Artists have complained about their artwork being stolen, people are arguing about threads.net stealing their data on despite this being a public forum, Reddit, Twitter, Github and other platforms are putting up walls to to stop AI bots from scraping everything.
However generative AI and large language models have been been spitting out their training data including copyright notices and other stuff verbatim. “poem poem poem to get personal data from ChatGPT”.
So, instead of providing all our comments for free to LLMs, how about adding a copyright notice to everything we write?
I propose the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license? Basically, if somebody uses your comment, they have to attribute you, but they may not use it for commercial purposes.
This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.
All you’d need to do is add this text CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed anywhere in your comment or post.
Legally everything you write is already copyrighted, and no notice is required. Creative Commons licenses are a way to reduce the restrictions on what people can do with your content. They don’t impose any extra obligations beyond what would exist without any copyright notice at all.
What you say is true, but how are you going to prove anything is copied or scraped and used for commercial purposes? Untraceable copyright violations make copyright worthless.
My point is that adding the CC notice doesn’t make any violations traceable or even less likely. Your comments are just as likely to be scraped with it versus without it. You’re not adding any restrictions on the use of the comments; you’re just selectively removing some restrictions.
I think you’re missing the “Non Commercial Share Alike” part of the license. Also, when the text is revealed to have a licence, then steps can possibly be taken. If nothing you write has a licence, nothing can possibly be done AFAIK. IANAL though 🤷
To me, it’s not much work to hit Ctrl+V at the end of writing a comment for the eventuality that a training set be forced to be made open.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
How does your proposition help with this?
In that case just append a unique string to your comments.
As others have already said, including a Creative Commons license does not make a difference.
Are any of them lawyers? Are you a copyright lawyer?
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0