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Again, I am aware that legally there's nothing they can do, but the point of copyright law is to facilitate making a living from art (let's ignore the House of

• O__________O 4y ago
  Copyright law protects finished works of art. It does not protect things like facts, ideas, procedures, or an artist's style, no matter how distinct. And legal system is up to date in any material matter related to the topic. If is not, you not only need to provide a specific notable claim, but back it up with evidence to support it and state why it’s not addressed by current legal code, case law, etc.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    Well it looks as though some actors such as Bruce Willis have already signed away their deepfake likeness and/or style, however you'd want to call it. Maybe additional legal concepts are not far behind? There was a time when copyright did not exist at all. It came into being because there was a need for it. Reddit-style argumentation about the literal aspect of the law is missing the point altogether. These new services are barely a few months old (or at least publicly available) and it remains to be seen how society will react. How can there even be case law if there is literally not enough time for it to appear? The salient fact is that the living conditions of many artists is going to degrade. If you do not believe that or do not care about it, then we can agree to disagree, but personally I think it would be better to alleviate that problem in some way and to nudge the law towards supporting this.
    • O__________O 4y ago
      You randomly mixing in concepts which are wholly related, as such, will not be replying to them; likeliness as a concept under tort law is basically unregistered trade mark rights, not copyright. You again refuse mention verbatim what legal issues are new that are not covered by existing laws. Law by definition will always have a latent space that’s beyond the law, it is called extralegal, and one of the many reasons in common law that judges exists. Something being extralegal does neither make it illegal, nor shows a law is currently imperfect. Laws and judges further do not represent some idle truth, but a system for bring disagreements to an end without the need to exceed the monopoly governments have on violence as a means of dispute resolution; which is why criminals resort to violence as a means of dispute resolution, because they are frequently unable to resolve disputes using the law. And then, you inject a yet another completely different topic, for which disagree, that being the impact of AI of professional artists, but as I said before, you lack the sense to understand your response are not in good faith, to me oddly argumentative, and wish you the best. Last comment is even against HN’s guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • Bakary 4y ago
        I don't see how what I am saying is incoherent, and I see we got off on the wrong foot here, so in the spirit of discussion please allow me to rephrase more simply and neutrally: 1. AI art is still extremely new, and it's unclear what direction the law will take regarding it (if any) 2. Artists are likely to be significantly impacted by this, therefore it is probable that there will be some debate about the legal environment for this AI art. It won't necessarily be in favor of the artists, though I personally hope it will. 3. The law is hopefully aimed at making society better in some way. The definition of that is relative of course, but the spirit of the law is important, otherwise the entire edifice is pointless. 4. The AI art could be argued to be classified as merely transformative, but is regular transformative art likely to have the same impact on artists as AI art? Intuitively, we can probably tell that's not the case because the amount of effort and talent needed to generate AI art is incredibly low compared to the regular version and therefore the output will be vastly higher. The distribution, ease of production and other factors makes this an altogether different problem. 5. The prospect of AI art seems to be a bigger problem for artists than copyright infringement, because it can nuke sales/commissions or even types of artists (such as concept illustrators) in a way copyright infringement cannot. The market power of the 2D artist, which is the hard to reproduce ability to produce things in a very specific style, is gone. 6. Prompt users will deliberately use a reference to specific artists because they expect the result will be better than without. They understand that they are implicitly piggybacking on the work of the artist that led to the style being available in the model, to then use it for their own ends. If the artist had not worked in the way they did, the style would not be easily available in a few seconds. You would have to train for a long time to be able to replicate it, and your output would be very low (hence unproblematic) So in the end you have something that will greatly impact artists, more so than most threats to intellectual property that are currently covered by the law, and that leads me to believe that the law will change, and if it does not, that it should change. Naturally, it is possible to disagree.