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!
train one with all the Nintendo leaks
This is fine
generate some Zelda art and a new Mario title
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.
Correct ruling.
From the “source” (the Japanese one, not the broken link at the bottom):
AIによる解析・学習についての現段階の日本の著作権法上の見解を確認、権利侵害の懸念も政府に訴えた一方、生成・出力段階での出力自体の著作権の扱いや元データの著作権の扱いが未確認ですので今後質疑等で確認する予定です。
生成系AIの活用、著作権者を守るための新たな規制が必要だ
It’s an analysis of the current copyright law in Japan. It does not mean that they won’t update the law eventually. What a terrible article.
Yeah i wish I had run the source article through Google Translate first.