Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
I am absolutely baffled as to how you think this is a battle steam is going to lose.
Please explain to me how the worlds most successful and widely used online game store for PCs is going to be impacted in any way that is at all negative for its user base (people who buy and play games) by having policies that legally protect Valve from being sued for knowingly distributing material that potentially violates copyright law in any legal system anywhere in the world they sell products in.
Chilling effect? Of having to disclose things to publish a game? Anyone who sells their game on steam already has to go through a lengthy review and disclosure process to ensure the product meets various guidelines, is correctly labelled if it has content that may be restricted in some places or to some age groups, etc etc.
Chilling Effect? This is a term usually used to describe the effect on freedom of expression. It would be a chilling effect if steam suddenly did not allow any games that feature gay characters, or if steam messenger suddenly blacklisted all phrases relating to say the Armenian genocide.
Are you saying that having to disclose and confirm that you are not violating the copyrights of source material you have used in production of a game, an industry and market well known for being litigious about copyrights, that this is a freedom of speech or artistic freedom issue?
Are you saying that using a plagiarism AI to generate synthetic dialogue, art or code… constitutes speech, in the legal sense? Its… you are not even the one coming up with the speech. This seems highly legally dubious to me at least from a US law perspective.
The CoPilot part is actually probably the most obvious and straight forward. Its extremely common for code om the internet to not actually be licensed to be able to be freely used for the purposes of profiting off of, and CoPilot often just copies such code verbatim.
This is fine in a non commercial context, for your own private use on a little program just for you, but the moment you are profiting off of code in software that isn’t either MIT licensed, as well as I think now a few other open source licenses, you are completely legally fucked if anyone ever finds out.
Further, is there some huge demographic of players of some wildly popular game or set of games that are very dependent on plagiarism AIs, sufficient to cause massive backlash in a way that would drive steam users and their favorite game devs to other platforms?
Again I am frankly baffled by what you have said.