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How can this possibly be news to you? Damn near everything on the internet, pictures, text, all of it, is copyrighted information. You can only ever use it in

How can this possibly be news to you? Damn near everything on the internet, pictures, text, all of it, is copyrighted information. You can only ever use it in ways that you are licensed to, which in the absence of an actual license, is essentially looking at it on a website.

saurik 3y ago
Sending an employee--or a computer program doing the same job--around to document the existence of a ton of photos and then offer a service where people come to my office and we search our records and memory to figure out where those photos are to send them to see the photos is not copyright infringement. It might be some kind of terms of service violation--if you believe those actually have legal merit, as they often don't--or (much more likely) a violation of someone's right to privacy (as faces are personally identifiable information); but, if you aren't retaining copies of the photos (and most of these companies don't even internally as they simply don't need to) and you aren't redistributing the photos (which they aren't: they just tell you what they learned and how to find the originals) and you aren't producing new photos similar to the old photos or modifying the photos in any way (which would undermine the entire point) and you aren't even slightly in the same market as the original photo (which would be an absurd argument to try to make), then this clearly has nothing at all to do with copyright.
anon291 3y ago
I think the question here is 'does this constitute fair use?' In the same way that a scientist might learn the writing style of scientific papers by ingesting hundreds of papers, so to an AI learns to write by ingesting a bunch of text. In the former case, we do not require any scientist to then cite every paper they've ever read out of fear that they may have slightly adjusted their writing style to imitate the community's preferred one.

saurik 3y ago

Sending an employee--or a computer program doing the same job--around to document the existence of a ton of photos and then offer a service where people come to my office and we search our records and memory to figure out where those photos are to send them to see the photos is not copyright infringement. It might be some kind of terms of service violation--if you believe those actually have legal merit, as they often don't--or (much more likely) a violation of someone's right to privacy (as faces are personally identifiable information); but, if you aren't retaining copies of the photos (and most of these companies don't even internally as they simply don't need to) and you aren't redistributing the photos (which they aren't: they just tell you what they learned and how to find the originals) and you aren't producing new photos similar to the old photos or modifying the photos in any way (which would undermine the entire point) and you aren't even slightly in the same market as the original photo (which would be an absurd argument to try to make), then this clearly has nothing at all to do with copyright.

anon291 3y ago

I think the question here is 'does this constitute fair use?' In the same way that a scientist might learn the writing style of scientific papers by ingesting hundreds of papers, so to an AI learns to write by ingesting a bunch of text. In the former case, we do not require any scientist to then cite every paper they've ever read out of fear that they may have slightly adjusted their writing style to imitate the community's preferred one.