Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement

Not just Meta, 40 EU companies urged EU to postpone roll out of the ai act by two years due to it's unclear nature. This code of practice is voluntary and goes beyond what is in the act itself. EU published it in a way to say that there would be less scrutiny if you voluntarily sign up for this code of practice. Meta would anyway face scrutiny on all ends, so does not seem to a plausible case to sign something voluntary.

One of the key aspects of the act is how a model provider is responsible if the downstream partners misuse it in any way. For open source, it's a very hard requirement[1].

> GPAI model providers need to establish reasonable copyright measures to mitigate the risk that a downstream system or application into which a model is integrated generates copyright-infringing outputs, including through avoiding overfitting of their GPAI model. Where a GPAI model is provided to another entity, providers are encouraged to make the conclusion or validity of the contractual provision of the model dependent upon a promise of that entity to take appropriate measures to avoid the repeated generation of output that is identical or recognisably similar to protected works.

[1] https://www.lw.com/en/insights/2024/11/european-commission-r...

The quoted text makes sense when you understand that the EU provides a carveout for training on copyright protected works without a license. It's quite an elegant balance they've suggested despite the challenges it fails to avoid.

Is that true? How can they decide to wipe out the intellectual property for an individual or entity? It’s not theirs to give it away.

Copyright is not a god given right. It's an economic incentive created by government to make desired behavior (writing an publishing books) profitable.

Yes it is. In every sense of the phrase, except the literal.

A lot of cultures have not historically considered artists’ rights to be a thing and have had it essentially imposed on them as a requirement to participate in global trade.

Even in Europe copyright was protected only for the last 250 years, and over the last 100 years it’s been constantly updated to take into consideration new technologies.

The only real mistake the EU made was not regulating Facebook when it mattered. That site caused pain and damage to entire generations. Now it's too late. All they can do is try to stop Meta and the rest of the lunatics from stealing every book, song and photo ever created, just to train models that could leave half the population without a job.

Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and Google don't care about people. They care about control: controlling influence, knowledge and universal income. That's the endgame.

Just like in the US, the EU has brilliant people working on regulations. The difference is, they're not always working for the same interests.

The world is asking for US big tech companies to be regulated more now than ever.