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The AI-focused COPIED Act would make removing digital watermarks illegal (as well as training any kind of AI on copyrighted content)

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.

The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act) would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards and guidelines that help prove the origin of content and detect synthetic content, like through watermarking. It also directs the agency to create security measures to prevent tampering and requires AI tools for creative or journalistic content to let users attach information about their origin and prohibit that information from being removed. Under the bill, such content also could not be used to train AI models.

Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers. State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.

(A copy of the bill is in he article, here is the important part imo:

Prohibits the use of “covered content” (digital representations of copyrighted works) with content provenance to either train an AI- /algorithm-based system or create synthetic content without the express, informed consent and adherence to the terms of use of such content, including compensation)

Doomsider ,

If you put something on the Internet you are giving up ownership of it. This is reality and companies taking advantage of this for AI have already proven this is true.

You are not going to be able to put the cat back in the bag. The whole concept of ownership over art, ideas, and our very culture was always ridiculous.

It is past time to do away with the joke of the legal framework we call IP law. It is merely a tool for monied interests to extract more obscene profit from our culture at this point.

There is only one way forward and that is sweeping privacy protections. No more data collection, no more targeted advertising, no more dark patterns. The problem is corporations are not going to let that happen without a fight.

nasi_goreng ,
@nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    afraid_of_zombies ,

    Yeah in theory but in practice that isn’t happening. In theory the laws could be structured such that creatives are being paid fairly and distributors make some money and that the general public knows the stuff will be public domain in a relatively short period of time.

    No one is doing it and they had hundreds of years to figure out how to do it. You are asking us to take it on faith and I personally will not.

    LainTrain ,

    Incredibly well-put. IP is just land for the wannabe landlords of information and culture.

    They are just attempting to squeeze the working class dry, take the last freedoms we have so we have to use their corporate products.

    _sideffect ,

    A bit late now, isn’t it?

    All the big corporations have already trained most of their current ai, so all this does is put the up and comers at a disadvantage.

    MagicShel ,

    It could halt the progress of improving their models and stagnate the whole technology.

    That being said, it only halts progress for American companies. Other countries will happily ignore this law and grow beyond our capabilities. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than the current situation.

    Kuvwert ,

    From what I understand the next rounds of ai are being trained on further refined versions of the same datasets and supplemented with synthetic data.

    The damage to existing copyrighted content is already done.

    Source: I’m a random internet user

    General_Effort ,

    It’s all still there. No damage was done.

    Kuvwert ,

    Well, perceived damage anyway. I can’t speak to how IP owners have been effected by LLMs, and I don’t believe it would be easy to quantify.

    bionicjoey ,

    Reminds me of Russia before WWI began. They realized they had fallen horribly behind the rest of the world in terms of military technology, so they called an arms limitation treaty conference where they pushed for basically every country in the world to agree to stop inventing any new weapons of any kind.

    fuzzzerd ,

    How’d that work out for them? Answer? Not well. History repeats itself, so here we go!

    admin ,
    @admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

    Seeing as laws can’t be applied retroactively, what would have been the alternative?

    AlexanderESmith ,

    People's attention spans are 5 seconds long, and art/culture change constantly.

    If you prohibit them from training on new content, the models will age super poorly, and they'll fall into disuse.

    General_Effort ,

    It wouldn’t be prohibited. It would just mean that the likes of Reddit or Facebook can charge more for “consent” to train on their content.

    AlexanderESmith ,

    So stop using reddit.

    General_Effort ,

    You want to convince everyone to stop using Reddit, Facebook, etc. so that LLMs go away? You know that’s not going to work.

    AlexanderESmith ,

    Not "go away" so much as "become dated and useless".

    afraid_of_zombies ,

    Well as long as you are honest about your motivations I can give you that much.

    I don’t want Disney destroyed. I want them to pay creatives well and stop with their legal/lobbying games. That’s the difference, I want people to do the morally correct thing you want to punish people.

    AlexanderESmith ,

    I'm not sure what the dishonest motivations would be; I don't really have a problem with content generators, other than;

    • They're trained on data that trainers don't have rights to
    • They are awful, inaccurate, hallucinating garbage

    To the first point; If they (OpenAI, Adobe, Disney, et al) hired a bunch of people, paid them a fair wage to generate art (text, images, whatever), got permission (contractual, with residuals), trained a model, then used it responsibility (for concepts and drafts), then sure; have your models and use 'em.

    To the second point; I mentioned that the models aren't good, and it's because they aren't actually creating anything, just mashing old content together. I also mentioned before that the models need to be used responsibly; You can't just hit "generate" and ship it as final product. You need editors and artists to follow up on the model output. The model should be used to make tedius work easier, not replace talented artists.

    0laura ,
    @0laura@lemmy.world avatar

    you could use the models to train the models to get better at making new things.

    AlexanderESmith ,

    Not really. They start hallucinating pretty quick.

    cyd ,

    If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…

    Melt ,

    China would be the world leader in making AI model trained on copyrighted content

    catloaf ,

    And as the vast majority of content is not licensed for AI model training, they would have an immensely larger dataset to train on.

    Petter1 ,

    Well, there is also Europe ✌🏻

    General_Effort ,

    No. In the EU, the lobbyists have already won. Major countries, like Germany, have always had very conservative copyright laws. I believe it’s one reason why their cultures are losing so hard.

    Surprisingly, Japan has adopted a very sensible law on AI training.

    afraid_of_zombies ,

    I am just sitting here with my eye twitching thinking of all the code I have had to deal with from German companies over the years.

    Kowowow ,

    Sure would be fun to expand things to include a section to not let normal people make art of copyrighted material or be an excuse to mess with fair use

    Kolanaki ,
    @Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

    This is actually pretty cool for small artists, but how would it handle things like iFunny and such adding watermarks to shit they don’t own in the first place?

    mke , (edited )

    I don’t think that’s the kind of watermark being talked about here, Kol.

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology would be called upon to, quoted from the COPIED ACT Summary, facilitate development of guidelines for voluntary, consensus-based standards and for detection of synthetic content, watermarking and content provenance information, including evaluation, testing and cybersecurity protection. I believe we’re talking about the unseen, math-y, certification and (I imagine) cryptography kind of digital watermark, not the crappy visual edits made by iFunny and co.

    In fact, since it also says:

    Prohibits removing, altering, tampering with, or disabling content provenance information, with a limited exception for security research purposes.

    The content in question might reach e.g. iFunny already “signed” and they wouldn’t be able to remove that.

    Of course, I’m saying this without actually fully understanding what fits under covered content (digital representations of copyrighted works). Does my OC on deviantart count as covered content? I think so, but I couldn’t tell you for certain. If anyone can help me understand this, please, that’d be really nice.

    And finally, as was already said by others, I think this does nothing about all the crap companies already did to artists, since the law can’t affect them retroactively. It’s not that cool for small artists, since they’ll still be abused, except big tech would have the legal monopoly on abuse.

    I mean no disrespect by this: did you read the article? I’m genuinely curious how you got the iFunny idea.

    General_Effort ,

    covered content?

    That is any digital representation of any copyrighted content. If it’s on DeviantArt, it is a digital representation. By creating something, you own the copyright. A notable exception is when you do the work for hire, in which case it probably belongs to your employer. (Or if the work lacks human creativity, in which case it is public domain.)

    Anything on DeviantArt is almost certainly covered content, with the possible exception of AI generated images, or re-uploads of public domain content.

    (5) COVERED CONTENT .—The term ‘‘covered content’’ means a digital representation, such as text, an image, or audio or video content, of any work of authorship described in section 102 of title 17, United States Code.

    For reference: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

    mke ,

    Thank you for clarifying, and with a reference, too. That’s pretty much what I thought. It’s great to have confirmation, though.

    General_Effort ,

    cool for small artists

    It’s certainly very bad for small artists. Can I ask why you think it would be good?

    To answer why it is bad for small artists: Money for license fees will mainly go to major content owners like Getty, or Disney. Small artists will have to go through platforms like Shutterstock or Adobe, which will keep most of the fees. At the same time, AI tools like generative fill are becoming ever more important. Such licensing regimes make artists’ tools more expensive. Major corporations will be able to extract more value.

    Look at Adobe. It has a reputation for abusing its monopoly against small artists, right? Yet Adobe pays license fees for images on its platform, that it used for training its AI tools. Adobe has also created a provenance standard, such as this bill wants to make mandatory. This bill would make Adobe’s preferred business model the mandatory standard by law.

    conciselyverbose ,

    Disney won’t sell licenses.

    They’ll keep their monopoly on 95% of the training data on the market for entertainment content, so they can accelerate their workflows using those tools, and everyone else is now trying to compete with their giant wallet and their extra tooling you’re not allowed to compete with.

    afraid_of_zombies ,

    I am not understanding. They will now be even more effective at what they do and will be building a tech stack that no one else has access to and you think this is a win for the little guy?

    If you owned a store, then a Walmart setup next to it and Walmart rolled out some new barcode system that your scanners didn’t work on how the hell would that benefit you?

    Not only are the already bigger, they are getting efficiencies they aren’t sharing with your business. You want open protocols, you want tool sharing, you want the market as a whole to be getting more efficient. You don’t want some company that already won able to pulverize by sheer size anyone who competes.

    conciselyverbose ,

    No, it’s very obviously not a win for the little guy.

    If you can’t learn from public performances, art dies. That’s all of art for thousands of years.

    sab ,

    So what will happen to art if we only disallow AI models from learning from copyrighted performances, whilst still allowing them to do so from public domain and licensed works (and obviously not changing anything for humans who seek inspiration)?

    conciselyverbose ,

    Disney will own all of it.

    Because they already own most of it and now have a massive productivity advantage.

    fuzzzerd ,

    Nah. They will cross licence with the other big players effectively closing the market to anyone they don’t bless.

    conciselyverbose ,

    They already own all the big players.

    toothbrush , (edited )
    @toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    They did it. They’re passing the worst version of the AI law. Thats the end for open source AI! If this passes, all AI will be closed source, and only from giant tech companies. Im sure they will find a way to steal your stuff “legally”.

    LainTrain ,

    To the cheer of so-called progressives who never understood the tech and continue to be wilfully ignorant of it the corporations win again.

    2xsaiko ,
    @2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    This is exactly what OpenAI etc. wanted to achieve with all the “AI safety” bullshit doomer talk. I really hope this doesn’t pass

    trashgirlfriend ,

    No open source plagiarism machine :(

    LainTrain , (edited )

    Dw artbros and other corporation defenders will get curbstomped by the closed-source ones instead, not only will you be out of employment, but you will be unemployable without a ChatGPT subscription, and Altman/Musk/whoever will be worth trillions as a result. But at least it won’t be “plagiarism” because the lobbyists will ensure that it’s all nice and legal.

    And the worst part is you honestly deserve it for not listening to us.

    Also, this is you:

    https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/6ca542a8-98ea-4864-bb33-ca59d9459493.webp

    ZILtoid1991 ,

    Okay, then lets ban art generators, problem solved!

    LainTrain ,

    That’s also not rational, but at least it’s consistent so it’s an improvement.

    Anyway banning them is impossible, even if one country bans it, all the other countries will still have them - the internet is the whole world, remember? And even then, LLMs would still exist too, and arguably those are far more significant.

    ZILtoid1991 ,

    “Why ban bad thing if bad country allows bad thing?”

    People are saying the same about raising the minimum wage, implementing labor protections, etc. “Okay, advocate for fair wages, but then that minimum wage job of yours will be outsourced to China/India/Vietnam/etc.!”

    LainTrain ,

    GenAI isn’t a bad thing though.

    girsaysdoom ,

    Did you read the documents? It’s not as bad as what you’re saying.

    It looks like the prohibited acts (section 6) specifically mention for commercial purposes where attribution markers are separated from the content. So, commercial AI software that doesn’t retain these markers or copyright marker removal done to mislead or affect in a commercial way would be against the law in 2 years.

    I don’t see how this affects anything open source related. The way I understand it is that this will just force commercial applications to adapt to this and move on.

    toothbrush ,
    @toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    oh cool, nevermind then. However, most open source AI is done for commercial purposes, so it will still cripple the ecosystem.

    just_another_person ,

    Don’t see an issue with this. People who scrape copyrighted content should pay for it.

    Badeendje ,
    @Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

    Closing the door behind the ones that already did it means only the current groups that have the data will make money of it.

    just_another_person ,

    Is it Copyright content?

    v_krishna ,
    @v_krishna@lemmy.ml avatar

    This regulation (and similar being proposed in California) would not be applied retroactively.

    just_another_person ,

    Never mentioned any sort of retroactive measures.

    snooggums ,
    @snooggums@midwest.social avatar

    Since no retroactive measures are mentioned, the companies that already scraped the web won’t be stopped from continuing to use the AI models already trained on that data, but anyone else would be stopped by the law.

    It is like making it illegal to rob banks after someone already robbed all the banks and letting them keep all the money.

    The law could have made it illegal for use of models trained on the copyrighted materials without permission instead of targeting the process for collecting it.

    just_another_person ,

    Downvote all you want. If your entire business or personal model includes stealing content from other people, then you need to rethink that.

    Badeendje ,
    @Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

    “stealing” implies the owner does not have it anymore… It is large studio speak.

    And I get what you are trying so say, I just think the copyright system is so broken that this shows it is in need of reform. Because if the qualm is with people doing immoral shit as a business model, there are long lists of corporations that will ask you to hold their beer.

    And the fact that the training of the models already occurred on these materials means that the owners of the current models are probably training on generated datasets meaning that by the time this actually hits court, the datasets with original copyrighted materials will be obsolete.

    just_another_person ,

    deleted_by_moderator

    •
    LainTrain ,

    No, you are. You’ll be in a hell of your own making when you’re going to be paying a subscription to the corpo AIs just to remain employable.

    Honestly reading this shit I know why structures of oppression like capitalism etc exist, it is because of dumb motherfuckers like you and I feel absolutely zero sympathy, you deserve all of it and more for simping for Musk, Altman et al.

    just_another_person ,

    deleted_by_moderator

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    Badeendje ,
    @Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

    Well that’s a well articulated reply.

    I don’t understand why you would take this position. Because the small artists will never be able to avoid Beiing included in training sets, and if they are what are they going to do against a VC backed corpnlike OpenAI. All the while the big copyright “owners” will be excluded. Meaning this only cements the position of the mega corps.

    GBU_28 ,

    Comment breaks community standards.

    fuzzzerd ,

    Regarding obsolete models, that’s only partially true. There’s loads of content that are effectively “finished” and won’t be changing, and will grow obsolete at a fairly slow pace. Meaning they’ll be useful in the models once trained for years.

    Obviously new technology and similar ideas/content that didn’t exist when the model was created won’t be there, but the amount that changes and or is new is relatively small each year compared to all the historical content.

    GBU_28 ,

    Openai exec: oh shit damn,. Damn. I gotta call my mom.

    afraid_of_zombies ,

    Stealing: depriving you of what you own

    Copying: taking a picture of what you made.

    Stealing is not copying. You still have whatever you started with.

    afraid_of_zombies ,

    Yes it is perfectly appropriate for someone who burned a backup copy of a DVD they paid for to go to prison for ten years

    catloaf ,

    This sounds exactly like existing copyright law and DRM.

    Grimy OP ,

    It’s strengthening copyright laws by negating the transformative clause when dealing with AI

    admin ,
    @admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

    Hopefully the next step: force every platform that deals in user generated content to give users the choice to exploit that content for a fraction of the profit, or to exclude their content from processing.

    It’s amazing how many people don’t realize that they themselves also hold copyright over their content, and that laws like these protect them as well.

    Grimy OP , (edited )

    This is essentially regulatory capture. The article is very lax on calling it what it is.

    A few things to consider:

    • Laws can’t be applied retroactively, this would essentially close the door behind Openai, Google and Microsoft. Openai with sora in conjunction with the big Hollywood companies will be the only ones able to do proper video generation.
    • Individuals will not be getting paid, databrokers will.
    • They can easily pay pennies to a third world artist to build them a dataset copying a style. Styles are not copyrightable.
    • The open source scene is completely dead in the water and so is fine tuning for individuals.

    Edit: This isn’t entirely true, there is more leeway for non commercial models, see comments below.

    • AI isn’t going away, all this does is force us and the economy into a subscription model.
    • Companies like Disney, Getty and Adobe reap everything.

    In a perfect world, this bill would be aiming to make all models copyleft instead but sadly, no one is lobbying for that in Washington and money talks.

    just_another_person ,

    deleted_by_moderator

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    cm0002 ,

    Yup, I fucking knew it. I knew this is what would happen with everyone bitching about copyright this and that. I knew any legislation that came as a result was going be bastardized and dressed up to make it look like it’s for everyone when in reality it’s going to mostly benefit big corps that can afford licensing fees and teams of lawyers.

    People could not/would not understand how these AI models actually processes images/text or the concept of “If you post publicly, expect it to be used publicly” and here we are…

    LainTrain , (edited )

    As always, the anprims/luddites/ecofashies (who downvoted me) are like an anvil to left-wing ideas of progress, we’re too busy arguing amongst ourselves to make a stand to protect open source AI from regulation.

    Honestly I blame Hbomberguy personally. People were a lot more open-minded before he tacked on that shitty little AI snark at the end of his plagiarism video.

    autotldr Bot ,

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.

    Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers.

    State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led an effort to create an AI roadmap for the chamber, but made clear that new laws would be worked out in individual committees.

    “The capacity of AI to produce stunningly accurate digital representations of performers poses a real and present threat to the economic and reputational well-being and self-determination of our members,” SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said in a statement.

    “We need a fully transparent and accountable supply chain for generative Artificial Intelligence and the content it creates in order to protect everyone’s basic right to control the use of their face, voice, and persona.”

    The original article contains 384 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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