There’s a lot going on in the world of generative AI, but maybe the biggest is the increasing number of copyright lawsuits being filed against AI companies like OpenAI and Stability AI. So for this episode, we brought on Verge features editor Sarah Jeong, who’s a former lawyer just like me, and we’re going to talk about those cases and the main defense the AI companies are relying on in those copyright cases: an idea called fair use.
當今世界人工智能生成模型不斷地被開發出來，但對人工智能公司之訟案亦不斷地被提起，像OpenAI及Stability AI等。就此種有如連續劇般的曲目不斷上映，以律師之角度，接下來我來談談這些人工智能公司以合理使用作為答辯免於侵權之可行性。
All the big generative AI models from every company are trained on huge swaths of data that are scraped from the entire internet. And big media companies, like The New York Times and Getty Images, have filed lawsuits against those AI companies, saying, basically, that the AI companies are stealing their work and profiting from it — claims that amount to straightforward copyright infringement.
每一人工智能公司都是從網路搜刮一大票資料來訓練其人工智能生成模型。像妞約時代報及Getty影像公司已對這些人工智能公司提起侵害著作權訴訟。
Copyright law is still very much rooted in the idea of making copies and regulating which copies are legal and which aren’t. Since computers can’t do anything at all without making copies, copyright law shows up again and again in the history of the internet, which allows anyone to make and distribute perfect copies faster than ever before.
著作權法仍大大地根基於重製重製物與規範何種重製物係合法及違法之概念。因此無法重製重製物，電腦即無法做任何事；著作權法於網路歷史上一而再，再而三地顯現，原因是其允許任何人尤較過往更快速地重製與散布重製物。
But there’s a check on all that control that copyright law provides: fair use. Fair use is written right into the Copyright Act, and it says that certain kinds of copies are okay. Since the law can’t predict what everyone might want to do, it has a four-factor test written into it that courts can use to determine if a copy is fair use.
著作權法有合理使用的規定，而合理使用在著作權法明文規定使得某些利用著作的行為不構成侵害著作權。
But the legal system is not deterministic or predictable. Any court gets to run that test any way they want, and one court’s fair use determination isn’t actually precedent for the next court.
That means fair use is a very vibes-based situation, and it’s anyone’s guess how a lot of copyright lawsuits are going to go. Many of them feel like a coin flip, and when you add in the amount of hype, uncertainty, and money that comes with AI, it gets even more complicated.
The stakes are very high. As you’ll hear us say in the episode, this is a potential extinction-level event for the modern AI industry on the level of what Napster and fellow file sharing sites were facing in the early 2000s. And as we know from history, the copyright rulings from the file sharing age made entire companies disappear, and copyright was changed forever.
