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There's nothing inevitable about it. Laws exist to protect people. It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. Remember the na

There's nothing inevitable about it. Laws exist to protect people. It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. Remember the naive rallying cry among those who thought everyone should have the right to all music, without any compensation for the artist? "Information wants to be free!" (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/24/napster-music-free-file-sharing https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/24/napster-music-...) Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. ... It ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002. Use of the output of systems like Copilot or Stable Diffusion becomes a violation of copyright. The weight tensors are illegal to possess, just like it's illegal to possess leaked Intel source code. The weights are like distilled intellectual property. You're distributing an enormous body of other people's work, to enable derivative work without attribution? Huge harm to society, make it illegal. If you use the art in your product, on your website, etc., you risk legal action. Just like if I publish your album on my website. Illegal. The companies that train these systems can't distribute them without risking legal action. So they won't do it. It's expensive to train these models. When it's illegal, the criminals will have to pay for the GPU time. It will always exist in the black-market underground, but the civilized world makes it illegal. That's where this is going, I hope. Best case scenario.

franciscop 4y ago
How do you exactly define a single person's style vs a genre? While any artist might specialize, as is the case here, in a single style and distill it and create a large body of work in the specific style, do you think no one before created a similar work of art in the same style? Naming a recognizable artist is the current "lazy" way of doing this instead of naming every possible visual style; and sure we could ban name and surname, but should an artist own "dreamy flat pastel colored illustrations of cities of characters with high contrast, no lines, children illustrations" for perpetuity? Definitely not, for the style itself there's likely hundreds of artists that have done something similar before and after.
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- gort19 4y ago
CookieCrisp 4y ago
I think the advantage of using them is too great, companies that use the networks will outcompete ones that don't -- even if it were made illegal in the US it won't be everywhere. I imagine when it comes down to it, the law's going to be pragmatic. What happens to US industries if we allow this, and what happens if we don't, and my guess is that it ends up being allowed. I'm not saying that's good or right - I really don't know how I even feel about the AI networks morally... I just think money is going to win out.
- PuddleCheese 4y ago
  Copyright exists to incentivize authors, artists, scientists, etc. to create original works by providing a temporary monopoly. The arguments suggesting that people shouldn't benefit from their work on an individual level, and pointing to music piracy as an example of why we shouldn't try, strike me as arguments for general inaction and fatalism. Not sure what the goal is, there...
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    The goal is to get these people to face reality. The fact is we are in the 21st century, the age of information. Their creations are just data, and data can be copied, processed and transmitted worldwide at negligible costs. There is no controlling it. The goal is to make them stop trying to control it. Because their attempts to control it are ruining computers for all of us. We already have harmful stuff like DRM on every chip because of these people. Platforms are getting more locked down, our freedom as users and programmers is decreasing. They will destroy free computing as we know it if this keeps going unchecked.
    - PuddleCheese 4y ago
      Because someone may see a version of reality where people are incapable of benefiting from their own work does not mean that it's by any means a settled issue or indicative of "Reality". I doubt these conversations would exist if it was. It is indeed the current year, but that doesn't mean that because things can be metaphorically distilled with false and reductionist equivalencies, that it should all be free for the taking to benefit a few people who outran regulation. Regarding the concept of control, artists were first put in a defensive position by the individuals who started using their work without their consent, and who are trying exercise their own control over the artwork produced by others through monetizing outputs. Are only companies like Stability.AI, OpenAI, and Midjourney exclusively permitted to use and control the artwork of others, and allowed to charge for access to models which use this artwork without compensation or accreditation to the original authors? Are those artists computers not also being ruined? Do they not deserve representation? We need to stop demonizing the idea that someone can benefit from their work because there are some companies that have fought to extend copyright for their own benefit. Copyright REFORM is generally a much more supportable issue than the idea that everything should be free in perpetuity...
TAForObvReasons 4y ago
Music piracy didn't stop because of the Napster shutdown. It just manifested itself in different ways. Now all you need to do is use youtube-dl to download the youtube video or soundcloud track or bandcamp album with the -x flag to extract audio. Both the software and the original media sources are legal. In fact, GitHub was forced to take a public stance on youtube-dl after a DMCA takedown request on the repo. The biggest reason the laws can't possibly hope to stop the practice is: > [MysteryInc152] told me the training process took about 2.5 hours on a GPU at Vast.ai, and cost less than $2. As those costs are driven down and the software is accessible to more people, distribution of the weights will not be needed.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  I think that one of the main reasons YouTube became so huge was music piracy.
wwweston 4y ago
> There's nothing inevitable about it. Laws exist to protect people. Amen. I think one thing we're going to have to look at is having the expectation of a separate agreement for having ones work go into a training set. Maybe equity should even be the standard here. And informed consent associated with it. People need to know they're training something else to do their job as well as doing the job, selling the cow instead of the milk.
- deleted 4y ago
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fleddr 4y ago
Here's why I believe it is inevitable... It's already out there. On people's local computers and soon their mobile devices. People are tinkering with it at warp speed. This point addresses that it technically cannot be stopped. I don't expect it to be possible to detect that the art is AI-generated. This becomes further impossible when using a personal input image as well as many follow-up edits or composite works. It blends into normal image creation. The only way to prove that it's not AI-generated is to record in-progress "human art" as is sometimes done in art contests, but this isn't reasonable to legally require of every single piece of art to be created. You can't enforce what you can't detect.
- bugfix-66 4y ago
  The companies that pay artists' salaries won't be willing to secretly break the law to save money. Microsoft won't legally be able to continue its abuse of GitHub. Copilot will be dead. OpenAI and Stability will not legally be able to profit from large-scale intellectual property theft. All these violations will end. These are the most significant digits. The residual amateur piracy doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if random guy gets some leet neural net warez and uses it to make his desktop wallpaper.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    First, you didn't address my point that you cannot detect AI output. I already have Stability running on my PC. I generate an image with it. How do you know the output comes from Stability? Answer that, please. Second, a worldwide draconian ban on AI image training and generation just isn't going to happen. Very few legal things are coordinated worldwide, and copyright law is incredibly low on the list. Even training without consent can be addressed. Google trained some of their AI from Google Photos. Which they made free for unlimited use so that us fools would produce billions of images, accept the terms we don't even read and voila: AI legally trained.
    - stevewatson301 4y ago
      Just because you can buy a knife to kill someone discreetly, doesn't mean that we should just give up on the idea of making murder illegal. Of course "killing someone" and "copying someone's artwork" are at different levels, however, I'm sure artists would beg to differ.
denkmoon 4y ago
>It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. perfect example, as piracy has _never_ been effectively stopped and _never_ will be effectively stopped by legislative means
- sensanaty 4y ago
  Sure, on a small scale, but Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and I'm sure many other platforms exist and are quite successful. I'm a big pirate myself, with multiple TB harddrives full of pirated music accrued over the years, but even I choose to use Spotify and Tidal a lot of the time, out of pure convenience.
  - komali2 4y ago
    Exactly though, the fears of the industry of the time were met, one way or the other. Spotify and others came around and basically destroyed the album / CD model, led to independent publishers having way more power than ever before. It is a record company hell that we're living in right now. Despite spending as much as they did to kill Napster, they weren't able to stop the "inevitable."
  - ilyt 4y ago
    > Sure, on a small scale, but Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and I'm sure many other platforms exist and are quite successful. They are not stopping the piracy. They are providing better service than piracy. As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. Offer something convenient and worth the price and a lot of people will pay it just fine.
thordenmark 4y ago
Napster distributed whole songs. If it sampled 1000's of songs then created original compositions that sounded kind of like the 'style' of those songs what would the legalities be? That is a huge difference. I'm a professional artist who has been able to make a good living and support a family, what does this mean when someone with an algorithm and some key words can produce good-enough work in a fraction of the time for pennies? There is a huge swath of professional artists whose livelihoods are at stake. Is this like the stagecoach makers when automobiles where invented? Or is this like Napster stealing copyrighted material? This is new territory.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Very much the first. (1) Ubiquitous new technology (2) New domains the technology opens It's even more fundamental than stagecoach --> automobile. It is more like cipher --> RSA -- fundamental change based on basic math and ubiquitous, readily available technology. The toothpaste is out of the tube!
dirtyid 4y ago
No chance. IMO i can see case scenario artists get together to lobby for some sort of label system like food industry to label non synthetic art for those interested in supporting bespoke human created works. Then watch said artists get called out as fakers for using AI assisted features like context-aware fill.
kodah 4y ago
Personally, I'm on-board with protecting artists incomes, however, I think there's a middle-ground. First, I'd like to correct a fact you omitted: Napster, Limewire and the like didn't come out of nowhere. They were created because artists and their recording companies forced consumers to buy entire CDs at inflated prices that kept rising. Now, what they got in return from their consumers after that wasn't fair either. I don't think making AI generation illegal for everyone makes sense. That's how you get the Metallica's of the world bank-rolling professional grifters to hold people's grandmother's financially hostage. I do think it makes sense to bar AI generated products from making money if the works used to train it did not belong to that company or individual. If you create a program using CoPilot, you should not earn money. If you make a comic using Stable Diffusion, you don't deserve money. This keeps the power players in check while allowing artists paths to use these AIs if they own their own work outright. Imagine if you could train CoPilot on your own code and then use it to help you. That to me sounds like the framing for a new and responsible form of innovation.
- _c3ag 4y ago
  yeah! i think AI tools must be transparent of the input, period. it feels too unfair leading a new art style and simply be copied with machine precision and speed… opting to not contribute to the neural network database should be a thing but i do not know how reverse engineering of output can be done
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - visarga 4y ago
    Yes, there should be opt outs for ML training. They could take many forms - robots.txt rules, special HTML tags, http headers, plain text tags or a centralised registry. You can take any work out of the training set without diminishing the end result. But doing so would mean being left out of the new art movement. Your name will not be conjured, your style not replicated, your artistic influence thinning out. If an artist wants her works to have the fate of BBC archives, that removed millions of hours of radio and tv shows from the internet, then go ahead. The historic BBC content was never shared, liked, commented or had any influence since the internet became a thing. A cultural suicide to protect ancient copyrights.
tomrod 4y ago
I think the tech evolution will drive a niche luxury market for authenticity.
II2II 4y ago
> Use of the output of systems like Copilot or Stable Diffusion becomes a violation of copyright. That really should depend upon the output. Many, if not most, people learn an art by imitating the style of established artists. Some will carry on with that style. Others will develop their own, though it will probably always carry elements from those they imitated. Should injecting a machine into the process automatically make it illegal? There are going to be clear cut cases where it should be, cases where so much is imitated that it goes beyond style and into substance. Yet that means we should have a human looking at the output to determine if it is too close to a copy, rather than banning AI generated art altogether. To do so would put the creative process in peril. This is not because machine learning reflects our definition of creativity. Rather it is because it is difficult to define what human creativity itself is. (That said, I do believe that using the artist's name as a way of promoting their own work is stepping over a line.)
- orangesite 4y ago
  > That really should depend upon the output. Except, in copyright law it depends on the _input_. These models would not exist if they were not first fed the source material. Until we have systems that are not trained on a pre-existing corpus this will remain true. No matter how clever the algorithm, without the source material you have no output. Zilch. Nada. Now, when the source material is someone else's property this means that without - someone else's property - you would have had no output. So, when you want to use someone else's property, which you do not own, the general rule is that you a) first ask them if you may and b) pay them for the right to use their property. In this sense it is no different than using a photocopier. It's the copyright ownership of the material you put into the machine that will interest the judge not the quality of the copy. I'm really looking forward to the first court cases and predict that much hilarity will ensue!
  - visarga 4y ago
    Trained models don't have the actual images inside, they have summed up gradients. So what they are doing is far from a copy&paste job, it's more like decomposing and recomposing from basic concepts, something made clear by the "variations" mode. Among the things the model learned are some un-copyrightable facts, such as the shapes of various objects and animals, how they relate, their colours and textures - general knowledge for us, humans. Learning this is OK because you can copyright the expression, but not the idea. Trained models take little from each example they learn. The original model shrunk 4B images to a mere 4GB file, so 1 byte/image worth of information learned from each example, a measly pixel. The DreamBooth finetuning process only uses 20-30 images from the artist, it's more like pinning the desired style than learning to copy. Without Dreambooth its harder but not impossible to find and use a specific style. And the new images are different, combining elements from the prompt, named artists and general world knowledge inside. Can we restrict new things - not copies - from being created, except in patents? Isn't such an open ended restriction a power grab? To make an analogy: can a writer copyright a style of writing, and anything that has a similar style be banned?
virtualritz 4y ago
> It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. AI art is unknown territory. Comparing this to media piracy (e.g. copying music) leads to a fallacy. Specifically: where does fair use stop? And consider: Good artists copy; great artists steal. Any art historian will be able to show you how true this is accross all epochs and styles (and types of art no less, i.e. including e.g. music)[1]. Anything that follows is OT for the debate at hand. It is merely to point out that while not only not applying here (AI art is derivatives/remixed works not simple copies), the notion that the P2P crackdown and its legal repercussions of the early 2000's had anything to do with how much someone creating the music in the very first place got paid is a myth perpetuated by the music industry. Specifically that part of the music industry that is not the artists. > Remember the naive rallying cry among those who thought everyone should have the right to all music, without any compensation for the artist? The only naivity is that compensation of artists played a role in this. Piracy was never noticable for musicians who weren't already stinking rich. And for those, while noticable, it wasn't an issue. One may argue it was/is for people high up in the food chain of the music industry. But even that stands on feet of clay. From [2]: > The main finding of the present study is that in 2014, the recorded music industry lost approximately €170 million of sales revenue in the EU as a consequence of the consumption of recorded music from illegal sources. This total corresponds to 5.2% of the sector’s revenues from physical and digital sales. These lost sales are estimated to result in direct employment losses of 829 jobs. There are approx. two million people being employed by this industry in the EU[3]. Go figure. For further reading on the funny idea that artists got compensated before P2P and didn't after there is Courtney Love's classic debunking piece on musician's revenue around the time Napster was a thing[4]. And some comparable numbers from what this means for artists trying to make a living of digital music today [5][6]. [1] My father was an art historian. My opinion is mainly based on spending every holiday of my youth looking at art from all epochs across Europe, first hand. Nolens volens I may add. I.e. I'm saying: take my word for it. :] [2] https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/document_library/observatory/resources/research-and-studies/ip_infringement/study7/Music_industry_en.pdf https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/docum... [3] https://www.ifpi.org/music-supports-two-million-jobs-contributes-e81-9-billion-annually-to-economy-of-eu-and-uk-study-finds/ https://www.ifpi.org/music-supports-two-million-jobs-contrib... [4] https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ [5] https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/12/how-many-spotify-streams-are-necessary-to-live-above-the-poverty-line.html https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/12/how-many-spotify-str... [6] https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-million-artists-royalties-1038408/ https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-million-ar... Edit: typos
tracker1 4y ago
I think it may fall along very similar lines to "sampling" in terms of use... the AI model obviously used copies/samples of original/copyright works. I'm not saying I support the argument or that it will stand up in court, but definitely some merit to making it.
shadowgovt 4y ago
At this point, I don't think the law can stop it. We're looking at a technology that can easily become illegal but ubiquitous, like Napster in the heady days of flouting audio copyright. If the entire Western copyright sorted of influence unifies on it being an illegal system, Russia and China are under no disincentive to ban the techs. Especially if it makes their entertainment industries more competitive with the Hollywood machine.
- macrolime 4y ago
  Not just entertainment, whoever bans this will lose out everywhere and become a backwards shithole.
strken 4y ago
The process for a human to copy her style in an original work would be similar, and legal. I don't think it's a good idea to prevent the automation of human-capable tasks, because it's anticompetitive: it protects an industry (albeit a small one of starving artists) at the cost of consumers. The harms to artists are obvious and immediate, but limited and small. The benefits of letting an ML model train in the same way as a human are vague and in the future, but might be capable of massive transformative changes in the way we work. I think it's right to be careful about "protecting" a limited number of people at the cost of enormous future potential.
- fdupress 4y ago
  Enormous future potential for derivative work gets created. Enormous future potential for original work gets erased. Why would anyone in their right mind choose to put effort into creating original art if there is "one easy trick" to get around copyright by simply turning their art into a model that can be used to churn out things they could have produced?
  - cthalupa 4y ago
    >Why would anyone in their right mind choose to put effort into creating original art if there is "one easy trick" to get around copyright by simply turning their art into a model that can be used to churn out things they could have produced? Why do some artists still paint on canvas instead of using photoshop or krita, where you can easily ctrl+z any mistake, never need to mix any paint, can move layers up and down, etc. etc. etc.? Why do some photographers still shoot anything smaller than large format with film when medium format and full frame digital cameras exist? Why do some people still use analog synths when Native Instrument's Komplete exists? Why do some guitarists still use amplifiers when they could use an AxeFx/Kemper/Neural DSP? Most of those options are also more expensive, on top of being more inefficient/difficult/generally burdensome, yet people still do them. People do a lot of things that are not necessarily the most efficient way to do something. They like the minor differences, or enjoy the process, or many other things. I also don't see how SD and similar get around copyright. Even if training these models on copyrighted images is legal, that doesn't mean that the output they produce necessarily is. It doesn't matter how I create a depiction of Iron Man, be it SD or a paintbrush and canvas, I do not have the rights to reproduce him. And for things that can't be protected by copyright, such as style, I am not hindered by it no matter if it is created with SD or colored pencils on a sketchpad.
Teever 4y ago
Modern intellectual property law, specifically copyright, is so brazenly slanted to maximize benefit profit for American corporations at the expense of your averge person with zero consideration for the rule of law or the democratic process. Year after year entrenched media interests lobby the US government to make IP policy more corporate friendly and those policy changes are forced on the citizens of countries around the world through strong armed free trade agreements. We don't get to discuss these thigs as citizens of soverign states, they just happen to us. Maybe we want to live in a world with a substantially shorter copyright term, is that so wrong? Maybe that would be better for individuals and society as a whole but we'll never know because American companies wont risk the chance of losing money or power to find out. How long do you think should copyright should be before it reverts back to the public domain? 5 years? 25? 50? 100? 500? 1000? How much is too much copyright?
judge2020 4y ago
> The weights are like distilled intellectual property. You're distributing an enormous body of other people's work, to enable derivative work without attribution? Huge harm to society, make it illegal. The thing is that you're distributing only the instructions for making other peoples' work. There are art books and articles explain the styles of certain artists and what techniques they use to achieve it; you could probably recreate "the Mona Lisa but in the style of Marc Chagall with cool glasses on" with real paint if you had previously stared at both the Mona Lisa and Marc's art for hours at a time. Are you infringing upon either of their copyrights by combining them? Probably not. But if you just recreated the Mona Lisa after having stared at it for hours, and it turned out nearly identical, then it would be. So where is the line?
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  Well think if you took the left side of Mona Lisa and combined it with Van Gog's Starry night? Would that be ok? Of course not. But if you took 100 paintings from 100 artists and clipped all into small jigsaw pieces then recombined them randomly to create a new picture, that would probably not be considered "derived art". What matters is how much creativity you put into the process. Does the creative esthetics of the work derive from your efforts, or from those of the existing author's existing art. But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view, and is what seems to be happening here. Consider the history of trademark lawsuits. You can be sued if you create something that somehow resembles an existing trademark, say use the exact same color as Coca-Cola for something similar. So I think the guiding principle is or should be whether what you create can be confused with the work of some other highly original artist. It doesn't matter if you painted it all, if it looks similar enough that people could confuse it with the original artist's work, you are infringing.
  - deadbeeves 4y ago
    >But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view What makes you say that? A work is considered derivative with regards to another work, not to an author. If we take your jigsaw example and accept that the final result would not be derivative of any of the works that contributed each individual piece, and then pretend as if in actuality all the sources were from the same artist, what would change that would suddenly make the result derivative from some or all of the original works?
qball 4y ago
>It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. Trivially, you still can't. Lawbreaking when it comes to copyright is enabled at scale by computers (like everything else); so unless you manage to win the war on general-purpose computing there's nothing you can do. Sure, streaming has taken the place of piracy (growing the pie is better than strict conservatism), and Patreon (and its offshoots) has made it possible to be paid for recurring content that's inevitably going to be pirated, but file-sharing (torrents) and alt.binaries (abusing free storage sites as a backend for streaming video) still work just as well as they ever did. The only reason people pay for content is that they want to, provided the price isn't usurious or infinite ("not sold in your region"); those that continue to work with said want prosper, those that fight it fail, and that's just the way it is.
randyrand 4y ago
- Copyright expires 70 years after an artists death. - Corporations / Contributers can buy images, or draw their own - Getty Images already has the rights to 477 million images. This is inevitable.
nonima 4y ago
>It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. You can't. Soulseek is alive and well. It started with Napster and now others are carrying the torch.
- b800h 4y ago
  Except now the vast majority of people pay for music via Spotify.
grumbel 4y ago
> There's nothing inevitable about it. Everything you can come up with as a "solution" is really just a stop gap measure. Instead of specifying the style by name, you could specify it by example image. Instead of training the AI on her images directly, you could train a second generation AI on images drawn in that style generated by another AI that was trained on her images. Thus your second generation AI would be free of any copyrighted work. And of course the whole copyright thing only comes into play when people redistribute the AI. If AI is easy to train yourself locally, even that doesn't matter anymore. If you want to go all Butlerian Jihad on the world, you might be able to stop it. As long as AI is allowed, this ain't going away, it's only getting easier, cheaper and faster.
- happymellon 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure if you steal a diamond from a diamond thief it is still considered theft from the original owner. Your "indirection" hasn't ever been a valid argument.
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    In fact, in that case, the indirection does the opposite of protect: even receiving the diamond from the original thief as a gift is illegal.
  - anhner 4y ago
    Except you're not stealing anything and the "thief" didn't steal anything, either. You both just made a copy.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  For all we know, this could already be happening. Every digital image produced yesterday could have been AI-generated for all anyone knows. The original artist in this story could already be using AI to create their own work. Of course, I don't actually believe that's what's happening in this case, but the fact that it could means it's probably impossible to return this genie to its lamp.
- mihaic 4y ago
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
> It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. Curious choice of example, because it was never stopped. It just went somewhat out of the mainstream because the industry offered pricing options, like Spotify, who were acceptable for most people so they no longer had an incentive to resort to piracy. Not wanting to pay at all was always a minority position, most people just found it ludicrous to pay full album price for one of two songs that they liked. And still, if you do want song X for free you can still obtain it easily. The industry just no longer makes a fuss about it.
cthalupa 4y ago
>It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. We effectively didn't, though, at least as far as artists are concerned. Streaming revenue is abysmal for artists. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-04-19/spotify-artists-royalty-rate-apple-music https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-... Piracy made music acquisition too convenient for the consumers, so an alternative had to be created - but this alternative really only helps the labels, and not the people actually making the music. It's not clear to me that the streaming world is better for artists than the Napster one. At least anyone wanting to legally listen to music then would buy albums, rather than just having a spotify subscription. Not that royalties on physical CDs were great, but my understanding is they did work out better for most artists than we see with streaming royalties. I don't know what a potential analogy would be here with stable diffusion or dall-e or whatever, but I don't know that people were able to immediately identify the potential downsides with "winning" against piracy, either.
- happymellon 4y ago
  > We effectively didn't, though, at least as far as artists are concerned. Streaming revenue is abysmal for artists. But that's not Napster's fault. Spotify pays a lot of money for playing of a song, of that the artist only sees a tiny percentage due to music middlemen trying to relive the 90's.
  - cthalupa 4y ago
    Sure. And that's why I buy music off Bandcamp whenever I can, and thankfully most of the music I listen to is on smaller labels, so usually even more money goes to artists. I'm just saying that the solutions that pop up once you "win" are not necessarily ones that provide a win for the people you are trying to protect.
  - lozenge 4y ago
    Spotify pays a lot of money for playing a song? Out of a $10/month fee, that clearly can't be true. If P2P was somehow impossible, we would still be buying DRMd tracks for $1 each on iTunes. Spotify would at best, cost $80/month.
wnkrshm 4y ago
There are so many arguments here about big C copyright (Disney etc.) and how it is evil and that it shouldn't be an argument - but what I'm seeing is that small artists, freelancers are getting hurt by the output mostly at this point. If this is about big C copyright, where is the Mickey Mouse dreambooth concept? Disney property is seen as property but the labor of some random freelancer is just seen as nothing.
- fennecfoxy 4y ago
  https://imgur.com/a/BzOt61v https://imgur.com/a/BzOt61v 1s to google and 14s for image gen (of 4). It's already all out there.
williamcotton 4y ago
And just how will these new laws be passed? HackerNews upvotes?
pessimizer 4y ago
If artists were required to exclusively sign with globe-spanning conglomerates that pay them in loans and take a cut every time they teach an art class (no good comparison for record companies taking cuts of concert revenue), you'd see a society-breaking, unjustifiable level of protection for an artist's "style." As it is, artists don't have massive teams of lawyers and billions in assets, which makes their concerns irrelevant to the people who would normally be bribed to advocate for them. For copilot, I'd like to see more models trained on stolen and leaked proprietary code from hacks, or an organized movement to leak code from businesses and feed it into a freely-shared model. If transformation into the model is enough to launder copyright, it ceases to be stolen code. I'm sure it would be helpful in cloning proprietary products.

franciscop 4y ago

How do you exactly define a single person's style vs a genre? While any artist might specialize, as is the case here, in a single style and distill it and create a large body of work in the specific style, do you think no one before created a similar work of art in the same style? Naming a recognizable artist is the current "lazy" way of doing this instead of naming every possible visual style; and sure we could ban name and surname, but should an artist own "dreamy flat pastel colored illustrations of cities of characters with high contrast, no lines, children illustrations" for perpetuity? Definitely not, for the style itself there's likely hundreds of artists that have done something similar before and after.

deleted 4y ago

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gort19 4y ago

CookieCrisp 4y ago

I think the advantage of using them is too great, companies that use the networks will outcompete ones that don't -- even if it were made illegal in the US it won't be everywhere. I imagine when it comes down to it, the law's going to be pragmatic. What happens to US industries if we allow this, and what happens if we don't, and my guess is that it ends up being allowed. I'm not saying that's good or right - I really don't know how I even feel about the AI networks morally... I just think money is going to win out.

PuddleCheese 4y ago
Copyright exists to incentivize authors, artists, scientists, etc. to create original works by providing a temporary monopoly. The arguments suggesting that people shouldn't benefit from their work on an individual level, and pointing to music piracy as an example of why we shouldn't try, strike me as arguments for general inaction and fatalism. Not sure what the goal is, there...
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  The goal is to get these people to face reality. The fact is we are in the 21st century, the age of information. Their creations are just data, and data can be copied, processed and transmitted worldwide at negligible costs. There is no controlling it. The goal is to make them stop trying to control it. Because their attempts to control it are ruining computers for all of us. We already have harmful stuff like DRM on every chip because of these people. Platforms are getting more locked down, our freedom as users and programmers is decreasing. They will destroy free computing as we know it if this keeps going unchecked.
  - PuddleCheese 4y ago
    Because someone may see a version of reality where people are incapable of benefiting from their own work does not mean that it's by any means a settled issue or indicative of "Reality". I doubt these conversations would exist if it was. It is indeed the current year, but that doesn't mean that because things can be metaphorically distilled with false and reductionist equivalencies, that it should all be free for the taking to benefit a few people who outran regulation. Regarding the concept of control, artists were first put in a defensive position by the individuals who started using their work without their consent, and who are trying exercise their own control over the artwork produced by others through monetizing outputs. Are only companies like Stability.AI, OpenAI, and Midjourney exclusively permitted to use and control the artwork of others, and allowed to charge for access to models which use this artwork without compensation or accreditation to the original authors? Are those artists computers not also being ruined? Do they not deserve representation? We need to stop demonizing the idea that someone can benefit from their work because there are some companies that have fought to extend copyright for their own benefit. Copyright REFORM is generally a much more supportable issue than the idea that everything should be free in perpetuity...

TAForObvReasons 4y ago

Music piracy didn't stop because of the Napster shutdown. It just manifested itself in different ways. Now all you need to do is use youtube-dl to download the youtube video or soundcloud track or bandcamp album with the -x flag to extract audio. Both the software and the original media sources are legal. In fact, GitHub was forced to take a public stance on youtube-dl after a DMCA takedown request on the repo. The biggest reason the laws can't possibly hope to stop the practice is: > [MysteryInc152] told me the training process took about 2.5 hours on a GPU at Vast.ai, and cost less than $2. As those costs are driven down and the software is accessible to more people, distribution of the weights will not be needed.

ilaksh 4y ago
I think that one of the main reasons YouTube became so huge was music piracy.

wwweston 4y ago

> There's nothing inevitable about it. Laws exist to protect people. Amen. I think one thing we're going to have to look at is having the expectation of a separate agreement for having ones work go into a training set. Maybe equity should even be the standard here. And informed consent associated with it. People need to know they're training something else to do their job as well as doing the job, selling the cow instead of the milk.

deleted 4y ago
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fleddr 4y ago

Here's why I believe it is inevitable... It's already out there. On people's local computers and soon their mobile devices. People are tinkering with it at warp speed. This point addresses that it technically cannot be stopped. I don't expect it to be possible to detect that the art is AI-generated. This becomes further impossible when using a personal input image as well as many follow-up edits or composite works. It blends into normal image creation. The only way to prove that it's not AI-generated is to record in-progress "human art" as is sometimes done in art contests, but this isn't reasonable to legally require of every single piece of art to be created. You can't enforce what you can't detect.

bugfix-66 4y ago
The companies that pay artists' salaries won't be willing to secretly break the law to save money. Microsoft won't legally be able to continue its abuse of GitHub. Copilot will be dead. OpenAI and Stability will not legally be able to profit from large-scale intellectual property theft. All these violations will end. These are the most significant digits. The residual amateur piracy doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if random guy gets some leet neural net warez and uses it to make his desktop wallpaper.
- fleddr 4y ago
  First, you didn't address my point that you cannot detect AI output. I already have Stability running on my PC. I generate an image with it. How do you know the output comes from Stability? Answer that, please. Second, a worldwide draconian ban on AI image training and generation just isn't going to happen. Very few legal things are coordinated worldwide, and copyright law is incredibly low on the list. Even training without consent can be addressed. Google trained some of their AI from Google Photos. Which they made free for unlimited use so that us fools would produce billions of images, accept the terms we don't even read and voila: AI legally trained.
  - stevewatson301 4y ago
    Just because you can buy a knife to kill someone discreetly, doesn't mean that we should just give up on the idea of making murder illegal. Of course "killing someone" and "copying someone's artwork" are at different levels, however, I'm sure artists would beg to differ.

denkmoon 4y ago

>It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. perfect example, as piracy has _never_ been effectively stopped and _never_ will be effectively stopped by legislative means

sensanaty 4y ago
Sure, on a small scale, but Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and I'm sure many other platforms exist and are quite successful. I'm a big pirate myself, with multiple TB harddrives full of pirated music accrued over the years, but even I choose to use Spotify and Tidal a lot of the time, out of pure convenience.
- komali2 4y ago
  Exactly though, the fears of the industry of the time were met, one way or the other. Spotify and others came around and basically destroyed the album / CD model, led to independent publishers having way more power than ever before. It is a record company hell that we're living in right now. Despite spending as much as they did to kill Napster, they weren't able to stop the "inevitable."
- ilyt 4y ago
  > Sure, on a small scale, but Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and I'm sure many other platforms exist and are quite successful. They are not stopping the piracy. They are providing better service than piracy. As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. Offer something convenient and worth the price and a lot of people will pay it just fine.

thordenmark 4y ago

Napster distributed whole songs. If it sampled 1000's of songs then created original compositions that sounded kind of like the 'style' of those songs what would the legalities be? That is a huge difference. I'm a professional artist who has been able to make a good living and support a family, what does this mean when someone with an algorithm and some key words can produce good-enough work in a fraction of the time for pennies? There is a huge swath of professional artists whose livelihoods are at stake. Is this like the stagecoach makers when automobiles where invented? Or is this like Napster stealing copyrighted material? This is new territory.

tomrod 4y ago
Very much the first. (1) Ubiquitous new technology (2) New domains the technology opens It's even more fundamental than stagecoach --> automobile. It is more like cipher --> RSA -- fundamental change based on basic math and ubiquitous, readily available technology. The toothpaste is out of the tube!

dirtyid 4y ago

No chance. IMO i can see case scenario artists get together to lobby for some sort of label system like food industry to label non synthetic art for those interested in supporting bespoke human created works. Then watch said artists get called out as fakers for using AI assisted features like context-aware fill.

kodah 4y ago

Personally, I'm on-board with protecting artists incomes, however, I think there's a middle-ground. First, I'd like to correct a fact you omitted: Napster, Limewire and the like didn't come out of nowhere. They were created because artists and their recording companies forced consumers to buy entire CDs at inflated prices that kept rising. Now, what they got in return from their consumers after that wasn't fair either. I don't think making AI generation illegal for everyone makes sense. That's how you get the Metallica's of the world bank-rolling professional grifters to hold people's grandmother's financially hostage. I do think it makes sense to bar AI generated products from making money if the works used to train it did not belong to that company or individual. If you create a program using CoPilot, you should not earn money. If you make a comic using Stable Diffusion, you don't deserve money. This keeps the power players in check while allowing artists paths to use these AIs if they own their own work outright. Imagine if you could train CoPilot on your own code and then use it to help you. That to me sounds like the framing for a new and responsible form of innovation.

_c3ag 4y ago
yeah! i think AI tools must be transparent of the input, period. it feels too unfair leading a new art style and simply be copied with machine precision and speed… opting to not contribute to the neural network database should be a thing but i do not know how reverse engineering of output can be done
- deleted 4y ago
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- visarga 4y ago
  Yes, there should be opt outs for ML training. They could take many forms - robots.txt rules, special HTML tags, http headers, plain text tags or a centralised registry. You can take any work out of the training set without diminishing the end result. But doing so would mean being left out of the new art movement. Your name will not be conjured, your style not replicated, your artistic influence thinning out. If an artist wants her works to have the fate of BBC archives, that removed millions of hours of radio and tv shows from the internet, then go ahead. The historic BBC content was never shared, liked, commented or had any influence since the internet became a thing. A cultural suicide to protect ancient copyrights.

tomrod 4y ago

I think the tech evolution will drive a niche luxury market for authenticity.

II2II 4y ago

> Use of the output of systems like Copilot or Stable Diffusion becomes a violation of copyright. That really should depend upon the output. Many, if not most, people learn an art by imitating the style of established artists. Some will carry on with that style. Others will develop their own, though it will probably always carry elements from those they imitated. Should injecting a machine into the process automatically make it illegal? There are going to be clear cut cases where it should be, cases where so much is imitated that it goes beyond style and into substance. Yet that means we should have a human looking at the output to determine if it is too close to a copy, rather than banning AI generated art altogether. To do so would put the creative process in peril. This is not because machine learning reflects our definition of creativity. Rather it is because it is difficult to define what human creativity itself is. (That said, I do believe that using the artist's name as a way of promoting their own work is stepping over a line.)

orangesite 4y ago
> That really should depend upon the output. Except, in copyright law it depends on the _input_. These models would not exist if they were not first fed the source material. Until we have systems that are not trained on a pre-existing corpus this will remain true. No matter how clever the algorithm, without the source material you have no output. Zilch. Nada. Now, when the source material is someone else's property this means that without - someone else's property - you would have had no output. So, when you want to use someone else's property, which you do not own, the general rule is that you a) first ask them if you may and b) pay them for the right to use their property. In this sense it is no different than using a photocopier. It's the copyright ownership of the material you put into the machine that will interest the judge not the quality of the copy. I'm really looking forward to the first court cases and predict that much hilarity will ensue!
- visarga 4y ago
  Trained models don't have the actual images inside, they have summed up gradients. So what they are doing is far from a copy&paste job, it's more like decomposing and recomposing from basic concepts, something made clear by the "variations" mode. Among the things the model learned are some un-copyrightable facts, such as the shapes of various objects and animals, how they relate, their colours and textures - general knowledge for us, humans. Learning this is OK because you can copyright the expression, but not the idea. Trained models take little from each example they learn. The original model shrunk 4B images to a mere 4GB file, so 1 byte/image worth of information learned from each example, a measly pixel. The DreamBooth finetuning process only uses 20-30 images from the artist, it's more like pinning the desired style than learning to copy. Without Dreambooth its harder but not impossible to find and use a specific style. And the new images are different, combining elements from the prompt, named artists and general world knowledge inside. Can we restrict new things - not copies - from being created, except in patents? Isn't such an open ended restriction a power grab? To make an analogy: can a writer copyright a style of writing, and anything that has a similar style be banned?

virtualritz 4y ago

> It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. AI art is unknown territory. Comparing this to media piracy (e.g. copying music) leads to a fallacy. Specifically: where does fair use stop? And consider: Good artists copy; great artists steal. Any art historian will be able to show you how true this is accross all epochs and styles (and types of art no less, i.e. including e.g. music)[1]. Anything that follows is OT for the debate at hand. It is merely to point out that while not only not applying here (AI art is derivatives/remixed works not simple copies), the notion that the P2P crackdown and its legal repercussions of the early 2000's had anything to do with how much someone creating the music in the very first place got paid is a myth perpetuated by the music industry. Specifically that part of the music industry that is not the artists. > Remember the naive rallying cry among those who thought everyone should have the right to all music, without any compensation for the artist? The only naivity is that compensation of artists played a role in this. Piracy was never noticable for musicians who weren't already stinking rich. And for those, while noticable, it wasn't an issue. One may argue it was/is for people high up in the food chain of the music industry. But even that stands on feet of clay. From [2]: > The main finding of the present study is that in 2014, the recorded music industry lost approximately €170 million of sales revenue in the EU as a consequence of the consumption of recorded music from illegal sources. This total corresponds to 5.2% of the sector’s revenues from physical and digital sales. These lost sales are estimated to result in direct employment losses of 829 jobs. There are approx. two million people being employed by this industry in the EU[3]. Go figure. For further reading on the funny idea that artists got compensated before P2P and didn't after there is Courtney Love's classic debunking piece on musician's revenue around the time Napster was a thing[4]. And some comparable numbers from what this means for artists trying to make a living of digital music today [5][6]. [1] My father was an art historian. My opinion is mainly based on spending every holiday of my youth looking at art from all epochs across Europe, first hand. Nolens volens I may add. I.e. I'm saying: take my word for it. :] [2] https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/document_library/observatory/resources/research-and-studies/ip_infringement/study7/Music_industry_en.pdf https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/docum... [3] https://www.ifpi.org/music-supports-two-million-jobs-contributes-e81-9-billion-annually-to-economy-of-eu-and-uk-study-finds/ https://www.ifpi.org/music-supports-two-million-jobs-contrib... [4] https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ [5] https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/12/how-many-spotify-streams-are-necessary-to-live-above-the-poverty-line.html https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/12/how-many-spotify-str... [6] https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-million-artists-royalties-1038408/ https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-million-ar... Edit: typos

tracker1 4y ago

I think it may fall along very similar lines to "sampling" in terms of use... the AI model obviously used copies/samples of original/copyright works. I'm not saying I support the argument or that it will stand up in court, but definitely some merit to making it.

shadowgovt 4y ago

At this point, I don't think the law can stop it. We're looking at a technology that can easily become illegal but ubiquitous, like Napster in the heady days of flouting audio copyright. If the entire Western copyright sorted of influence unifies on it being an illegal system, Russia and China are under no disincentive to ban the techs. Especially if it makes their entertainment industries more competitive with the Hollywood machine.

macrolime 4y ago
Not just entertainment, whoever bans this will lose out everywhere and become a backwards shithole.

strken 4y ago

The process for a human to copy her style in an original work would be similar, and legal. I don't think it's a good idea to prevent the automation of human-capable tasks, because it's anticompetitive: it protects an industry (albeit a small one of starving artists) at the cost of consumers. The harms to artists are obvious and immediate, but limited and small. The benefits of letting an ML model train in the same way as a human are vague and in the future, but might be capable of massive transformative changes in the way we work. I think it's right to be careful about "protecting" a limited number of people at the cost of enormous future potential.

fdupress 4y ago
Enormous future potential for derivative work gets created. Enormous future potential for original work gets erased. Why would anyone in their right mind choose to put effort into creating original art if there is "one easy trick" to get around copyright by simply turning their art into a model that can be used to churn out things they could have produced?
- cthalupa 4y ago
  >Why would anyone in their right mind choose to put effort into creating original art if there is "one easy trick" to get around copyright by simply turning their art into a model that can be used to churn out things they could have produced? Why do some artists still paint on canvas instead of using photoshop or krita, where you can easily ctrl+z any mistake, never need to mix any paint, can move layers up and down, etc. etc. etc.? Why do some photographers still shoot anything smaller than large format with film when medium format and full frame digital cameras exist? Why do some people still use analog synths when Native Instrument's Komplete exists? Why do some guitarists still use amplifiers when they could use an AxeFx/Kemper/Neural DSP? Most of those options are also more expensive, on top of being more inefficient/difficult/generally burdensome, yet people still do them. People do a lot of things that are not necessarily the most efficient way to do something. They like the minor differences, or enjoy the process, or many other things. I also don't see how SD and similar get around copyright. Even if training these models on copyrighted images is legal, that doesn't mean that the output they produce necessarily is. It doesn't matter how I create a depiction of Iron Man, be it SD or a paintbrush and canvas, I do not have the rights to reproduce him. And for things that can't be protected by copyright, such as style, I am not hindered by it no matter if it is created with SD or colored pencils on a sketchpad.

Teever 4y ago

Modern intellectual property law, specifically copyright, is so brazenly slanted to maximize benefit profit for American corporations at the expense of your averge person with zero consideration for the rule of law or the democratic process. Year after year entrenched media interests lobby the US government to make IP policy more corporate friendly and those policy changes are forced on the citizens of countries around the world through strong armed free trade agreements. We don't get to discuss these thigs as citizens of soverign states, they just happen to us. Maybe we want to live in a world with a substantially shorter copyright term, is that so wrong? Maybe that would be better for individuals and society as a whole but we'll never know because American companies wont risk the chance of losing money or power to find out. How long do you think should copyright should be before it reverts back to the public domain? 5 years? 25? 50? 100? 500? 1000? How much is too much copyright?

judge2020 4y ago

> The weights are like distilled intellectual property. You're distributing an enormous body of other people's work, to enable derivative work without attribution? Huge harm to society, make it illegal. The thing is that you're distributing only the instructions for making other peoples' work. There are art books and articles explain the styles of certain artists and what techniques they use to achieve it; you could probably recreate "the Mona Lisa but in the style of Marc Chagall with cool glasses on" with real paint if you had previously stared at both the Mona Lisa and Marc's art for hours at a time. Are you infringing upon either of their copyrights by combining them? Probably not. But if you just recreated the Mona Lisa after having stared at it for hours, and it turned out nearly identical, then it would be. So where is the line?

galaxyLogic 4y ago
Well think if you took the left side of Mona Lisa and combined it with Van Gog's Starry night? Would that be ok? Of course not. But if you took 100 paintings from 100 artists and clipped all into small jigsaw pieces then recombined them randomly to create a new picture, that would probably not be considered "derived art". What matters is how much creativity you put into the process. Does the creative esthetics of the work derive from your efforts, or from those of the existing author's existing art. But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view, and is what seems to be happening here. Consider the history of trademark lawsuits. You can be sued if you create something that somehow resembles an existing trademark, say use the exact same color as Coca-Cola for something similar. So I think the guiding principle is or should be whether what you create can be confused with the work of some other highly original artist. It doesn't matter if you painted it all, if it looks similar enough that people could confuse it with the original artist's work, you are infringing.
- deadbeeves 4y ago
  >But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view What makes you say that? A work is considered derivative with regards to another work, not to an author. If we take your jigsaw example and accept that the final result would not be derivative of any of the works that contributed each individual piece, and then pretend as if in actuality all the sources were from the same artist, what would change that would suddenly make the result derivative from some or all of the original works?

qball 4y ago

>It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. Trivially, you still can't. Lawbreaking when it comes to copyright is enabled at scale by computers (like everything else); so unless you manage to win the war on general-purpose computing there's nothing you can do. Sure, streaming has taken the place of piracy (growing the pie is better than strict conservatism), and Patreon (and its offshoots) has made it possible to be paid for recurring content that's inevitably going to be pirated, but file-sharing (torrents) and alt.binaries (abusing free storage sites as a backend for streaming video) still work just as well as they ever did. The only reason people pay for content is that they want to, provided the price isn't usurious or infinite ("not sold in your region"); those that continue to work with said want prosper, those that fight it fail, and that's just the way it is.

randyrand 4y ago

- Copyright expires 70 years after an artists death. - Corporations / Contributers can buy images, or draw their own - Getty Images already has the rights to 477 million images. This is inevitable.

nonima 4y ago

>It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. You can't. Soulseek is alive and well. It started with Napster and now others are carrying the torch.

b800h 4y ago
Except now the vast majority of people pay for music via Spotify.

grumbel 4y ago

> There's nothing inevitable about it. Everything you can come up with as a "solution" is really just a stop gap measure. Instead of specifying the style by name, you could specify it by example image. Instead of training the AI on her images directly, you could train a second generation AI on images drawn in that style generated by another AI that was trained on her images. Thus your second generation AI would be free of any copyrighted work. And of course the whole copyright thing only comes into play when people redistribute the AI. If AI is easy to train yourself locally, even that doesn't matter anymore. If you want to go all Butlerian Jihad on the world, you might be able to stop it. As long as AI is allowed, this ain't going away, it's only getting easier, cheaper and faster.

happymellon 4y ago
I'm pretty sure if you steal a diamond from a diamond thief it is still considered theft from the original owner. Your "indirection" hasn't ever been a valid argument.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  In fact, in that case, the indirection does the opposite of protect: even receiving the diamond from the original thief as a gift is illegal.
- anhner 4y ago
  Except you're not stealing anything and the "thief" didn't steal anything, either. You both just made a copy.
oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
For all we know, this could already be happening. Every digital image produced yesterday could have been AI-generated for all anyone knows. The original artist in this story could already be using AI to create their own work. Of course, I don't actually believe that's what's happening in this case, but the fact that it could means it's probably impossible to return this genie to its lamp.
mihaic 4y ago

Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago

> It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. Curious choice of example, because it was never stopped. It just went somewhat out of the mainstream because the industry offered pricing options, like Spotify, who were acceptable for most people so they no longer had an incentive to resort to piracy. Not wanting to pay at all was always a minority position, most people just found it ludicrous to pay full album price for one of two songs that they liked. And still, if you do want song X for free you can still obtain it easily. The industry just no longer makes a fuss about it.

cthalupa 4y ago

>It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. We effectively didn't, though, at least as far as artists are concerned. Streaming revenue is abysmal for artists. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-04-19/spotify-artists-royalty-rate-apple-music https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-... Piracy made music acquisition too convenient for the consumers, so an alternative had to be created - but this alternative really only helps the labels, and not the people actually making the music. It's not clear to me that the streaming world is better for artists than the Napster one. At least anyone wanting to legally listen to music then would buy albums, rather than just having a spotify subscription. Not that royalties on physical CDs were great, but my understanding is they did work out better for most artists than we see with streaming royalties. I don't know what a potential analogy would be here with stable diffusion or dall-e or whatever, but I don't know that people were able to immediately identify the potential downsides with "winning" against piracy, either.

happymellon 4y ago
> We effectively didn't, though, at least as far as artists are concerned. Streaming revenue is abysmal for artists. But that's not Napster's fault. Spotify pays a lot of money for playing of a song, of that the artist only sees a tiny percentage due to music middlemen trying to relive the 90's.
- cthalupa 4y ago
  Sure. And that's why I buy music off Bandcamp whenever I can, and thankfully most of the music I listen to is on smaller labels, so usually even more money goes to artists. I'm just saying that the solutions that pop up once you "win" are not necessarily ones that provide a win for the people you are trying to protect.
- lozenge 4y ago
  Spotify pays a lot of money for playing a song? Out of a $10/month fee, that clearly can't be true. If P2P was somehow impossible, we would still be buying DRMd tracks for $1 each on iTunes. Spotify would at best, cost $80/month.

wnkrshm 4y ago

There are so many arguments here about big C copyright (Disney etc.) and how it is evil and that it shouldn't be an argument - but what I'm seeing is that small artists, freelancers are getting hurt by the output mostly at this point. If this is about big C copyright, where is the Mickey Mouse dreambooth concept? Disney property is seen as property but the labor of some random freelancer is just seen as nothing.

fennecfoxy 4y ago
https://imgur.com/a/BzOt61v https://imgur.com/a/BzOt61v 1s to google and 14s for image gen (of 4). It's already all out there.

williamcotton 4y ago

And just how will these new laws be passed? HackerNews upvotes?

pessimizer 4y ago

If artists were required to exclusively sign with globe-spanning conglomerates that pay them in loans and take a cut every time they teach an art class (no good comparison for record companies taking cuts of concert revenue), you'd see a society-breaking, unjustifiable level of protection for an artist's "style." As it is, artists don't have massive teams of lawyers and billions in assets, which makes their concerns irrelevant to the people who would normally be bribed to advocate for them. For copilot, I'd like to see more models trained on stolen and leaked proprietary code from hacks, or an organized movement to leak code from businesses and feed it into a freely-shared model. If transformation into the model is enough to launder copyright, it ceases to be stolen code. I'm sure it would be helpful in cloning proprietary products.