For this week’s process post, we will be talking about content and copyright in the digital world.
Ever since the introduction of digital media, there have been a lot more ways to both create and distribute content.
However, this also comes with its unique challenges, as it also means that it is a lot harder to control the flow of content and where it gets distributed.
Copyright in digital media is something that is very difficult, since it relies on many parties to ensure that the content is properly taken down. This is in comparison to older forms of print media like books, as one would have to copy the book one by one, and only be able to distribute it in person or by mail.
However, there are some ways that companies combat this problem. Large companies like YouTube use algorithms that automatically detect copyright infringement and take videos down. Otherwise, it can also be deleted by submitting a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) request and they will most likely delete it if it is valid.
Personally, for my own website I will just have to moderate content that comes onto my platform by way of commenting manually. Additionally, I will have to ensure that any of my own content falls under fair use since it is educational content.
Nowadays, new ways of creating content like DALL-E add another layer of complexity to the problem. DALL-E can turn any prompt into an image, but in that case who owns the image being created?
According to OpenAI “DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs” (OpenAI, 2021). Personally, I have used AI tools like this, and it also ran off GPT-3, just like DALL-E. I would think the fair thing to do is to give credit to the creator of the software since they technically made the software that made the content.
On the other hand, this is also murky as that would mean all software, such as this paper that I am writing technically should be credited to the Google Docs creators.
All in all, the digital age poses many challenges in terms of the creation of content creation tools and tackling copyright laws to protect the works of the original creators.
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