Notices by Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁 (blakereid@mastodon.lawprofs.org), page 2

@ntnsndr @luis_in_brief I think constraining tech companies is *critical* to enabling collective self-determination. The ease of capturing network effects in communications industries with externality-fueled business models is an enormous barrier to mutualist enterprise whose primary goal is to avoid those externalities. It’s a zero sum game that can’t be won without leveling the normative playing field.

@AnnemarieBridy @inthehands depends on which platform we’re talking about, but there are some overt declarations of intended uses that at least imply displacement (e.g., https://openai.com/blog/partnership-with-american-journalism-project-to-support-local-news). I also think displacement is pretty strongly implied by the transformativity argument. But then again, there are hard first order questions about how to divine purpose and how to sort between multiple purposes (complicated further by the mess of Warhol). Very hard to make confident predictions here.

@AnnemarieBridy @inthehands a great deal of "local news organizations" have private equity owners whose explicit goal is to reduce costs (i.e., headcount) and are very likely treat the availability of AI tools to generate content as cover to displace journalists.

Here are several specific examples (from a different project) that all but explicitly contemplate replacing reporters' jobs. https://blog.ap.org/ap-to-develop-5-ai-projects-with-local-newsrooms

Lots more here:
https://airtable.com/appnP5pmnsMFGYoAI/shrQeIsvzGoTbdp7b/tblvwDhL4X23V1pTp/viwN8zctay9H2N0ir?blocks=hide

@AnnemarieBridy @inthehands some of them even say the quiet part out loud, like "Journalists and newsrooms use Lede Al for high school and college sports reporting, automating the process so that they don't have to dedicate resources to local sports coverage."

See also stuff like RadioGPT https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/radiogpt-artificial-intelligence-dj-futuri-interview.html

@inthehands I'm not sure where I come out on the right answer. But I can at least see the argument: there's unauthorized copying of vast swaths of works into a machine that is designed, at least in part, to use the content of those works to economically displace their authors.

The #copyright suit by the Authors Guild and co. against OpenAI is directly framing perhaps the most plausible cause of action against generative #ai: reproduction in the process of training (and maybe data set assembly, though the complaint could be more precise about this). There are some hard civ pro hurdles to overcome to get the proof of specific incidents of infringement that they're alleging, and a hard fair use fight on the back end. But this is one to watch. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.606655/gov.uscourts.nysd.606655.1.0_1.pdf

This strategy avoids the trouble of drawing a connection from works in the training data and *outputs* of the models by focusing more granularly on the inherent copying entailed in training. If the plaintiffs can get over the procedural hurdles of establishing specific infringement (and class cert, etc.), this strategy also has the advantage of shifting the burden of dealing with the outputs into the case for fair use, which is way more atomistic and complex post-Warhol.

@design_law it's the best and only fun patent case and I wear a 100% orange outfit and bring orange snacks when I teach it in the intro class

@design_law okay fine Justice Scalia's concurrence in Myriad and discussing how to pronounce PHOSITA are also kind of fun

@design_law and Egyptian Goddess I guess but that's pretty much a copyright case

@design_law I gotta get to work but if I had another 5 minutes I would do the "they're the same picture" meme with the test from EG next to the © SS test

Teaching #copyright this semester is a good reminder that there is a serious frog-boiling problem in IP. People talk about copyright like it's some kind of well-reasoned and founded enterprise, and there certainly is an endless parade of case law. But almost nothing is coherent or consistent or cleanly moored to constitutional principles. Almost every doctrine is framed by cases bursting at the seams with amateur art criticism, bias, intrinsic and extrinsic contradictions, and vibes-determinism.

#Meta's approach to open-sourcing #LLMs is one of the most irresponsible initiatives ever launched (a) by Meta in any area and (b) by any company working in generative #AI, both of which are quite high bars on their own. The move is "take the long list of policy problems with generative AI and make them nearly impossible to regulate by increasing the number of enforcement targets by many orders of magnitude, all so we can later exploit community insights without paying.”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23799025/meta-ai-llama-2-open-source-microsoft

Copyright isn't a right to evade consumer protection law around works with embedded copies or abuse competition in ancillary markets @perzanowski @design_law

What @perzanowski is describing here is a pernicious form of copyright Lochnerism, an effort to expand a narrow monopoly over the copying of software into a bulwark against any kind of state regulation that happens to involve the software (H/T @design_law) https://mastodon.social/@design_law/110735772170768997

I hope this finally gives journalists and government agency social media folks the courage to jump ship. Especially on the latter count, the site is useless if it can only be accessed by registered users. It's just a much less ubiquitous and reliable version of Facebook.

Soooooo... what's the political plan for court reform? Still nothing? cool cool cool

Making an account on Bluesky turned up at least a dozen faves from Twitter who never made the migration to the fediverse. I forget who said that Mastodon is for people who hated Twitter and Bluesky is for people who loved Twitter; it's kinda reminding me that I am in both camps. (I am pretty unimpressed with Bluesky's engineering, including the lack of 2FA.)

Computers were a mistake

The ongoing debate about federation with the Meta thingy is an interesting living experiment in ~decentralized governance in an context largely unmediated by the law and may provide some lessons about the power (or lack thereof) of private decentralization to serve as a counterweight to concentrated corporate power