YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Patel

lines on the record: 56
first: 2024-02-15
most recent: 2024-02-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And there's also the sort of thing where some of these companies have a worst case than the others. So whichever ends up in front of a court first is also going to be interesting, I think. Some of these companies have played fast and elusive copyright a little more than others. And you're right that the first trial balloon is going to determine a lot of what happens next”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really do feel like the tension you've identified with the CEOs of these companies continue to make huge investments is that they feel they can solve the problem with money. And I think the tension is you actually have to solve the problem. My prediction is that if the time's notch is a big early victory, OpenAI will just throw money at the times and make it go away, right? They will just throw money until the Times says, fine, we'll do a 10-year deal. But that doesn't stop the author's guild. And that doesn't stop Getty. And then suddenly it becomes too costly to run. I think that first case, the trial case, actually determines a lot of what happens next. Because if the authors win there, the creators win in any of those early cases, the entire AI industry is going to light up with settlement offers. And then the prices are just going to rise. And maybe that will determine what happens next. But if the AI companies win first, I do think it's existential.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, why would you ask me that? You're basically just setting me up for whatever I answer is the wrong thing. I think that this is one of those things where I think the most you can really hope for is that whatever comes out doesn't damage copyright law in a way that makes it unworkable. That is like the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario isn't actually that generative AI gets banned forever or that it gets a green light forever. The worst case is that copyright law changes in a way that's unworkable.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that problem is just another rat's nest because it makes copyright look easy because like once you get into sort of the deep fake problem and likenesses. Oh man, like you think copyright sucks. Wait until you get to the right of publicity slash the right of privacy, which is the same thing depending on which state you're in.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which just gets to other weird places, but it's like everyone will have the same rights as any celebrity to endorse or not endorse Twitter. And it's like, that is really weird. But it feels like we're going to need that for the deep pig problem.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's one I can think of, actually. Yeah. And this is a hint towards our next episode, Deepfakes. There's no copies. There's a copy somewhere in the model, but then you're looking at the deep fake of Taylor Swift or Joe Biden or Donald Trump or whoever. And it's not a copy of anything. So if those characters want to show up and say, take this down, they have to use some other tool because they can't just go to copyright and say that you're not authorized to use that photo of me the way that I don't know even celebrity revenge porn gets taken down because they own the copyrights, the underlying images that get stolen. There's something else that needs to happen in particular deepfakes that I don't think that we have an answer to yet either. It's like, I don't know, we've had senators on the show proposing new causes of action around likenesses.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes sense to me, oh yes, this is Chekhov's gun right moment, right? Like it makes sense in like, oh, yes, this was the destiny of copyright law and the destiny of generative AI. But will it be a good tool about as good as anything else, I think? It's like not great. It's not super good. But if I run my head through anything else that we've got on the books, I don't think that there's like something where I'm like, oh yeah, this isn't a copyright thing. This is something else thing.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of not totally. I'm not 100% on board, but like, yeah, like traditionally what we do when technology is about to blow up culture is we bring on something like copyright. And so I don't know if that's the right tool for this because I don't even know if we really understand what generative AI is about to do to us. But I think it does make sense to me that it's shown up at this time. As sort of the front line.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And historically, when you're looking at a technology that's about to blow up culture itself, Bring in the copyright actually. It's like the printing press shows up, you bring in sort of protocolright, like the stationer's monopoly, right? Like you bring in something like copyright. Does it work super well? Is it a good thing? I don't know.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's a terrible tool to regulate speech. It's clearly not working out, I think, in the context of individual creators. We've set up just a very bizarre kangaroo chord system, essentially, through platforms. Everyone is familiar with the idea of copyright strikes and DMCA, and everyone sort of knows that it's a lot of BS and doesn't work super well, doesn't make a ton of sense, and it's weaponized. That said, it's like when you're looking at sort of the changes that are coming to the culture through generative AI and what that poses for society and for the way we live and all kinds of things like how do we learn in schools, right? The nature of creativity itself, the value of literature and art. I like don't even know what how to quantify. The changes that are coming down the pipeline or what to do to address them”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to end there on kind of a big think. This is an idea that I have ruthlessly stolen from you over the years. It's the idea that copyright law is the only real limiting regulation on the internet. Because it's the only thing that can consistently get things taken down. Like everything else aside from child pornography and sex trafficking to some degree even, it's those two things in copyright law. And those are the regulating factors on the internet. Those are the things that you can send a letter and something you hint down if you claim it's copyright infringement. And then you have this chaotic fair use argument happening in the background. Like the exit ramp is supposed to be really flexible and, you know, lend itself to these kinds of existential arguments that might go either way in front of a court. Entire industries might live or die depending on how people are feeling that day about the nature of the New York Times. Is this working? Like, is this the right way to go about it?”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have nothing to lose, then of course go to trial, right? If you have literally nothing to lose. And I think we've sort of hit the wall where you go, oh, either we go to court and we destroy copyright law forever, maybe. The future literacy of humanity, it's like people are starting to spin up these visions of the future that are increasingly apocalyptic. And I think that there's like an appetite to take this to the end.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getty, the Times, the media authors. Basically everyone who works in a creative industry is very mad and very concerned. And they've seen sort of their bottom line eaten away by big tech. And this is like no longer an era where you go, oh, well, we can form these partnerships with these companies and it'll work out for us in the long run. Like people are tired of having getting their backstabbed essentially. Like that's sort of the perception, I think. I think that like there is an appetite to take this all the way to the end rather than give in and let things blow up the future. And like whether or not that's like a warranted feeling, I don't know.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally anything the court is random, right? The jury is random and the decision is random, and then eventually you end up in an appellate court with a bunch of unelected weirdos, and they're extraordinarily random lately. This is why the CEOs think it's just going to be some money, right? Because they're going to say, look, I don't want to go to trial. I doubt the New York Times wants to go to trial. Like, we'll just pay you a bunch of money and you'll go away and we'll build our businesses under a legal regime that exists now.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it's applicable. The thing about the blurred lines case is like it's a case about vibes, right? Yeah. Does this song vibe with Marvin Gay? And is that infringement? It's just such a terrible case. It is kind of, yeah, it's a really terrible, I mean, it's a good example of the fact of like, this is why you never want to go to trial for literally anything.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Later on, the estate of Marvin Gay goes after Ed Sheeran. There is actual musical similarity in the two songs there, but as Sharon takes the sandy, he's very sympathetic. He says, this is the death of all music. And the jury agrees with him. And he wins. Total coin flip. Like the facts actually in both cases were the opposite of what they needed to be for the outcomes, in my opinion. But they are straightforward fair use analyses. Why do you think that's applicable or not applicable in the case of OpenAI?”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back. I'm talking about fair use with verge features editor Sarah Jong. We've talked about what the four factors in a fair use case are, but that leaves us with a really big question. How is this all going to play out for the AI companies? I often use the blurred lines case as an example of how much of a coin flip all of this is. The state of Marving and Ferrell Williams get into a dispute, the estate of Marvin Gate wins, even though there's no copying in that song at all, which is still crazy to me.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're always going to suck. Like, therefore, we will never impact the commercial value of this work. I actually don't know if they're going to be willing to go that far because it's a bit much. I straight up think that they are going to have to really minimize factor four as much as they can and just like talk around it and like try to really push their case on the other factors. I think factor four is like that's a rough one for them. I think it's especially rough given that like the most recent fair use case we have out of Scotus is a factor four case. I think that might be the biggest sign to me that we're headed towards an extinction level event.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in a case of open AI, it becomes like the economics of it actually become pretty direct, right? Like there is a market for information or writing or what books and this robot for 20 bucks a month can just substitute for users all of the other kinds of products that they might otherwise buy. Again, I think there's complexity here because I actually don't think the GPTs right now, like GPT-4 can't actually do the work. It's not quite good enough. So you have to pull your mind ahead to where it obviously will be good enough in the future. But right now, I wonder if the difference between what it can do right now and what it might do away into this analysis.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing that's interesting about that note on Factor Four, which is the economic factor, you could call it, is that in the time since you and I graduate from law school and now there is a movement called law and economics in the law that really emphasizes these ideas. Like the law should be measurable. We can imply economic thinking to it. That was not so much in vogue when the Napster cases were getting decided or the Grockster cases were getting decided. And so now you have this other fair use thing where it's like, is a painting replacing the market for a photo? And the judges are like, we can do some economic thinking here. And we're going to prove it by saying, yes, there is a market for depictions of prints. And this painting can serve that market as well as the photograph, which sounds ridiculous.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That this person theoretically had anti-war health foundations like, no, this is like it's not the thing they didn't want to photograph. They wanted Andy Warhol. They're like, yeah, but it's like the same market. It's about the same, right? I don't think that there's been a Supreme Court case that emphasized factor four that heavily before. And it's, I think, like sort of a warning shot actually for these new technologies. I don't know if they had the new technologies in mind, but like definitely this is not something we've seen out of quartz before. Is that heavy of an emphasis on factor four?”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I actually think that the fourth factor is really, really against open AI. Get like an Andy Warhol style portrait of Prince, or you know, you've got the famous Marilyn Monroe thing where it's like the cutouts and the choppy print thing. So a magazine thinks about putting a picture, like a photo of prints on their cover, and they're like, no, everyone's going to put a photo of prints on their cover after he died. Let's get an Andy Warhol style thing instead from the Andy Warhol Foundation. So they like make a portrait of Prince in the style of Andy Warhol. And the base that they use is a photograph that someone else took. They do not license the photograph and the person who took the photograph is the kind of person whose photographs get licensed to be put on the cover of magazines. And the court basically just goes, look, you like snapped up an opportunity.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know how to evaluate that in the case of AI at all. It feels like they're erasing the market for all human generated content in the world. But then I use the tools and I'm like I still have something to say here.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk about the fourth factor here, which feels like the most important one in this case and often feels like the most important one in any fair use case. The effect of your copy on the market for the original work. I make a song, it samples your song. The sample is de minimis in some way. It's just like background noise. My song is really popular. That doesn't mean people are going to listen to my song instead of listening to the original. And in fact, it might mean that people love the sample so much. that sales of the original song go up. So you've had some impact on the market. It could be positive or negative or nothing. And we're going to try to figure that out. And if it's positive or nothing, maybe that use is fair. If I have taken so much of your stuff and replaced your work with it in your market goes down and your sales go down, that's negative and that's going to cut against fair use.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's also how search engines work, right? Like, it's like you have to have all the stuff in order to be able to search it. I mean, the technology is subtly different, how the technology is being used to subtly different. The other part of it that no one wants to really even think about or hear about is that the Google Books cases, we don't have a Supreme Court decision out of them. Like the important bits come out of the appellate courts, and it's been 10 years. So it's like, well, almost 10 years. So it's like we've seen a shift in how copyright, especially fair use, is being addressed by the Supreme Court. It's a completely different court. Like, we could get something very strange out of this that is unexpected.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That just seems like very complicated to me because there's a little bit of technical nuance to how AI models work that requires all the stuff, even if all the stuff isn't out in the world or exposed to the user.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fact that it's not sort of immediately available Kind of diminishes this factor. Fascinating. I honestly wonder if that argument will be made well and if the judges will accept it well given that the main thing the AI companies have to do using this data is train on it, right? Google Books is like we made an index of all the books and we can show you parts of the index and then kick you out to buying a book. Open ads like we copied everything, we trained a model on it and we might have even thrown away the database of copies that we made. And now the model can just go converse. And it's like you had to take all of the stuff to train the model.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually do think there's a little bit of nuance to this one. This is where the Google Books cases, I think, sort of cut in favor of OpenAI, where yes, they're taking One hundred percent of the New York Times, like as much of the New York Times as they can get, yes, but what's spitting out is small in comparison to what they're taking. And so the fact that they've taken everything is sort of minimized in the Google Books cases, for instance, where they're like, yeah, they had to read everything. But because a robot was doing all of the reading, that means a lot less. That makes sense. Like the human literate part of the copying is what's important here, is sort of, I think, the upshot of like those cases. And so here, I think it's a little bit more mitigated for OpenAI.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Factor three in the analysis is how much of the work was used. This one might be the most obvious one on its face, which is it's all of it, it's bad, if it's as little as possible, it's good. Is there any nuance to this one”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About to get into the third and fourth varies factors, and one thing we're going to talk a lot about is Google, specifically Google Books. 20 years ago, in 2004, Google said it wanted to scan and make searchable all of the books in some research libraries. The copyright holders, authors, and publishers said, no, you can't do that, and they filed copyright lawsuits. It took nearly a decade, but the case was finally resolved in Google's favor in 2015. A federal appeals court held that turning books into search snippets was fundamentally transformative of the original work. There's factor one, and said that even though Google had scraped the entirety of the books and made a profit from offering its services, it was not hurting the market for the original books. That's where factors three and four come in.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, I will tell the audience you can see how complicated this is from the jump. This is not, there's nothing deterministic about this analysis. At every point, you can have a pretty existential argument. But to me, the nature of the work, it is the least deterministic because if the judge decides that they don't like the New York Times that day, they can just turn the nom down and say something like, the news is the news. It's not a poem. Like everyone has the news. If OpenI didn't steal it from the New York Times, they would take it from the AP and it's the same news. And like that is a thing that they could logically say here to devalue this factor.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like ChatGPT letting you get around the New York Times paywall and the New York Times being paywalled in the first place, that does seem to run in the favor of the New York Times and against Open AI.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of the nature of the work factor that I think is also a bit of a coin flip here is how widely available something is. So the New York Times thinks of itself as the news, right? It has a very high self-regard and it thinks of itself as pervasive and it is the first draft of history and all the ways the Times thinks about itself. It is also famously behind a paywall. It's a thing you have to pay for. You have to pay a lot of money for it. They can mail you pieces of paper, which is a very interesting way of receiving the news. There's a tension there, right? And the tension is in the complaint. They're saying, look, ChatGPT lets people get past the paywall. It's this thing you have to pay for and you can pay someone else to get it for free. The argument is you're reducing the market for the New York Times. How do you think those two things square?”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the dial's kind of in the middle on this one because on the one hand it's the kind of creativity that you want to incentivize but on the other hand it's like full of facts and when it comes to like facts and history like you don't like facts themselves aren't copyrightable right and like you don't want to like put a big fence around the first draft of history essentially so i think it does end up sort of in the middle there”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always think of nature of the work as how the judge feels about it. It's just up for whatever it is. It's like, how do I feel about the song Pretty Woman? Is it important that I'm going to turn up the dial on this one and say you've got to overcome it a lot? Is it a list of APIs in a spreadsheet in order? I'll turn the dial down a little bit because that seems pretty silly. And that as far as I can tell is how this one gets assessed. Feels like the entire contents of the New York Times archive might get the, I feel like this is pretty important waiting. It's hard to know.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some things are considered a little more in the purview of copyright than others. So art plays, that kind of thing, creative works, that's much more like valuable than, say, the sequence, structure, and organization of Java, the language, right? Which is, by the way, copyrightable, but it's like. Kind of a little bit less copyrightable, like on the download than the other stuff because it's weird. It's just a weird thing that. Copyright to the law.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome back. We were just talking about factor one of the fair use test, which is purpose and character of the use. And we've talked about the idea that some copies are transformative. They take the original work and they turn them into something else. That is majorly up for debate in the case of a generative AI system like ChatGP Second phase factor is the nature of the work. Is it widely available? Is it a secret? Is it stashed away and you've copied it and you've given it to everyone else? How does nature of the work play out in these cases?”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll just point out to the audience we're already in the middle of a deeply existential debate on the very nature of how AI systems work and whether they ever transforming the source text. We're at the first factor. We haven't even made it out of the first one. There's three more to go and they're all like this and some of them are even wonkier. This is when I say it's a coin flip. This is what I mean, like I feel like Sarah and I could just sit here debating whether or not AI is transformative for the rest of the show and not reach a conclusion. And it's not us who's deciding it in the end. It's a bunch of judges. And I don't know what they're going to think. We have to take a quick break. When we come back, Sarah and I will start diving into the other three factors in a fair use case.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some cases it clearly is transforming, but the New York Times has all those examples where the robot just spits it back verbatim. It's not transforming. And so you can sort of see like the New York Times is trying to preempt that transformativeness debate. They're like, yeah, if it's bidding it out verbatim, how much transforming is actually going on in here? You get kind of like an almost circular argument there where it's like if it's not doing it verbatim in some cases then when it is doing it verbatim, it's still transformative because that like whatever internal guts are happening in there like it's like clearly changing things just because we got like a one-off like verbatim quote surely that means it's like it's still okay it's a weird one”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I feel like in the case of open AI, whether or not copying all the information on the internet so that a robot can spit it back out at you in slightly different formats, whether or not that's transformative is wildly up in the air.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's case by case, even if it seems like it's easy, you can still get in trouble, might win in the end, but you'll still get in trouble. If you get into a much more difficult scenario like OpenAI, something that has never been to court, period, you're up leveling the difficulty to another place.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it is tough. The big missing word in this that's sort of been added over time through the courts actually is that they're looking for transformative use. That's just something that's evolved over the years. If a work is transformed by the copying, there's like a stronger argument to be made that it was a fair use. So you've got like, you know, a parody, you've got mashups. That's like a classic one. If you're like doing a YouTube clapback and you have a little clip of the person you're clapping back, that's a transformative use. But you can kind of tell from all of those easy examples I used, you can definitely think of a time someone got in trouble with copyright law for doing exactly that, which goes again to like fair use is kind of a funky thing where because”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what's the difference between, for instance, a middle school or opening up the New York Times and like quoting the New York Times in their book report about Soybeans, it's a source, so why not go to the New York Times to get the definitive information on some news story? People are also going to open AI against the advice of their teachers to like copy paste a paragraph about soybeans for their book report, right? It's like the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or for non-profit educational purposes. Yes, open AI is ultimately going to make money off of this thing.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI companies are getting sued. The New York Times, for example, has sued Open AI. And the New York Times has complaint is very compelling because it has all of these examples where open AI will just spit out word for word recitations of New York Times articles. They've obviously copied the information. OpenAI's response is, yep, we've acknowledged that we've made these copies, but that copying is fair use. We're allowed to do it, and we're going to show it to you by going through the four factors. So the first factor is purpose and character of the use. What does that mean and how do you think applies in this case?”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, fair use is the escape valve for copyright because it is wild for the law to restrict other people's speech based on whether or not you've published it in a book or set it on a tape or whatever. And so you have these four factors in the law. You can look them up, 17 USC 107. They're like intertwined. There's not really like a clear logic behind how the four are like lined up. And in fact, if you go and look at the cases where fair use is implicated, you can see the factors being weighed very differently per case. You don't even need to meet all four depending on the use. It's not super clear. It is meant to be very flexible because speech is important and you want to have a really flexible escape valve. But that also means it's not super predictive in cases of new technologies.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that moment, they said, This is illegal. And those companies basically disappeared. And that is the extinction level event that Sarah's describing. The justices might say, well, actually, all this is illegal. And then the entire AI industry might disappear. So now we come to the AI companies, which are also making a bunch of copies, and the argument that is getting made everywhere is this is something called fair use. Yep, we acknowledge that we've made the copies, but we've done them in a way that makes it okay because of something called fair use. Can you quickly explain what fair use”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Runner of a whole bunch of file swapping platforms ending in Stir. Grockstar ended up being painted with the same brush. And that left the Supreme Court to make a big decision that had major ramifications on everything that's happened online in the last 20 years. Ultimately, the court said, if you market a tool for people specifically to do copyright infringement with, you are liable for the copyright infringement that happens as a result. That is a judicial construction, that idea had to be invented, and there was a lot of disagreement about it at the time. You can go into the history and drama of that case, the cases that came before it, and the cases that came after it, but the point I want to make is that no one knew what was going to happen. The Supreme Court had the power to effectively create or destroy a country.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A really good example of something I want to hammer on as we cover the AI companies. The concept of fair use was enshrined into federal law in the Copyright Act of 1976. It's almost 20 years before the Consumer Internet came along. So when digital culture hit and companies like Napster arrived on the scene, we had no idea what was going to happen. No one in 1976 could predict Napster, and the record labels in Napster had to go to court to figure out if Napster was legal at all. Turns out it wasn't. Napster basically met its end in 2001 when a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that determined Napster by facilitating the copyright infringement of its users was also liable for copyright infringement. A few years later, another peer-to-peer file sharing network called Grockster went all the way to the Supreme Court with a very similar lawsuit. Grockster was a different company, and the same federal court that had shut down Napster said Grockster was not infringing copyright law. But because Napster was the fourth”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we exit one era where we had just sort of softened fair use so that it was okay for people to use their VCR setups to record off the television. So that was the era we were exiting where it was like, oh, okay, so like there's there are these new technologies and people are going to use them for themselves in these like, you know, pretty benign ways and that's okay and copyright doesn't have to restrict that. And then we enter into sort of the Napster era where they go, everyone can be a pirate now and that's not good. It could destroy this industry. So now we have to change copyright law in a way that we've never seen before.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got sued that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court made some changes to copyright law in that case. When most people think about Napster, I'm pretty sure they think about Justin Timberlake playing Sean Parker in the movie The Social Network. And they might think about the idea that a company that just quote unquote facilitates piracy is a bad idea. They do not think about the Supreme Court eventually issuing changes to copyright law wholesale that we now live inside. So explain what you mean there. Quickly give people the capsule summary of Napster and Grockster and what happened to the law in those cases.”
2024-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT