> Blurring a work but incorporating it would nonetheless still be derivative, I think. you have to show that the derivative work is a substantial part of the n

> Blurring a work but incorporating it would nonetheless still be derivative, I think. you have to show that the derivative work is a substantial part of the new work. If your background is a small portion of the new image, and the blue makes it difficult to see that it was the original, and that any other blurred image would've done the same job, then i would argue that the final new painting does not constitute a derivative work. A similar argument could be made for AI models. The model consists of billions of training images. None of these images are individually substantial in the final output, despite that on some part of the output, you can trace a derivative work. For example, if an author used 1 million books, and copied every nth word from each book and merged it, to produce a final book (which happens to produce a coherent book), i would argue that the author did not infringe copyright on any of the original 1million source books.