What color are your bits? (2004)

The "past" link for previous submissions won't work in this case because the title was submitted as "color" instead of the original spelling of "colour". Search with "colour" to see the previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

In the 2024 preface:

> Copyright holders worry about how to exercise control over the use of "their" creative material for training models; but that begs the question of whether copyright holders ever had, or should have, a right to any such control. If a human can read a book and learn from it, and then write their own books, why shouldn't a computer?

There’s a small amount of irony in an article that’s discussing copyright, and the invisible but critical context of information, then dismissing the context of copying when it comes to copyright, as well as confusing what copyright protects. I’m certain the author knows that copyright does not protect ideas, it does not protect “colour”, it deliberately only protects the “bits”. In US copyright law this is called the “fixation” of a work. The Berne Convention uses similar terminology: “works shall not be protected unless they have been fixed in some material form.”

AI’s “learning” has a different colour than human learning. This has been debated at length on HN and elsewhere, and in the courts, but it’s definitely wildly misleading to compare ChatGPT training on all books ever written and then being distributed (for a profit) to everyone, to one human reading one book and learning something from it.

It has been very interesting to watch how discourse on copyright and ip has evolved over the years. In the end, however, what seems to happen is that copyright always "works" when powerful people benefit from it working and "doesn't work" when its less powerful people being victimized. Or vice versa, really. It seems like we've entered into a period of history where any little legal or cultural power differential is very rapidly exploited to produce profit and I'm curious (to say the least) how we are going to fix this.