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It's not going to fail: the US courts are big company biased, and all the big companies are going to show out in force and money to ensure they get the result t
by XorNot 4y ago
It's not going to fail: the US courts are big company biased, and all the big companies are going to show out in force and money to ensure they get the result they want.
But even extending that: knocking copyright'd images out isn't going to stop these systems. We know they work now, so if you have to be careful about licensing then that's just going to be done.
The idea that any of these platforms will "die" if copyright fair use doesn't automatically apply is magical thinking. Most art is worthless - companies hoovering up huge corpuses with the correct rights assignment for machine learning is going to be the new business.
A company like Disney will drop every piece of output from their staff into a dataset for Disney, then license it under terms to other companies - the tech works, so "invent me a disney character looking like..." would have value internally, just to Disney, for idea generation and refinement - arguably a lot more then to anyone else because they would still retain the artist resources to capitalize on it.
Right now, a bunch of people who told themselves that despite the pay, they weren't going to be replaced by AI are shrieking that it's turned out not to be the case (it was obvious for a few years something like this was coming though). They're reaching for every legal tool that they hope will kill these things, forgetting that it's never worked out like that. Copyright being a problem when it happens to you as an individual, is different to when it happens to MegaCorp Inc. which is constantly being sued, has limited liability, and puts payouts down as a line-item expense.
- chrismorgan 4y agoFor my part, I think you’re right, and that it’s unlikely to fail in at least the USA, and, after consideration of what you wrote, that if it did fail in any meaningful way it would push things in the direction of copyright pools (like patent pools); but at the very least, it would be a massive disruption which would take some time to be sorted out and require a certain degree of starting from scratch in data sets; and all up it’d probably favour big business even more heavily than the current informal consensus. I think there’s also a fair chance in such a situation that European countries with their different approach to copyright philosophy would act as a balancing force, striking down overly-general copyright-assignment-equivalent clauses in terms of service and the likes, which would be the only real way of sucking up as much everything as these models need to work well, especially for providing retroactive relicensing (to avoid a big hole in their sources).
- yencabulator 4y ago> A company like Disney will drop every piece of output from their staff into a dataset for Disney, then license it under terms to other companies Knowing Disney, those terms would 100% include "subject to Disney's approval obtained prior to publication", and a chunk of money extracted from you. That company is very controlling of their IP. Either that, or you're talking about a dataset that generates very specific looking images, that do not remind you of any major classic Disney property (so not "every piece"). Your own Jedi / Avenger avatar creator maybe, custom Mickey Mouse world character absolutely not.