> "The bottom line is this," the firm, known as a16z, wrote. "Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development."
> The firm said payment for all of the copyrighted material already used in LLMs would cost the companies that built them "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments."
Doesn't that kind of demonstrate the value being actively stolen from the creators, more than anything? Copyright law killed Napster, too. That doesn't mean applying copyright law was wrong.
And now the guy who started Napster is on the board of Spotify who just decided they weren’t going to pay small time artists for their music anymore. Go figure.
Spotify and the rights holders come together and agree on the right price. Unfortunately, since long before Spotify ever existed, it's usually the record labels who owns the rights to the music and the actual creators still get shafted.
Except in this case, 10s of thousands of rights holders are just getting nothing as of the start of 2024 and I can tell you, Spotify certainly did not “come together” with any of us.
Didn’t they basically say they’re no longer going to bother paying for songs earning under $3 USD per year.
It seems like the only people that will be impacted are the abusive auto-generated spammer accounts with thousands of garbage tracks uploaded garnering 1200 streams a year by people accidentally playing them via Google Home misinterpretations etc.
1000 streams per year for each song. That’s not just that auto-generated junk. That’s a majority of ALL music on Spotify.
So yes an individual song might be $3 per year but that just shows how poor their royalties are to begin with. And tries to obscure the fact that artists don’t just release one song ever.
There’s thousands of artists who maybe even were somewhat successful at some point in their career but would have a lot of songs in their back catalog that don’t get that many streams annually. Suddenly they’ve gone from not making enough per stream from Spotify, to just getting paid nothing at all.
Starting a business is huge amounts of risk to begin with. Just because you may lose more doesn't mean you're magically exempt from being able to ignore that.
Watching the superstars of venture capital whine that copyright is unfair is quite something, though.
“Payment for all workers who develop fields or man factories would cost the companies that operate them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary payments”
- slavers, probably.
Of course slavery != AI, but the argument that we should protect companies from their expenses to enable their bad business model is very entitled and presumptuous.
Thousands of companies have failed because their businesses models didn’t work, and thousands more will.
AI will be fine. It probably won’t be as stupidly lucrative as the current model, but we’ll find a way.
There are many areas of research, technological advancement, and construction which would proceed much more quickly than their current pace if we didn't force them do things in the way that society has decided is correct and just.
The constitution is clear that copyright is not "just;" it is a concession for the sole purpose of promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts," whose "unnatural restriction of natural rights must be carefully balanced."
The fact that "research, technological advancement, and construction would proceed much more quickly" without copyright is exactly why abolishing copyright is the just and correct thing to do.
> Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development.
which, as an involuntary donor, is exactly what I want
> The firm said payment for all of the copyrighted material already used in LLMs would cost the companies that built them "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments."
https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-horowitz-ai-...