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To the best of my knowledge, all claims that fanfiction is in the clear, that it's okay to do derivative works if you aren't charging money, and so on, are all

To the best of my knowledge, all claims that fanfiction is in the clear, that it's okay to do derivative works if you aren't charging money, and so on, are all just fandom folklore. If any author wanted to legally shut down fanfic, to my knowledge they could. And I'm against that - hell, in my opinion fanfiction writers should be able to sell their work even without authorial consent. Look at the Touhou scene, look how much cultural production was achieved just by one popular creator being chill about copyright. The idea that you can own exclusive rights to a story or a setting is a historical aberration.

godelski 3y ago
> if you aren't charging money, Yeah, that's to the best of my knowledge true but IANAL. I'm with you about the fanfic scenario too. I'm also very open about sampling. But I think these issues are different than the data that we're talking about in this thread. If data can be recovered (an in some ways it is, others it isn't) then that's not really derivative. Derivative also needs some distance and not be too close. And importantly, these data are being used to create a product that is being sold. Where the processing of the data is the thing of value. My point is that the environment has changed and there's a lot of gray area here. Turning this into a binary distinction is unhelpful. There's new nuances here and there were new nuances when sampling became popular in hip hop. We need to have open and honest discussions about these things, and I think a lot of discussions we have or observe are rather dismissive of these nuances (coming from both sides of the debate fwiw). I'm obviously very open to using data but we must also be aware of our data privacy, how it can be used, our social contracts, and what a reasonable level of a priori consent is. If we overly simplify these conversations then they aren't actually discussions. My points are to this, that there is gray and that there are very clear cases where you do not have unlimited access and usage to works that are publicly available. Private ownership is the root of capitalism afterall, and so it should be rather unsurprising that we have many laws and social contracts over ownership and the extent of what one may do with things they did not create. There certainly is a lot of anger and frustration in these conversations and I don't expect an artist making their living off of their art to understand all these nuances nor am I surprised that they are upset and possibly afraid. This is new territory and pretending it isn't is just as obtuse as calling generators fuzzy copy-paste machines. But I want to be clear that we can have both goals. We can protect data rights, privacy, fairness AND have this sampling and creativity culture, for lack of better words. We just need to be careful, nuanced, and thoughtful to determine how to do this though. We won't be perfect and won't make everyone happy, but we can maximize social agreement conditioned under fairness and privacy. I just want to ensure that we are not approaching this conversation as that there are clear answers in what can be done with data and what can't be. Hell, we don't even have that answer for music, sampling, or fan fiction. We have answers as to what laws say, but even as you point out, that's ambiguous in many cases without even considering that the environment is not only changing, but changing rapidly. I think we all understand that there is a difference between using the Akira slide compared to the "Ice Ice Baby v Under Pressure" scenario. No one has the answers, and that's why we need to talk. And unfortunately "edge cases" are the norm in topics like these. Note: I am an ML researcher. I use publicly available data to train models that have images of people, their art, their animals, their property, and such that I'm sure many do not know exists in these datasets. Similarly I do not even know all the data within some of these datasets. But I can still recognize that there is a gray area that exists here and personally I see it as my ethical duty to ensure we have these discussions in an open and honest way to determine the limits of what I should and shouldn't be able to do. It isn't up to me, it is up to our society to create a social contract.
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  Yeah well, I'm part of society and I've said my opinion on the matter. :P Sure, it's a continuum. I'd say it's more that, viewed as a continuum, my opinion about the ends of the spectrum is binary, in that I want one end to go up and the other to go down. That doesn't mean I want to split it into two cases so much as that I want to consider it among other things on an axis between two points, "private" and "public", and my opinion is a function of placement between those two points. Artists are frustrated about fanfic too! They feel genuine ownership of these characters. I've seen people have borderline breakdowns at fanfics. The idea that people are doing things that they didn't intend to "their" characters can be genuinely traumatic to a writer. If you make that a question about consent then fanfic becomes comparable to abuse, and I just don't agree that those should be the terms. Any work placed before the public is inherently participatory. Copyright splits the world into "creators" and "consumers" and I think that's problematic, because there's no such thing as passive consumption of a work. The listener or reader recreates the experience of the work in their head, based on their own assumptions, preconceptions and personality, and if they have an experience or viewpoint that diverges from that of the author, they must be able to share that in turn. So I have a genuine values disagreement with some of what we currently call "rightsholders" in the matter. What's that got to do with deep learning? Very little: I just see where it leads if you phrase the topic about consent, and it's not a world where unwashed readers can get their dirty mitts on their characters. (My personal favorite is... closed-source Minecraft (Java) mods. "Do not decompile against my wishes!", the description said. Minecraft mods, meanwhile, are only possible in the first place by decompiling Minecraft's source code against Mojang/Microsoft's wishes. You were this close to learning something!)

godelski 3y ago

> if you aren't charging money, Yeah, that's to the best of my knowledge true but IANAL. I'm with you about the fanfic scenario too. I'm also very open about sampling. But I think these issues are different than the data that we're talking about in this thread. If data can be recovered (an in some ways it is, others it isn't) then that's not really derivative. Derivative also needs some distance and not be too close. And importantly, these data are being used to create a product that is being sold. Where the processing of the data is the thing of value. My point is that the environment has changed and there's a lot of gray area here. Turning this into a binary distinction is unhelpful. There's new nuances here and there were new nuances when sampling became popular in hip hop. We need to have open and honest discussions about these things, and I think a lot of discussions we have or observe are rather dismissive of these nuances (coming from both sides of the debate fwiw). I'm obviously very open to using data but we must also be aware of our data privacy, how it can be used, our social contracts, and what a reasonable level of a priori consent is. If we overly simplify these conversations then they aren't actually discussions. My points are to this, that there is gray and that there are very clear cases where you do not have unlimited access and usage to works that are publicly available. Private ownership is the root of capitalism afterall, and so it should be rather unsurprising that we have many laws and social contracts over ownership and the extent of what one may do with things they did not create. There certainly is a lot of anger and frustration in these conversations and I don't expect an artist making their living off of their art to understand all these nuances nor am I surprised that they are upset and possibly afraid. This is new territory and pretending it isn't is just as obtuse as calling generators fuzzy copy-paste machines. But I want to be clear that we can have both goals. We can protect data rights, privacy, fairness AND have this sampling and creativity culture, for lack of better words. We just need to be careful, nuanced, and thoughtful to determine how to do this though. We won't be perfect and won't make everyone happy, but we can maximize social agreement conditioned under fairness and privacy. I just want to ensure that we are not approaching this conversation as that there are clear answers in what can be done with data and what can't be. Hell, we don't even have that answer for music, sampling, or fan fiction. We have answers as to what laws say, but even as you point out, that's ambiguous in many cases without even considering that the environment is not only changing, but changing rapidly. I think we all understand that there is a difference between using the Akira slide compared to the "Ice Ice Baby v Under Pressure" scenario. No one has the answers, and that's why we need to talk. And unfortunately "edge cases" are the norm in topics like these. Note: I am an ML researcher. I use publicly available data to train models that have images of people, their art, their animals, their property, and such that I'm sure many do not know exists in these datasets. Similarly I do not even know all the data within some of these datasets. But I can still recognize that there is a gray area that exists here and personally I see it as my ethical duty to ensure we have these discussions in an open and honest way to determine the limits of what I should and shouldn't be able to do. It isn't up to me, it is up to our society to create a social contract.

FeepingCreature 3y ago
Yeah well, I'm part of society and I've said my opinion on the matter. :P Sure, it's a continuum. I'd say it's more that, viewed as a continuum, my opinion about the ends of the spectrum is binary, in that I want one end to go up and the other to go down. That doesn't mean I want to split it into two cases so much as that I want to consider it among other things on an axis between two points, "private" and "public", and my opinion is a function of placement between those two points. Artists are frustrated about fanfic too! They feel genuine ownership of these characters. I've seen people have borderline breakdowns at fanfics. The idea that people are doing things that they didn't intend to "their" characters can be genuinely traumatic to a writer. If you make that a question about consent then fanfic becomes comparable to abuse, and I just don't agree that those should be the terms. Any work placed before the public is inherently participatory. Copyright splits the world into "creators" and "consumers" and I think that's problematic, because there's no such thing as passive consumption of a work. The listener or reader recreates the experience of the work in their head, based on their own assumptions, preconceptions and personality, and if they have an experience or viewpoint that diverges from that of the author, they must be able to share that in turn. So I have a genuine values disagreement with some of what we currently call "rightsholders" in the matter. What's that got to do with deep learning? Very little: I just see where it leads if you phrase the topic about consent, and it's not a world where unwashed readers can get their dirty mitts on their characters. (My personal favorite is... closed-source Minecraft (Java) mods. "Do not decompile against my wishes!", the description said. Minecraft mods, meanwhile, are only possible in the first place by decompiling Minecraft's source code against Mojang/Microsoft's wishes. You were this close to learning something!)