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So what happens if you put a painting into a mechanical grinder? Is the shapeless pile of dust still copyrighted work? I don’t think so.

jimnotgym 4y ago
The owner of that Banksy painting certainly thinks so.
- limitedsupply 4y ago
  The painting that has several cuts in about 25% of the surface area? Don’t think that constitutes as a shapeless pile of dust.
  - jimnotgym 4y ago
    So what % does?
    - limitedsupply 4y ago
      Not a lawyer, but practically speaking copyright is lost when an item ceases to “exist” itself and can’t be restored. If you cut a painting in half - it’s absolutely still a copyrighted item. If you atomize it and don’t have technology to restore it, then copyright is meaningless. What item exactly is copyrighted?
TheDong 4y ago
Maybe? If you take a bad paper shredder that, say, shreds a photo into large re-usable chunks, run the photo through that, and tape the large re-usable chunks back together, you have a photo with the same copyright as before. If you tape them together in a new creative arrangement, you might apply enough human creativity to create a new copyrighted work. If you grind the original to dust, and then have a mechanical process somehow mechanically re-arrange the pieces back into an image without applying creativity, then the new mechanically created arrangement would, I suspect, be a derived work. Of course, such a process don't really exist, so for the "shapeless dust" question, it's pretty pointless to think about. However, stable diffusion is grinding images down into neural networks, and then without a significant amount of human creativity involved, creating images reconstituted from that dust. Perhaps the prompt counts as human creativity, but that seems fairly unlikely. After all, you can give it a prompt of 'dog' and get reconstituted dust, that hardly seems like it clears a bar. Perhaps the training process somehow injected human creativity, but that also seems difficult to argue, it's an algorithm.

jimnotgym 4y ago

The owner of that Banksy painting certainly thinks so.

limitedsupply 4y ago
The painting that has several cuts in about 25% of the surface area? Don’t think that constitutes as a shapeless pile of dust.
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  So what % does?
  - limitedsupply 4y ago
    Not a lawyer, but practically speaking copyright is lost when an item ceases to “exist” itself and can’t be restored. If you cut a painting in half - it’s absolutely still a copyrighted item. If you atomize it and don’t have technology to restore it, then copyright is meaningless. What item exactly is copyrighted?

TheDong 4y ago

Maybe? If you take a bad paper shredder that, say, shreds a photo into large re-usable chunks, run the photo through that, and tape the large re-usable chunks back together, you have a photo with the same copyright as before. If you tape them together in a new creative arrangement, you might apply enough human creativity to create a new copyrighted work. If you grind the original to dust, and then have a mechanical process somehow mechanically re-arrange the pieces back into an image without applying creativity, then the new mechanically created arrangement would, I suspect, be a derived work. Of course, such a process don't really exist, so for the "shapeless dust" question, it's pretty pointless to think about. However, stable diffusion is grinding images down into neural networks, and then without a significant amount of human creativity involved, creating images reconstituted from that dust. Perhaps the prompt counts as human creativity, but that seems fairly unlikely. After all, you can give it a prompt of 'dog' and get reconstituted dust, that hardly seems like it clears a bar. Perhaps the training process somehow injected human creativity, but that also seems difficult to argue, it's an algorithm.