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On Friday, the Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed US federal class-action lawsuits on behalf of Sarah Silverman and other authors against OpenAI and Meta, accusing the companies of illegally using copyrighted material to train AI language models such as ChatGPT and LLaMA.
Other authors represented include Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, and an earlier class-action lawsuit filed by the same firm on June 28 included authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad. Each lawsuit alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair competition laws, and negligence.
[...] Authors claim that by utilizing "flagrantly illegal" data sets, OpenAI allegedly infringed copyrights of Silverman's book The Bedwetter, Golden's Ararat, and Kadrey's Sandman Slime. And Meta allegedly infringed copyrights of the same three books, as well as "several" other titles from Golden and Kadrey.
[...] Authors are already upset that companies seem to be unfairly profiting off their copyrighted materials, and the Meta lawsuit noted that any unfair profits currently gained could further balloon, as "Meta plans to make the next version of LLaMA commercially available." In addition to other damages, the authors are asking for restitution of alleged profits lost.
"Much of the material in the training datasets used by OpenAI and Meta comes from copyrighted works—including books written by plaintiffs—that were copied by OpenAI and Meta without consent, without credit, and without compensation," Saveri and Butterick wrote in their press release.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday July 12 2023, @06:14PM (1 child)
Simple.
Copyrights can only be owned by natural humans, not corporations. Licences can only be non-exclusive.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday July 13 2023, @01:03AM
To expand a bit on this, copyrights should only ever be able to be owned by the actual creators, with perhaps a brief period where death or incapacity might allow it to be transferred to an heir. Otherwise, if transferred or sold any copyright is voided. At any rate a copyright should not last for more than 12 years or so. Limited licensing for distribution should be allowed for a short period (3 years? 5 years? 7 years?) with maybe one 3 year renewal being allowed. In every case the original creator should be able to make full personal use of their own copyrighted work.