4 ms·

IANAL but you can’t copyright a concept.

• ROTMetro 4y ago
  But you do have copyright claims to derivative works.
  • prpl 4y ago
    I think that really depends. You can describe the photo conceptually and build a new photo from that, which would be equivalent to clean room engineering.
    • rhizome 4y ago
      But "you" (or I) don't describe the photo, their process does, and I'm not confident that Separation of Concerns would be enough to establish a clean room.
      • jjeaff 4y ago
        But a derivative work requires that major copyrightable elements remain. So it seems like there is a fuzzy line on whether something is really derivative or not. I don't think it is necessarily enough to have simply started with a copyrighted work.
        • williamcotton 4y ago
          Yes, it has to be visually derivative in order to be a copyright infringement, not mathematically derivative! Imagine if Stable Diffusion was made illegal. Someone accuses me of using this illegal tool for an image that doesn’t look like anyone else’s image as far as the court is concerned for copyright. I put the image on my website. If the image itself is not at all infringing, then what is the evidence that Stable Diffusion was used? Should the police be issued a warrant to search my private property for proof that I used Stable Diffusion without a shred of evidence?
      • prpl 4y ago
        I think that depends on how it’s done. If there’s actual visual representation ( bitmaps or FFT coefficients) copied around (and most importantly - more than what might be described as fair use), that would probably be true. If a highly accurate conceptual description is generated then an image generated on that, I would see no issue. I don’t know how it is implemented for the software in question.
        • rhizome 4y ago
          IANAL, but from my understanding of the points at issue, I think a court might be likely to find that a) sucking the image into RAM is a copy in the first place; b) the FFT/etc. would be a (first) derivative work; c) using a form of the original image sufficient to communicate to the alteration processes what it should be altering would constitute a copy; and/or d) identifying something as a de-copyrighted work will undercut any defenses. Here's an interesting answer apropos to all this: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7250/could-i-remove-gplv2-from-this-algorithm-implementation https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7250/could-i-...
      • williamcotton 4y ago
        Clean room? The point of clean room software engineering is that the expressive parts of software are at the organizational level, you know, the basically arbitrary stuff that everyone has a case at being “the best way to structure a program”, so if you happen to have seen the source code you might have been influenced by some relationship between two classes that made sense and since Oracle’s lawyers are going to be breathing down your neck you had better go out of your way to avoid their ire. There is no such thing as “clean room painting” and it should be really obvious why that is…