"A committee of UK legislators"
This tends to say it all really. Legislators tend to be members of bodies, the kind of bodies which include the board of directors of companies like Elsevier. Copyright monopolists.
If people who actually know what they are talking about think there are good reasons to start pouring human knowledge and culture into machine learning systems in the hope of creating something incredible, that's a good reason why copyright should not apply to that use.
Imagine creating a potentially ultra-intelligent child and being legally unable to impart all of humanity's defining data to that child to fully educate them. Where is the sense in that?
Most people have absorbed trademarked words into everyday speech. In theory anyone who calls a vacuum cleaner a "Hoover" is committing misuse of the "Hoover" trademark. Lines between "fair use", "inspired by" and other concepts which provide a small respite from the already overextended rights of copyright and patent holders are constantly being re-drawn in increasingly restrictive ways, to the benefit of corporate entities instead of society at large.
The legal and legislative debate and actions concerning ML systems, potential future AIs, copyright, patents, trademarks and the ownership of knowledge in general will define the next decades. There are very real risks with allowing corporate interests to assert control over the ownership of human knowledge and culture. Excusing monopolistic behaviour regarding knowledge by claiming to be a 'trusted curator' is transparently self-serving. Curating humankind's collective data is a society's responsibility, as is making it widely available. In times long ago, learning your tribe's songs and stories so that knowledge was passed to the next generation was a responsibility given wisely to trusted people. If nobody bothered to pass on information about which plants would kill you if you ate them, your tribe would probably die out . Here in 2024, we have taken that idea and made it many orders of magnitude larger. Our modern data storage and networking technology lets us store incomprehensibly large amounts of knowledge, culture and data. So much data that we cannot make good use of it without a lot of help. The help is the exponentially more powerful computer and the ways we can express our thoughts to them.
We have the possibility in front of us to possibly make something far more than the sum of its parts. A risk which is surely worth taking?
Locking what is needed to teach our collective child behind laws which only benefit rich, greedy monopolists is not in society's best interests.
I fear that there are too few people in governments who are impartial enough, knowledgeable enough and imaginative enough to be trusted with this responsibility.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
