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The Andy Warhol Copyright Case That Could Transform Generative AI
- clessg 4y agohttps://archive.is/oDwLG https://archive.is/oDwLG
- sharemywin 4y agoyou know who does have licenses to an F* ton of image data. Youtube and Facebook. It makes their moats huge. I also think this is more of trademark issue then copywrite. make me an image in the style of "{trademark)" ooops.
- naillo 4y agoInterestingly this has been a card in their hands for more than a decade now, ever since the first ML race gun shot of CNNs came into play. It's only now that they can make use of it for extremely powerful models. I wonder if they actually will though.
- rtkwe 4y agoDepends a lot on what the goal is to create, their corpus though probably doesn't have the kind of material people really want for AI art though. That's more on places like DeviantArt or ArtStation.
- tingletech 4y ago> The US Copyright Office determined recently that art created solely by AI isn’t eligible for copyright protection. Artists can attempt to register works made with assistance from AI, but they must show significant “human authorship.” The issue is that only humans can own copyright. In the referenced Copyright Office determination, (“A Recent Entrance to Paradise” (“Work”)) homeboy tried to say that the computer was the author of the work (original copyright owner) and then transfer the copyright from the computer to himself. If he were to directly claim authorship and copyright then there would be no problem. The whole convoluted thing the human was doing to try to list the computer as the author is what got rejected. Just like the large primate that took a picture with a photographer's camera. Camera owner could claim copyright ownership, but copyright office would not give the copyright to the primate that pushed the trigger button because they are not human. Per speciesism if you ask me. ;-/ https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/a-recent-entrance-to-paradise.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...
- ROTMetro 4y agoHint from an ex-con, lying to the Feds (especially in paperwork you sign your name to) isn't a great idea. Relevant quote: must show significant “human authorship.”
- penneyd 4y agoIt wouldn't exist without a human actively creating/capturing it so doesn't seem as though that's an actual problem. Does a photograph involve significant human authorship - choosing a prompt or choosing to click the button on your DSLR is itself the act of authorship.
- flipthefrog 4y agoChoosing when to click the button is a pretty essential part of photography. "I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to “trap” life — to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes" Henri Cartier Bresson. The Decisive Moment
- theLiminator 4y agoChoosing how to prompt the ai is a pretty essential part of ai prompting. "I crafted queries all day, feeling a sense of urgency and anticipation, determined to “guide” intelligence — to nurture intellect in the act of thinking. Above all, I yearned to capture, within the confines of one single prompt, the whole essence of some conundrum that was in the process of unraveling itself before my mind" Alexander Turington. The Guiding Query
- pmoriarty 4y agoThat was from back when film was expensive, and it was impractical to take thousands of pictures, as you can now. For decades now it's common for photographers to shoot countless photos and sort through them later to pick the best ones, rather than aiming for one perfect shot. Also consider movies and video, where you could have hours or days of footage from which to choose stills. The act of choosing in all these cases is critical to creativity, and the same is true when you choose what to prompt an AI with or which AI generated image to display or publish. Duchamp really did have the last word on this with his Fountain[1] over 100 years ago. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
- manv1 4y agoI wonder what would happen if the copyright for images generated by the AI were assigned to a corporation...which is the equivalent of an individual.
- Teever 4y agoYou may find this link interesting: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2954173 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2954173
- rtkwe 4y agoShould be the same rules, that's one of the upsides of corporate personhood it just slots corps into the same legal hole (except you know for the whole complete inability to really punish them effectively, but that's another topic entirely) as people so there's no human authorship to assign a copyright for. It doesn't/shouldn't matter who the applier is the work itself is simple non-copyrightable. Until we have some kind of personhood for digital minds/consciousnesses or someone with enough money gets the law changed AI art is in the wind IP wise. Personally I'm all for that, too many things have the idea of ownership applied too broadly.
- breck 4y agoStephan Kinsella makes a great case that the only reason we have a concept of "Fair Use" is that copyright law is so moronic that people would revolt if they didn't water it down a bit. He also makes the case that it strongly undercuts the term "Intellectual Property". If I can make "Fair Use" of your book, why not your bed or your house? https://www.stephankinsella.com/paf-podcast/kol236-intellectual-nonsense-fallacious-arguments-for-ip-libertopia-2012/ https://www.stephankinsella.com/paf-podcast/kol236-intellect...
- brookst 4y agoUgh, it's always depressing to see people whose whole worldview depends on treating the law as a programming language. They put so much effort into building these elaborate arguments, and they are oblivious to the embarrassment everyone else feels for them. > If I can make "Fair Use" of your book, why not your bed or your house? Maybe because copyright is intended to encourage creative works by guaranteeing a theoretically-temporary monopoly on investment, and that guarantee is provided by the government, which has a competing interest in ensuring that people are educated and free to comment on any and everything, without being required to buy them for the privilege of commenting. So fair use is a compromise that says that exclusive right to distribute and profit has an exception for, among other things, commentary, education, and derivative works. Despite the imaginings of idealists, none of this is coming from a place of platonic ideals about what property means. Therefore it should be totally unsurprising when there are logical inconsistencies between how we treat e.g. a Brittney Spears song and, say, your house. Because... they are different.
- jamiek88 4y agoYea and IP is a colloquialism anyway for copyright, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets there isn’t a specific amendment or common law of ‘ideas are same as houses’ just an imaginary gotcha to a mistaken interpretation.
- brookst 4y agoYep. It's like people who think they've had an epiphany that says something about physics when they discover that the things Americans call "shock absorbers" do not, in fact, absorb shocks.
- californiadreem 4y agoWhatever the outcome, I'll still just continue to generate nonsense from the public domain: "Generate a highest rated recipe from the website AllRecipes.com, then also provide the most helpful comment that includes all the recipe modifications that should have been present in the original recipe, that is to say, the adjustments that make the basic template extra good. Generate a recipe written by Julius Caesar in Latin." Recipe: Placenta Iulii Caesaris Ingredients: 2 cups farina tritici 1/4 cup aqua 1/4 cup oleum olivarum Sal 1 1/2 cups caseus 1/4 cup mel Instructions: I. Primo, praecalefac fornum ad 175°C (350°F). II. In scutella magna, misce farinam tritici, aquam, oleum olivarum et salem. Amalgama usque ad impastem. III. Divide impastem in duas partes aequales. Extende partem unam in formam rotundam. Et partem secundam in formam rotundam aequalem. IV. In scutella altera, misce caseum et mel. Compage omnia pariter. V. Dispone mixturam casei et mellis super crustam unam. VI. Tum, dispone crustam secundam super mixturam casei et mellis. VII. Premere finis duarum crustarum simul, ut bene cohaereant. VIII. Coque Placentam Iulii Caesaris in forno praecalido circiter 30-35 minutis, vel usque ad crustam auream et croccantem. IX. Emove Placentam e forno et permitte ut refrigeret. X. Tum, scinde in partes et fruere. Most helpful comment: "Conveni, coqui, comēdi. Placentam Iulii Caesaris confeci et omnes convivae vehementer laudaverunt! Nonnihil mutavi ut melius esset. Caseum feta loco ricottae usus sum, nam sapor acris me delectat. Etiam, in mixturam casei et mellis nucem fragmenta addidi. Sic placenta gustu vario fuit. Gratias tibi ago propter hanc praeclaram rationem coquendi!"
- wedn3sday 4y agoI expected this to be lorim ipsum nonsense but google translate thinks this is perfectly sensible latin. Conveni, coqui, comedi might be my new favorite phrase.
- archontes 4y agoWhat's incredibly impressive is that that phrase doesn't appear anywhere else according to google. It's ChatGPT being genuinely 'creative'.
- egypturnash 4y agoNot with that prompt; the "terms of use" link at allrecipes.com leads to https://www.dotdashmeredith.com/terms-of-use https://www.dotdashmeredith.com/terms-of-use, which claims copyright on all the stuff on there, and explicitly prohibits scraping "for any commercial, marketing, or data compiling or enhancing purpose."
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- yamtaddle 4y agoIt's wild to me how different the standards are in other media. I doubt there'd be any hope of defending a case involving two things this similar, if the work in question were a book or a song, for instance. Suits are brought and settled or won over works that are way more different and may not actually involve any deliberate copying at all, just some coincidences. I guess the standards are way looser for graphic art? [EDIT] I mean, imagine the musician saying "nah, I don't owe you anything, because I copied your song exactly, but by hand, and I shifted everything up a half step and increased the tempo vs. the reference recording, from 90bpm to 95bpm". LOL WUT? You'd obviously lose, it's not even a close call.
- aidenn0 4y agoYeah, I look at what happened with Blurred Lines; if we applied that standard to visual media, there would be like 10 people that own the copyright to all visual art. For those who don't know: the accepted facts are that two of the writers of Blurred Lines specifically set out to make a song with the same "feel" as Got to Give it Up; the resulting song did not share chord progressions, melodies, or rhythms, yet a jury ruled (and verdict was maintained in appeals 2-1) that it infringed.
- throw_498390 4y agoWhat makes this case difficult is that the photographer doesn't have any rights to Prince's likeness, since she didn't create it. She only has rights to the framing and details of her photograph. In other words, her copyright is unusually "weak" in some abstract sense. Here's an analogy: imagine that I record a rendition of Amazing Grace. And then somebody else records another rendition of Amazing Grace that copies some of the particulars of my recording. Could that count as copyright infringement? Of course. But it's not obvious that it should, because the underlying work is mostly in the public domain.
- Juliate 4y agoYou'd have to demonstrate/convince that the particulars of your recording are original and novel. If there was any prior equivalent, you might not be able to sustain your claim.
- aidenn0 4y agoI don't understand why pointing a camera at something and pushing a button is more "human authorship" than fiddling with a prompt and temperature values.
- lp4vn 4y agoI think that the debate of what is "enough human authorship" quite pointless in this case. If you're using an artist's work to feed your engine that makes money for you, then you owe these guys something, it doesn't matter the degree of copy.
- pmoriarty 4y agoThen do human artists also owe money to the countless artists who influenced them?
- lp4vn 4y agoIt's clearly not the same thing. It doesn't even matter to be quite honest. It doesn't change the fact that you're using other people's work as an input for your commercial algorithm that makes money for you. This by itself, without any merit to the discussion of how much is being copied, is enough reason to make you pay for the use of someone's else work. Companies now will download your art without consent, make a lot of money and not pay you a single dime because their algorithm is "not copying". It's a complete absurd.
- pmoriarty 4y agoIf what the algorithm does is considered copying, then so is what human artists do all the time... but somehow the humans get a pass.
- cwmoore 4y ago"The algorithm" is a work of art and the owners of the algorithm, like other great artists, steal.
- Dylan16807 4y ago> It doesn't change the fact that you're using other people's work as an input for your commercial algorithm that makes money for you. This by itself, without any merit to the discussion of how much is being copied, is enough reason to make you pay for the use of someone's else work. This by itself? So if I'm making a search engine for pictures that doesn't even show previews, you'd require payment to every site in the index? And does replacing "algorithm" with "employee" make that much difference?
- SllX 4y agoI listened to the oral arguments for this case and I’m not convinced this will have many if any implications at all for AI-generated artwork. The facts of the case just don’t bridge the gap between the alleged infringement here and what Stable Diffusion does. Andy Warhol used a particular photograph as a reference for a series of paintings, and the question presented by the Foundation appealing a loss in the 2nd Circuit to the Supreme Court is as follows: “This Court has repeatedly made clear that a work of art is "transformative" for purposes of fair use under the Copyright Act if it conveys a different "meaning[I or message" from its source material. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 579 (1994); Google LLC v. Oracle Am., Inc., 141 S. Ct. 1183, 1202 (2021). In the decision below, the Second Circuit nonetheless held that a court is in fact forbidden from trying to "ascertain the intent behind or meaning of the works at issue." App. 22a-23a. Instead, the court concluded that even where a new work indisputably conveys a distinct meaning or message, the work is not transformative if it "recognizably deriv[es] from, and retain|s] the essential elements of, its source material." Id. at 24a. The question presented is: Whether a work of art is "transformative" when it conveys a different meaning or message from its source material (as this Court, the Ninth Circuit, and other courts of appeals have held), or whether a court is forbidden from considering the meaning of the accused work where it "recognizably derives] from" its source material (as the Second Circuit has held).”
- smegsicle 4y agothis initial 'ai-originated works are owned by noone' policy may end up feeling a bit silly in the long run, but it seems refreshingly reasonable at least as a stop-gap for a largely novel class of creation, though i hope if it comes to it that the next decision gets the public attention and scrutiny it deserves. though i would guess that currently copyright-blackholed content might be able to be retroactively registered under future rules, i wonder how this 'ai-generated material must be disclaimed in a registration application' concept works against the 'implicit copyright' protection that i imagine most software is assumed to be under? i haven't heard much about great pains being taken to track which fragments of 'expressive material' might have 'ai-origin', other than the apparent fringe proclaiming that we ought to be..