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.

actually in much of the EU if not all of it Copyright is an intrinsic right of the creator.

It is a "right" created by law, is the point. This is not a right that is universally recognised, nor one that has existed since time immemorial, but a modern construction of governments that governments can choose to change or abolish.

what is a right that has existed since time immemorial? Generally rights that have existed "forever" are codified rights and, in the codification, described as being eternal. Hence Jefferson's reference to inalienable rights, which probably came as some surprise to King George III.

on edit: If we had a soundtrack the Clash Know Your Rights would be playing in this comment.

Except of course that the point is that copyright is generally not described this way.

See my more extensive overview in another response.

The history of copyright law is one where it is regularly described either in the debates around the passing of the laws, or in the laws themselves, as a utilitarian bargain between the public and creators.

E.g. since you mention Jefferson and mention "inalienable", notably copyright is in the US not an inaliable right at all, but a right that the US constitution grants Congress the power to enact "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". It says nothing about being an inalienable or eternal right of citizens.

And before you bring up France, or other European law, I suggest you read the other comment as well.

But to add more than I did in the other comment, e.g. in Norway, the first paragraph of the copyright low ("Lov om opphavsrett til åndsverk mv.") gives 3 motivations: 1 a) to grant rights to creators to give incentives for cultural production, 1 b) to limit those rights to ensure a balance between creators rights and public interests, 1 c) to provide rules to make it easy to arrange use of copyrighted works.

There's that argument about incentives and balancing public interests again.

This is the historical norm. It is not present in every copyright law, but they share the same historical nucleus.