On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 3:05 PM Erik Moeller <eloque...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 12:25 PM Lauren Worden <laurenworde...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > If you don't obtain this agreement, you cannot meaningfully enforce > > > the "license" because the downloader never agreed to it in the first > > > place. Moreover, you'll have to make sure that _everyone else making > > > copies of the file_ also obtains agreement from people getting those > > > copies, or your whole house of cards falls down. > > > Isn't that exactly how we impose attribution and share-alike > > requirements of CC-BY-SA content? > > Not exactly. CC-BY-SA gives Wikimedia readers permissions they would > not otherwise have (e.g., to distribute copies), and it ties those > permissions to certain obligations (e.g., attribution). Readers who do > not wish to exercise those additional permissions are not required to > adhere to the obligations. They'd just be limited to what copyright > law lets you do with content you download from a public website. > Nobody can stop you from making your own offline version of Wikipedia, > calling it "Bobbypedia", and removing all other attribution -- as long > as you keep it to yourself. > > To be sure, you can put restrictions in an AI model license that kick > in for folks distributing the model, which is something they wouldn't > legally be able to do without consulting and agreeing to the licensing > terms. But, crucially, you don't have to distribute an AI model to run > it. Most of the unethical uses folks tend to worry about (e.g., bulk > generation of misinformation) do not involve distributing copies of > the model, only of its output. > This is perhaps a bit academic, but this is not really the case, at least in UK copyright law. The 'copying' inherent in viewing a web page is permissible under two grounds: 1) there is a statutory exemption in copyright law for this specific activity (in section 28a of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, if anyone cares to look it up ;) ). This would likely not apply to details of AI models as the exemption excludes 'a computer program or a database'. Whether it would apply to Bobbypedia depends on whether it counts as a database (strikes me as arguable). 2) there is probably an implicit licence granted by whoever publishes the work for whoever views it to use it. The scope of this implicit licence is highly debatable and probably extremely limited. Do you have an implied licence to download the HTML of a webpage into your browser cache and use your web browser to render the page and display the resulting content? Very likely. Do you have an implied licence to save a PDF copy onto your hard drive? Maybe. Do you have an implied licence to use the page to create a personal AI model and distribute the output? That is very unclear, probably not. Perhaps less likely if there was also an explicit license attached to the page. Chris
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