alt Hacker NewsHow is distillation an "attack" but gigascraping the Internet to the point of crashing servers and everyone needs Cloudflare and Anubis now not an "attack"?
I'm not aiming for a what about kickflip here: I'm saying we need to either agree on some rules or stop crying foul. Maybe the coherent legal theory is that neural networks and intellectual property don't interact. That would be weird but it would be consistent, a market could price it, I could do coding stuff and know if I was illegaling.
But this weird gerrymander that no judge will really rule on in an emphatic way is like, bad for the planet, bad for markets, bad business.
There are a lot of reasons to look forward to DeepSeek Huggingface drop kicking the unambiguous frontier weights in like, November, but I think my favorite one will be "who's distilling now bitch?"
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Knowlege should not have ownership. Training and distillation should be allowed
Granting people some form of control over knowledge only serves the public interest inasmuch it provides incentive to create more of it. Mass media, effortless duplication, and copyright extensions had already broken this to the point where control of knowledge was suppressing creation of new knowledge more than it facilitated.
The world has changed, we need a mechanism that works for the public interest that applies to the facts as they now are.
I think you've basically got the legal theory. Training a neural network isn't prohibited by copyright law so if you can legally get your hands on something (e.g. by sending a GET request to someone with rights to serve the contents of their web page, or by buying a book) without signing a contract to not train on it, you can train on it.
But the American AI companies only let you query their models if you first sign a contract to not train on the output.
It's hypocrisy and unfair, but I think there's a strong legal argument for it.
Of course China can simply decline to assist in enforcing that contract... But I would expect US courts to do their best to.