cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/8121669
Japan determines copyright doesn’t apply to LLM/ML training data.
On a global scale, Japan’s move adds a twist to the regulation debate. Current discussions have focused on a “rogue nation” scenario where a less developed country might disregard a global framework to gain an advantage. But with Japan, we see a different dynamic. The world’s third-largest economy is saying it won’t hinder AI research and development. Plus, it’s prepared to leverage this new technology to compete directly with the West.
I am going to live in the sea.
www.biia.com/japan-goes-all-in-copyright-doesnt-apply-to-ai-training/
Nice, time to train one with all the Nintendo leaks and generate some Zelda art and a new Mario title!
This is fine
This is copyright infringement.
The ruling in japan (and as I predict also in other countries) is that the act of training a model (which is just a statistical estimator) is not copyrightable, so cannot be copyright infringement. This is already standard practice for everything else: You cannot copyright a mathematical function, regardless of how much data you use to fit to it (that is sensible: CERN has fit physics models to petabytes worth of data, that doesn’t mean they hold a copyright on laws of nature, they just hold the copyright on the data itself). However, if you generate something that is copyrighted, that item is still copyrighted: It doesn’t matter whether you used an AI image generator, photoshop, or a tattoo gun.
But you could ask it to generate something in the style of Zelda, without being Zelda.
And that would be completely legal, just like any random guy on deviantart can draw something in the style of e.g. Picasso without getting into trouble (unless of course they claim it was painted by picasso, but that should be obvious).
Nintendo would have coup the government if the decision made this scenario actually possible.