Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

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towforce
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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by towforce »

syzygy wrote: Sat Jan 07, 2023 10:14 pm
towforce wrote: Sat Jan 07, 2023 8:29 pmAnything still not clear?
I have no idea what point you are now trying to make.

I have no friendly words for your behaviour.

I am saddened that you see my behaviour as unfriendly.

The basic point: if it's OK to copy NNs then it would also be OK to copy other machine parts - but this doesn't happen as often as one would expect given that doing so would result in better business outcomes.

The point of my previous post: I explained how copying an NN you didn't have permission to copy (as opposed to training the NN yourself to get the same functionality) would be analogous to making an exact copy of another company's clock motor, duplicating the design, materials and dimensions of each component, rather than designing and building your own clock motor (even though the resulting functionality and the way the clock motor basically works would still be the same).

In case it's still not clear, let me do a step by step pairing:

Step 1

- software developer trains an NN

- clock motor manufacturer creates a new mechanical clock motor with no human artistic expression in it (this is left to the manufacturer of the cases)

Step 2

- another software developer wants the functionality of the new NN

- another manufacturer decides to go into the clock motor business


Step 3

- the second software developer has a choice: train their own NN, or copy the one the first developer has already trained

- the second manufacturer has a choice: they can either tool up to duplicate the first clock motor, or they can start work on developing and testing their own product, which will have the same functionality, but which will not be exactly the same

Is the point of my previous post now clear?
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Ovyron
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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by Ovyron »

This thread died back in September 2021, I revived it in November 2022, it's fun to see how 12 new pages appeared since then.
towforce wrote: Sun Jan 01, 2023 8:11 pm Here's a simple, unmistakable expression of what I'm saying: "you can't just copy other people's products and sell them as your own".
Apparently that's all what people care about. Recently Getty Images sued Stability AI. In case you don't know, Stability AI is responsible for the cutting edge technology of AI powered text to image generation that we have, called Stable Diffusion. Even its competition (Midjourney, NovelAI, AI Roguelite, et al) are powered by Stable Diffusion.

Getty Images is a company that makes and sells stock photos, they made a large amount of them, and those images were scrapped and Stability AI used them to train their model (among many other places they got images from for their dataset).

The important bit is that even Getty Images acknowledges that falls under fair use, the simile here would be Getty Images producing a large amount of chess games, and Stability AI using them to produce a model that can generate chess games. The copyright of Getty Images goes out the window and you can see Stable Diffusion not only doing its best to replicate Getty's stock images, but also their logo:

Image
(note images of much better quality can be obtained with better text prompts, this is just an example)

Since Stable Diffusion was released Getty's sales have been cut it half, turns out half their clients preferred to generate the images instead of buying stock ones.

All fine till this point, except that Stability AI is selling access to Stable Diffusion at their huggingface domain for a profit. Yes, the software is open source, everyone is free to download it and use it at home, and there are free sites where you can use it like dezgo, but some people just want to give their money away.

This is what Getty has issues with, if they are profiting from a model that was trained with their images they want a slice of the cake, too, if the service was provided for free they wouldn't have done anything. This is a real life case we don't have to imagine, you can use whatever you want to train your NN and it won't infringe anyone's copyright, if it did Getty would be suing for THAT.

But if you are doing it for a profit, you could be violating the terms of use of the content you're scrapping, to comply you may need to get a licence and share the profits (or not, if Getty loses the case).

The way things happened contrast a lot with all the patent talk on this thread, it's clear there has been a change in mentality. In the old mentality, you want to create something unique that only you have, patent it so nobody else can use it, and sell it to maximize profits. In the text to image generation world, OpenAI developed the technology and showed how to do it with the world, and the latest incarnation is like Stockfish, anybody is free to set up a web service to sell it if they want, and people are willing to pay just because installing it at home is such a hassle.

But it's clear the way technology is headed, open source has won the war.
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hgm
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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by hgm »

I was always told that no commercial company would ever be interested in manifacturing something that could not be protected by patents. It was stressed that if we ever discovered something useful in our research, we should contact the patents division before publishing about it. Because if we didn't, the discovery would basically be lost to humanity forever.

So there doesn't seem to be any mistery: companies do not make exact copies of unpatented products of competitors because there are no such products in the first place. Not because it is in any way forbidden. It is exactly the other way around: because it is not forbidden, there are no such products. No one is interested in investing in a production line for manifacturing something if they will immediately be undercut by competitors that basically use slave labor to be able to offer the same thing more cheaply.
syzygy
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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by syzygy »

hgm wrote: Sat Jan 21, 2023 3:48 pm I was always told that no commercial company would ever be interested in manifacturing something that could not be protected by patents.
Lots of commercial companies such as bakeries manufacture age-old products not protected by any patents or other intellectual property rights.

Also, companies are certainly interested in copying inventions made by the competition even though they clearly won't be able to patent them, and they are often willing to pay for a license. (If no company would be interested, there would be no need for patents in the first place, and we somehow run into a logical contradiction.)

More likely, you have been told that no company would ever be interested in putting money into developing something that could not be protected by patents or other intellectual property rights (such as copyright). This is basically true (but there are things like trade secrets, trade marks/brand recognition, etc.).
It was stressed that if we ever discovered something useful in our research, we should contact the patents division before publishing about it. Because if we didn't, the discovery would basically be lost to humanity forever.
If you publish it before filing a patent, it becomes the property of all of humanity :-)
Other companies can and will use the invention for free to improve their own products where that makes sense. (If the invention is not yet ready for commercial use and needs further development, a company that invests into doing that can obtain a patent on the further improvements made.)
So there doesn't seem to be any mistery: companies do not make exact copies of unpatented products of competitors because there are no such products in the first place. Not because it is in any way forbidden. It is exactly the other way around: because it is not forbidden, there are no such products.
It is certainly true that companies patent (and otherwise protect) whatever they can patent (and otherwise protect).

But the premise that "exact copying" does not exist is broken in the first place. If you look around, there are tons of commodity products that for all practical purposes are "exact copies". Many of these products were once patented.

It all depends on what makes business sense. In many cases it would just be stupid to try to replicate a competitor's product "exactly" even if the product is not or no longer product by any IP right.

Towforce lives in a fantasy world where secret IP rights exist that are not described in any lawbook, are never invoked in any court case, but somehow magically stop companies from doing things that are in their business interests. Of course towforce cannot name one single product that competitors should be copying but for unexplainable reasons are not. He produces nothing but noise.
No one is interested in investing in a production line for manifacturing something if they will immediately be undercut by competitors that basically use slave labor to be able to offer the same thing more cheaply.
By that logic, the competitors would not be interesting in investing in a production line either...
It is not the investment in the production line that is the problem (since the competition will have to make the same investment) but the investment in R&D.
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towforce
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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by towforce »

syzygy wrote: Sun Jan 22, 2023 1:28 amTowforce lives in a fantasy world where secret IP rights exist that are not described in any lawbook, are never invoked in any court case, but somehow magically stop companies from doing things that are in their business interests. Of course towforce cannot name one single product that competitors should be copying but for unexplainable reasons are not. He produces nothing but noise.

This is both an ad-hominem attack and, more or less, a straw man argument: no matter how clearly or how many times I make my point, you respond as though I'd said something different to what I'd actually said - the very definition of a straw man.
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Daniel Mehrmann
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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by Daniel Mehrmann »

KLc wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 9:35 pm In case you didn’t notice: https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/ou ... chessbase/
Well, one of the funny things is, that you can still buy Fat Fritz 2 on Amazon today and the reseller is directly Chessbase GmbH. :lol:
Of course i don't checked entire shopping process, but at least, you can say they still offer Fat Fritz 2 directly.

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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by CornfedForever »

I am curious...can one copywrite a tablebase?

Different animal that what is under discussion, but I'm not sure how those are generated...I presume with a computer program which involved a human's programming abilities.

I see a NNUE as a 'soft tablebase' for general play.
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towforce
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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by towforce »

CornfedForever wrote: Wed Jan 25, 2023 4:28 pmI am curious...can one copywrite a tablebase?

My guess: "no". You cannot copyright or patent mathematical constants.
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syzygy
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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by syzygy »

CornfedForever wrote: Wed Jan 25, 2023 4:28 pm I am curious...can one copywrite a tablebase?
No.
https://github.com/syzygy1/tb
All tablebase files generated using this generator may be freely redistributed. In fact, those files are free of copyright at least under US law (following Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)) and under EU law (following Football Dataco and Others v. Yahoo! UK Ltd and Others (C-604/10)).
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Re: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

Post by smatovic »

"Google Created an AI That Can Generate Music From Text Descriptions, But Won't Release It"
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/01/2 ... release-it
[...]
Still, the Google researchers note the many ethical challenges posed by a system like MusicLM, including a tendency to incorporate copyrighted material from training data into the generated songs.
[...]
Maybe the datasets for NN training are copyright protected? Also in chess?

a) Human hand-picked* collection of games?
b) Labeled game positions with an evulation score from an copyright protected chess engine?

* if you select by certain criteria, not only functional, by playing style for example.

--
Srdja