this is watching the Corridor
         | Crew's video)
         | 
         | Why AI will NOT be taking Your Animation job -
         | https://youtu.be/-lhbzbSck04
        
       | brandelune wrote:
       | The original links here, to the actual question asked and the
       | answer by the minister:
       | 
       | https://kiitaka.net/21312/
        
         | waboremo wrote:
         | This sounds like the exact opposite of what the title is
         | claiming.
        
           | throwaway33381 wrote:
           | Yeah. Copyright laws in Japan are extremely strict. I would
           | not be surprised at a complete ban on this. This is just a
           | fluff piece like a lot of ads coming in recently.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | This would work if they also not allow generated AI to be
       | copyrighted
        
       | djaouen wrote:
       | This is good news. This is basically stating that AI is inventive
       | (which it is, in my humble opinion).
        
         | acer4666 wrote:
         | What if you overfit your model to the point of exact
         | reproduction? Or anything in between that and what you consider
         | inventive. Where is the line drawn.
        
       | scottiebarnes wrote:
       | So if you train an audio model on say, Eminem's voice, then write
       | some songs and have it perform them...Would this output be legal
       | to publish?
        
         | numpad0 wrote:
         | IIUC/IANAL: depends on whether anyone feels the data to be "it"
         | or not. Provenance is not too relevant.
        
         | shagie wrote:
         | I've been amused by the WH40k videos narrated by David
         | Attenborough.
         | 
         | There was some discussion about this a few years ago regarding
         | Lyrebird - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182580
         | 
         | In particular, celebrities have an additional right - Right of
         | Publicity.
         | 
         | https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/publicity
         | 
         | > In the United States, the right of publicity is largely
         | protected by state common or statutory law. Only about half the
         | states have distinctly recognized a right of publicity. Of
         | these, many do not recognize a right by that name but protect
         | it as part of the Right of Privacy. The Restatement Second of
         | Torts recognizes four types of invasions of privacy: intrusion,
         | appropriation of name or likeness, unreasonable publicity, and
         | false light.
         | 
         | https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity/
         | 
         | > In the United States, no federal statute or case law
         | recognizes the right of publicity, although federal unfair
         | competition law recognizes a related statutory right to
         | protection against false endorsement, association, or
         | affiliation. A majority of states do, however, recognize the
         | right of publicity by statute and/or case law. States diverge
         | on whether the right survives posthumously and, if so, for how
         | long, and also on whether the right of publicity is inheritable
         | or assignable.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights (and in
         | particular
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#Japan )
         | 
         | > In October 2007, J-pop duo Pink Lady sued Kobunsha for Y=3.7
         | million after the publisher's magazine Josei Jishin used photos
         | of the duo on an article on dieting through dancing without
         | their permission. The case was rejected by the Tokyo District
         | Court. In February 2012, the Supreme Court rejected the duo's
         | appeal based on the right of publicity.
        
         | polishdude20 wrote:
         | What's the difference between that and someone else who just
         | happens to sound like Eminem in terms out output?
         | 
         | As long as you don't market yourself as Eminem that should be
         | completely legal.
        
           | scottiebarnes wrote:
           | I suppose so. I'm just imagining these "ghost AI artists" who
           | publish catalogues of music using the audible likeness of
           | more prolific artists.
           | 
           | I know that you could have always just hired an Eminem
           | impersonator and have them lay down tracks...but this
           | technology lets you achieve speed and scale. At least the
           | Eminem impersonator was a real person. This is just a model
           | learned off an artists voice.
        
             | 2023throwawayy wrote:
             | > At least the Eminem impersonator was a real person. This
             | is just a model learned off an artists voice.
             | 
             | I fail to see how that has any difference on the output.
        
       | kyleyeats wrote:
       | To anyone who disagrees: Am I allowed to learn how to draw
       | Jigglypuff? I don't own Jigglypuff.
        
         | snickerbockers wrote:
         | Am I allowed to distribute these ROMs of Pokemon games over
         | BitTorrent? I don't own Pokemon.
        
           | kyleyeats wrote:
           | No. I answered your question, do you have an answer for mine?
        
             | snickerbockers wrote:
             | you can draw it but you can't [legally] sell it without
             | permission from The Pokemon Company. And you definitely
             | can't start a new media franchise based on your OC which
             | combines jigglypuff with Sonic the Hedgehog.
        
           | surgical_fire wrote:
           | God created emulators for ROMs to be loaded into them.
           | 
           | To not distribute the ROMs would be heresy.
        
         | circuit10 wrote:
         | I mostly agree with your point but this isn't the best analogy
         | because while you're allowed to learn to draw Jigglypuff, you
         | probably could get in legal trouble for distributing or selling
         | those drawing if it's not fair use. I think a better analogy is
         | using Jigglypuff drawings to learn how to draw things like that
         | in general and then creating your own character that's not
         | exactly the same but uses some concepts you learnt
        
       | sylware wrote:
       | Considering the amount of animes Japan does produce, they could
       | very probably train amazing AIs: they could assist in a
       | significant way the creative process of such studios (look at
       | digital corridor experiment).
       | 
       | Worth to try for a long time and maybe waste a lot of resources.
        
         | kyleyeats wrote:
         | It'd be really great to finally see some anime models hit the
         | Stable Diffusion scene.
        
           | EscapeFromNY wrote:
           | I hope this is sarcasm :)
           | 
           | The anime crowd were years ahead of the curve.
           | https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ came out in 2019
        
         | setr wrote:
         | More than the anime production is that anime-fans are database
         | animals -- they catalogue anime to ridiculous degrees. Some of
         | the best image training datasets were always the boorus; anime
         | fans have basically been prepping for ML/AI since the 80s
        
       | nancyhn wrote:
       | All countries will have to follow suit or are effectively
       | committing seppuku, self selecting themselves out of the AI gene
       | pool.
        
       | wwweston wrote:
       | If you're not going to socialize AI gains, and leave in place the
       | social systems that value people by their output, waiving
       | copyright or other IP is astoundingly anti-humane.
       | 
       | What should be instead is that _fair use_ doesn 't apply to AI
       | training. That is, anything other than explicitly negotiated opt-
       | in should be illegal.
        
         | surgical_fire wrote:
         | Eh, I disagree. Copyright laws are mostly bullshit anyway, and
         | only tend to favor capital holders, who tend to buy up all the
         | copyright they need. I would gladly see copyright rendered
         | useless.
         | 
         | The peasantry hardly benefits from it anyway.
        
       | fnordpiglet wrote:
       | I think this should generally be true. The aggregation performed
       | by model training is highly lossy and the model itself is a
       | derived work at worst and is certainly fair use. It may produce
       | stuff that violates copyright, but the way you _use or
       | distribute_ the product of the model that can violate copyright.
       | Making it write code that's a clone of copyright code or making
       | it make pictures with copy right imagery in it or making it
       | reproduce books etc etc, then distributing the output, would be
       | where the copyright violation occurs.
        
         | mannyv wrote:
         | There's no difference between an art student looking through a
         | museum or archives for ideas and an AI using the material for
         | training.
         | 
         | Same could be said for reading. A medical student reading
         | through textbooks or a writer who reads is essentially what an
         | AI is doing.
         | 
         | You can ask an art student to create something in a certain
         | style. You can get writes to write in a certain style.
         | Equivalent.
        
           | Retric wrote:
           | AI models will make 1:1 copies of training data where artists
           | try and avoid doing so. It's common to obscure this copying
           | by intentionally inserting lossy steps, but making an MP3
           | isn't a new work.
        
           | Trombone12 wrote:
           | Indeed, if we don't care at all about "x is y" statements
           | being true, they can be "applied" to reading.
           | 
           | To determine if an art student and DALL-E really are the
           | same, despite their _very obvious difference_ (one has arms
           | and is part of a net of social relations while the other is
           | intellectual property), will take some actual arguments which
           | I presume you of course had planned to provide in a second
           | comment from the start.
        
           | antiterra wrote:
           | A student is a human and AI is not. We don't have to apply
           | the law equally to both regardless of how similar the method
           | is.
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | >The aggregation performed by model training is highly lossy
         | and the model itself is a derived work at worst and is
         | certainly fair use.
         | 
         | I mean, I've literally gotten the Superman logo in Stable
         | Diffusion without even trying, so it isn't that lossy.
        
           | fnordpiglet wrote:
           | And if you use it, you're violating copyright. But you will
           | find no copy of the logo in the model data. The model is way
           | too small to contain its training imagery from an information
           | theoretic point of view.
        
         | sandworm101 wrote:
         | No. Making a single copy for your own use is still a copyright
         | violation. There are exceptions (fair use, nomitive use etc)
         | but just because people are rarely sued for personal copying
         | doesnt equate to that copying being permitted. And trademark
         | issues, such as the other commenter generating the superman
         | logo, are subject to a host of other rules.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-31 23:00 UTC)