Twitch And Amazon Hit With Lawsuit for Training AI With Streamers' Content (engadget.com) 34
A class action filed this week accused Amazon's Twitch gaming service of using video streams to fuel its AI products without licensing or obtaining permission, reports Engadget:
Earlier this month, Twitch Support posted on X that it added an option to opt out of "having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon." Shortly after, Twitch hosted an episode of its recurring Patch Notes stream where Mike Minton, the company's chief product officer, said "if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in," when asked by a viewer why the Twitch settings for AI training aren't opt-in but instead enabled by default, requiring users to opt out if they don't want to participate.
Now, the latest class action lawsuit claims that Twitch and Amazon committed a breach of contract when the companies decided to use its streamers as "free training stock for separate commercial AI products."
Did the read the TOS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Something tells me that if you post something to those video channels, they already get a ton of rights to the content itself. Maybe these content creators thought it was just free hosting? Seems naive.
Re: Did the read the TOS? (Score:5, Informative)
Opt-out alternative instead of opt-in is illegal in some places.
Re: Did the read the TOS? (Score:2)
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Did you read the article?
They altered the TOS to allow this.
You're now lying to defend their practices. Don't tell yourself you're somehow neutral here.
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It seems to me that a reasonable person would recognize that "train AI", and far more, is covered by that language.
It also seems to me that the original pla
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Did you follow the conversation. No one here was talking about AI specifically, they were talking about the "ton of rights to the content itself" something which the old ToS also granted Amazon.
And now you're cluelessly calling someone a liar despite clearly not having a clue what is being talked about and then calling them impartial, fuck all the way off with your shitty attitude.
Re: Did the read the TOS? (Score:2)
Re: Did the read the TOS? (Score:2)
UBI (Score:4, Insightful)
UBI is like reparations from the robots and AI.
Did they read the rules? (Score:2, Insightful)
Licenses are not ownership. (Score:5, Informative)
Belong? No. Twitch (Amazon) gets a license to the content. Here's what they think gives them the right to do this:
But the content is not theirs to do with as they please. It still belongs to Twitch streamers. Twitch needs a license to their content so they can transcode it to all the resolutions they support on the fly (a derivative work) and display/perform it on the viewers' computers. That's fair. But training models is not connected with the usual business of Twitch, which consists of sending the streams to viewers, providing the chat on which they interact with the streamer and other things they might call the Twitch "experience". It's the same thing book publishers are fighting in the courts against LLM companies: can Twitch (Amazon) do this if all they have is a license and don't own the content?
By their own admission, they had to force everyone to opt in because nobody would have if they didn't force it. That includes streamers who have since become incapacitated or died and can't exercise their right to opt out.
It's also unclear whether people's content will be erased from the model when they opt out, in a future training iteration, or at all.
This is not legal advice.
Re: Licenses are not ownership. (Score:2)
Writing purposefully vague terms doesn't give them some carte blanche. Reposting some uploader's video in a way to publicly slander them, for instance, is also a "use", but certainly not legal.
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do you have a link to a case that definitively establishes that AI training is legally transformative?
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Now, while that might not explicitly include AI training, that wording reasonably covers it. Keep in mind that this is how Twitch is able to provide a service for free. The guy who started this suit doesn't have to pay to show his gameplay and Leg
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oh really:
reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display
one could also argue translate allows the work to be translated into AI to create that derivative work.
I am also not a lawyer, good thing neither of us qualify.
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This is not legal advice.
That much is clear, because it would be horrendously bad legal advice if it were. You went out of your way to quote a ToS that explicitly gives Twitch far more rights than you claim they have including derivative works, and somehow translate that to Twitch only being allowed to transcode video?
With that we can only assume that:
a) you don't know what all the words in the ToS mean
b) you don't know that courts already have ruled that AI training is transformative and fair use implying that the only question is
Re: Licenses are not ownership. (Score:2)
Not automatically. On a service like Twitch or YouTube, perhaps, because they give you limited (if any) control over the license terms with which you can publish your works on their platforms.
But you can certainly upload works of yours for free and public access and put them under a license that forbids use in LLM training. For example, my understanding is that a CC license with the ND clause str
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No, you can claim to do so, but that doesn't make it a fact. So far no court has ruled such a license as valid. Quite the opposite, since AI training has been so far ruled transformative fair use it is almost certain that those licenses are not enforceable. You can't create a copyright license that specifically prevents fair use.
This means that media that is available publicly and for free on the internet currently is fair game for AI training, at least as far as the US legal system is concerned. Other juri
Pretext (Score:2)
Since Twitch is mainly about streaming gameplay, is this just a pretext to train generative AI on content from games that the streamers can't give permission to train on in the first place?
Or are they filtering that out and are just getting really good at generating images of people sitting in chairs?
What's the expected value of training from twitch? (Score:2)
What does Amazon hope to gain from training from twitch? Twitch has always had very low information density.
I can't imagine any of the actual gaming content matters to Amazon. Like maybe they could train a chat moderator, but I can't think of anything else they could mine.
Good luck! (Score:2)
Whatever Amazon claimed about AI opt-out or not, the ToS state since decades, that the streamers grant a unrestricted irrevocable, ..., commercial and free of charge usage right for their content to Twitch/Amazon. Amazon could create a commercial TV channel with that content and the streamers would not need to see a single cent and it were completely legal.
Yeah ToS are usually onesided, but they are binding. There is a reason why you should read them. The same reason why companies try to write it so you don
Delicious (Score:4, Interesting)
Classic saying the quiet part out loud, I love it.
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That's not the quiet part. That's just common sense. It is completely irrelevant what topic you discuss, defaults matter because a very significant portion of the population simply do not give a shit about anything.