Artists lose first copyright battle in the fight against AI-generated images::But the fight may not be lost as the court allowed the artists to claim copyright infringement against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DevianArt, on workpieces that the artists had filed a copyright for.
So now artists are going to have to actually apply for copyright? What the fuck happened to intellectual property?
In the US, copyright is implicit. All work is instantly protected by copyright the moment it is created. Registering with copyright office is optional/voluntary. I think the judge’s comments that you are referring to was probably referring to the works where copyright protections were waived by the artists for works placed into public domain (which, on Deviant Art, covers a vast amount).
works placed into public domain (which, on Deviant Art, covers a vast amount)
So especially poor and young artists get exploited. Why am I not surprised.
Bit of a long story…
Some forms of intellectual property require registration. For example patents. Patents are supposed to encourage technological development by allowing inventors to monetize their work. There’s a lot of justified criticism of that system but, on the whole, it seems to have worked.
Originally, US copyrights worked in exactly the same way, for the same purpose. The requirement to register for copyright was dropped in 1978. However, registration still plays a role in US law for some legal purposes.
So what happened to copyright?
Europe developed a different copyright tradition, in the 19th century, while it was stilled largely ruled by oppressive autocracies. The monarchs of the 19th century were not the overpaid figureheads that still exist in some countries.
Copyrights today last (usually) until 70 years after the author’s death, while patents which underpin tech progress last (usually) only 20 years in total. You can see that this is very different. That copyright revolves around the death of a person shows how it is a personal privilege, as were normal in aristocracies. The purpose is to enable people to extract money without any consideration for the interests of society as a whole. It’s about rent-seeking.
Nowadays, US content production (Hollywood, etc.) dwarfs that of Europe. The better copyright laws of the US may have something to do with that. Although the US has gradually shifted over to the rent-seeking European model, there are still some advantages left.
As the content producers in the US grew, the US gradually switched over to the rent-seeking model. I think this is largely because the content producers also gained more lobbying powers.
The biggest trick the rich ever pulled was fooling the public into thinking copyright benefits everybody. It doesn’t. It only benefits them. It will only ever benefit them.
yeah Disney is famous for lobbying to protect their Mickey mouse copyright.
Copyright is a form of intellectual property? So are trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
My understanding has always been that artworks that you create are your intellectual property that is automatically copywrited, at least in the United States. From the article it seems like that is either not true or it’s being ignored by the court.
It is automatically copyrighted, but you do have to register before you bring a legal action for infringement.
What does it being automatically copyrighted mean then?
It means the registration can be retroactive when you do need to file a case.
intellectual property is a fiction. it’s a term used to snow people. there is no such thing, nor should there be.
Intellectual property is a social construct, but that does not negate its reality or make it fictitious. Its the very thing that copyrights, patents, trademarks and countless laws were created to protect. And it’s an invaluable tool for people that need to protect their ideas and creations, especially artists and makers. The issue with intellectual property is that most of the laws surrounding it were created by/for corporations and rich people, and wind up fucking the rest of us over.
people share. food, recipes, songs, stories, pictures, tools. to use a government-enforced monopoly to interfere with people sharing is fucking immoral.
copyrights, patents, trademarks
anyone using one term to refer to all of these is being fundamentally dishonest: they are completely separate laws with different histories and uses. stallman says anyone using this term is trying to snow you. i agree.
I’m not convinced you even know what intellectual property is and aren’t merely parroting the controversial opinions of random people on the internet. Here are some links that might be of use to you;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property
https://www.findlaw.com/hirealawyer/choosing-the-right-lawyer/intellectual-property-law.html
I’m not convinced you’re interested in perspectives that don’t affirm your own
You have yet to offer any new perspective other than to say “your wrong” or “your lying”. If you can come up a convincing argument and support it, then I would be more than happy to learn something new and change my mind.
that’s still not very convincing. I’m not asking to be convinced though. if you are happy in your ignorance, why should i disabuse you?
Yes, please keep fighting to ensure we are locked to adobe’s rent seeking model with no open alternatives.
The best thing for the art world is to make sure independent and poorer artists have no available competitive tools as we head into an inevitably advanced future. Where would we be without our intellectual landlords in such a future. The ones who can afford proprietary datasets are the only ones who deserve to prosper.
Right?
Yeah actually I don’t like that. Also as an artist with degrading digital dexterity, such a powerful medium that doesn’t rely on hours of causing my hands more damage is really cool.
Can’t wait to get holodeck style creative experiences. I will enjoy creating such things as well, if it’s not exclusively available through corporately aligned rent systems.
It’s like we’ve come full circle from the early 2000s.
At that time, the MPAA and RIAA was paranoid about changing technology disrupting their copyrights, and fought tooth and nail against it.
So what happened was other corporations created products which dominated the markets of that emerging technology.
Now we have individual artists grouping up to fight tooth and nail against the inevitable tides of change, having learned nothing from history, instead of grouping up to own that future.
The generative AI products that are trained using artists’ own Photoshop files with full change histories, WIP pencil sketches, etc are going to be WAY better than ones trained off just the final images online.
But those products may never exist at the current pace of things, as the art community unwittingly cedes the stake in their own future to mega corporations.
The artists with power want to keep that power and make sure they are still above the other 99.999% of artists who are forced to give it up and do it as a hobby because it doesn’t pay the bills.
They are the true gatekeepers. This is what an incredibly oversaturated industry does to the ones lucky enough to make it.
Unfortunately, they are willing to sacrifice everybody else’s future in this tech to do so. Short-sighted assholes.
Copyright has always traditionally required there to be some sort of direct linkage to the source material, like “This has X character that I own in it” or “This is like X story I made, except Y and Z were changed”.
Generative AI for the most part doesn’t do that. There is no line to draw from their pictures to the AI’s pictures. The lawsuit that maybe stabs these programs in the back would be a big artist claiming that they used the research LAION training set, knowingly, to create a product that copies their style exactly via their labeling of works with their name, and thus reducing their way to make money. Whether that has enough basis in law to work… debatable.
But “This work it generated violated my copyright” is for sure not the way to get them.
I’m so conflicted about this; on the one hand AI’s can be a great tool for humanity, on the other hand they will likely destroy the livelyhood of thousands of people and probably give more power to big corporations.
They will also very likely make less people pursue drawing, (graphic) design and painting as a skill.
The same was said about Photoshop decades ago.
Also reminds me of this.
To compare this with what happened when Photoshop came up is not a fitting comparison at all.
Digital art pushed more people into learning how to draw (with traditional and digital media) leading to a surge in courses, books, workshops etc. Digital drawing made it affordable for more people to get into drawing. And it also encouraged them to learn traditional drawing to improve their skills and expand their portfolio.
This is not comparable to what is happening now with AI image generators.
Photography versus traditional media realism paintings like still lifes and portraits is a better analogy. But photography only touched one specific area of drawing/painting not all of it. And in this case it really did lead to a skill becoming incredibly rare.
I propose the following solution: Everyone is free to use any publicly available data to train AI. Any data generated by AI is automatically in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted.
No, that doesn’t work at all. That gives all the power to people with billions of dollars to train and run the best proprietary models, at the expense of the people who created the data.
Welcome to the internet where you can literally experience everything that AI was trained on right now for free.
That’s how the internet works. You put your stuff out there and people and software experience it.
THIS IS NOTHING NEW
Yeah? Where did you get the impression I’m in favor of a completely unregulated marketplace where corporations are free to harvest everything from everyone for free?
Try to block right clicking or blocking a recording u fucking moron. Why do u think those things are possible? If they were nfts would have value.
See how stupid u look?
bozo
No u lol. Ur the idiot who can’t figure out right clicking hahahaha
That’s literally how it works now. There are no legal restrictions on training ais and courts have rules ai generated works are not copyrightable.
they will likely destroy the livelyhood of thousands of people and probably give more power to big corporations.
i doubt it.
I don’t understand how it’s not plausible to know whether works aren’t copyrighted in the data or not. That has to be tracked for multiple reasons and if AI teams pulled in the full data set to train the model it should be a matter of filtering out works that have usage restrictions applied. I would think it is just a matter of the AI team choosing to ignore usage restrictions rather than an inability to adhere to them.
It seems to me like the judge is misunderstanding or disregarding the nature of the data and procedures for deselecting cases.
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I’d like to see you create high quality art using either a mouse or graphics tablet. It takes a lot of time and practice to draw something as simple as a decent looking circle without using the circle tool or a brush stablizer.
Why would I do that when I can use an AI prompt and get high quality customizable results almost instantly? If anything AI has made art a race to the bottom.
Sad really.
