Hacker News
points by amiga386 2 days ago | 0 comments
If you read the article, you'd find they admit to that, their position is nuanced, and this is not a "gotcha".

> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.

> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.

Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment. The infringed party gets enough money to shut them up and everyone moves on. A fine is a price. They'll keep doing it with impunity. Meanwhile the small guy who doesn't have copyright lawyers on retainer is getting shafted, time and time again.

[–] phn 2 days ago
"When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply." Well, yes, obviously they have to, or risk not existing anymore.

Also, "fan ports" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They're assets extracted from commercial games, uploaded with whatever license the person who extracted and packaged them chooses.

From their argument, if they truly think copyright should be abolished, an LLM capable of remixing that work into whatever you want would be a good thing, right? Ultimately this would empower the end-users of the models.

There's an argument to be made that these models trained on the world's knowledge shouldn't be locked behind closed models controlled only by big corps, but in this case it's good that anyone can download data and train such a model, right?

I can't speak for roblox intentions, and I am well aware of their history. But so far they seem to have published at least some of their model work to HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/Roblox/

What nuance am I missing?

[–] progmetaldev 2 days ago
I've seen my son play Sonic the Hedgehog games in Roblox that were straight rips from the original games (at least visually and play-wise). I'm not really sure how it was done (extracting actual assets from the game, or just a dedicated user very familiar with the original game), but there are quite a few recreations of other games on Roblox that are just as good as the originals.
[–] Permit 2 days ago
> Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment

And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.

[–] everforward 2 days ago
Their infringement is different, and would really be a trademark issue if we hadn’t just invented the idea of copyrighting a character separately from the story they are a part of in the ‘30s (they are not individually copyrightable under the original text).

There’s a substantive difference between ingesting other people’s work and hosting copies of fans knockoff models of their favorite characters.

It’s even weirder because in other mediums this wouldn’t even be a thing. Nobody gets nearly as up in arms about fans doing their own cuts of movies, or re-using characters in written fan fiction, or etc. Very odd to me how up in arms people get about this specifically for visual art.

[–] kzz102 2 days ago
I think this is an important point we need to grapple with more and more in the future. We like to think an act as either lawful or not lawful, either ethical or not ethical. We need to bring in scale as a separate axis. There's a world of difference whether an activity is done at human scale or machine scale. At human scale, it's an act of deviance that may contribute to the diversity of human experience. At machine scale, it's a distortion that threatens the society.
[–] pooloo 2 days ago
The internet was built on aggregators and crawlers, it only matters when people are not getting paid... I prefer the internet to be unregulated, but whatever greed always wins
[–] senordevnyc 2 days ago
"It's OK if I do it, but not if someone more successful than me does it" is still blatant hypocrisy.
[–] ImPostingOnHN 2 days ago
"it's ok if a rich person or company does it, but not if someone less rich does it" is equally blatant hypocrisy that is worse for society.
[–] andsoitis 2 days ago
What is the relevance to this case? Isn’t this site less rich than Roblox and their hosting copyrighted items and they’re not getting punished.

Or am I misreading the situation?

[–] ImPostingOnHN 2 days ago
In order to follow, you would need to first read the post I replied to, and answer your question as it pertains to that post.
[–] senordevnyc 2 days ago
I agree? How is that relevant here?
[–] squidmaster 2 days ago
But it is okay if not-rich people do it. I have "pirated" and otherwise flaunted copyright my whole life, along with many millions more. Nobody has ever come at me for it. Enforcement of any sort against common people is exceedingly rare. For a long time it was only corporations who took copyright seriously, and now that even they are flaunting copyright people such as yourself suddenly pretend that the little guy has to care.

Well I don't! Copyright is a farce and I continue to wipe my butt with it.

[–] mightyham 2 days ago
This thread of comments seems to be getting somewhat off topic. I believe the point being made by open3dlabs is that copyright is basically a pay to play system for corporations which is obviously unjust. You're right that copyright isn't enforced on individuals, but DMCA is definitely enforced on small content sharing sites which have little to no recourse compared to large corporations that can flagrantly break the law.
[–] cucumber3732842 2 days ago
Exactly. It's like the Clean Air act. Nobody's coming looking for your wood stove but they'll happily pull a million bucks out of some podunk business who's maintenance guys were foolish enough to use up an old case of paint that predates whatever the modern VOC regulations are.

Just because individuals aren't an enforcement target doesn't mean enforcement isn't happening.

[–] ImPostingOnHN 2 days ago
> But it is okay if not-rich people do it

Are you sure you replied to the right post? You're agreeing with me here.

The post I replied to is the one suggesting that us little people doing this is at least as bad as rich people and rich corps doing it.

[–] lovedaddy 2 days ago
Yep, this is basically the outlook of ChatGPT etc in america, when they try and stop china scraping them. I hope they go bust as soon as possible.

Honestly people need to wake up to this industrial level theft, and get some laws in place. If someone did this by hand you'd call it either a DDOS or IP theft, even if license is permissive. Just cos its from a machine doesn't excuse.