Just because something is available for public viewing does not mean it’s licensed for anything except personal use.
The strawman here is that since physical people benefit from personal use exceptions in the law, machine learning software should too. But why should they? Since when is a piece of software ran by a corporation equivalent to an individual person?
A tangentially related but good example of this sort of thing is BluRays and community movie nights (like setting up a projector in a park).
Most of these movie nights are de facto illegal, as even though you own the BluRay, it is not licensed for public showings, just for personal use. Obviously no one gives enough of a shit to enforce this against small groups, especially if they aren’t making money off it, but if a theater started offering showings of shit the owner just bought on BluRay or UHD disks, it wouldn’t last too long.
Similar thing here. Just because you can access the content to view it yourself doesn’t mean you have the rights to do more than that with it. As an individual, you’re likely fine to break those rules. As a giant fucking corporation, it’s time for you to pay up.
Copyright licensing allows the owner to control how a work is distributed, not how it’s consumed. “Personal use” just means that you can’t turn around and redistribute a work that you’ve obtained. Not that you’re not allowed to consume it in a corporate setting.
Copyright licensing allows the owner to control how a work is distributed, not how it’s consumed.
First of all, that’s incorrect.
Secondly, by default you have zero rights to someone else’s work. If something doesn’t explicitly grant you rights, you have none. If there’s a law or license, and if it’s applicable to you, you get exactly what’s specified in there.
The “personal use” or “fair use” exceptions in some places grant some basic rights but they are very narrow in scope and generally applicable only to individuals.
I mean, it’s in the name. The right to make copies. Not to be glib, but it really is
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.
You may notice a conspicuous absence of control over how a copied work is used, short of distributing it. You can reencode it, compress it, decompress it, make a word cloud, statistically analyze its tone, anything you want as long as you’re not redistributing the work or an adaptation (which has a pretty limited meaning as well). “Personal use” and “fair use” are stipulations that weaken a copyright owner’s control over the work, not giving them new rights above and beyond copyright. And that’s a great thing. You get to do whatever you want with the things you own.
You don’t have a right to other people’s work. That’s what copyright enables. But that’s beside the point. The owner doesn’t get to say what you use a work for that they’ve distributed to you.
Consuming is not the same thing as training. A machine is not a consumer, it is a tool.
Training literally is consuming. A copyright license doesn’t get to dictate what computer programs the work is allowed to be used with. There’s a ton a entertainment mega corps that would love for that to be the case, though.
You’re saying that you’re not allowed to do a statistical analysis on a copyrighted work. It’s nonsense. It’s well-established that copyright does not prevent that kind of use.
A program of machine can be a consumer of something, although if you want to be technical you could say the person using the machine is the consumer. In actual computer science we talk about programs consuming things all the time.
