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Looking at a copyrighted image posted by an author is not infringement. Printing that image onto a shirt and selling it is infringement. That’s what OpenAI is

Looking at a copyrighted image posted by an author is not infringement. Printing that image onto a shirt and selling it is infringement. That’s what OpenAI is doing.

golol 3y ago
But OpenAI is not selling the rights to any images, or are they? When I pay for Dall-E, does the contract give me any rights for a work? If not then there is no issue.
- AlienRobot 3y ago
  Copyright is the right to copy things. You don't even need to sell it. This is why Wikipedia images are mostly Copyleft images. Google gets a pass because nobody is suing Google. When people try to sue Google, Google simply stops indexing them and then they start begging Google to infringe their copyright again.
  - golol 3y ago
    This interpretation of copyright only made sense while the transfer and storage of information was tied to physical objects. That time is long and we dont consider it infringement to remember a media or reproduce it at home. Furthermore, we are now entering an era where the production of information is also being untied from physical objects, so it'll only get worse for copyright. I made a post to diacuss this stuff as I find it interesting right now and want to hear more opinions.
    - AlienRobot 3y ago
      I completely disagree. Tech exceptionalism makes no sense. We should be making technology to ensure people have their rights protected, not to come up with technobabble excuses to pretend such rights don't exist. Just because people having been posting memes and reposting pictures and comics with cropped credits and pirating stuff that doesn't mean any of this is legal. Legality isn't about what you can technically do thanks to how the computer works, or how HTTP works, or how the laws of physics work. Legality is just about what is law and what is not. Redistributing copyrighted works without license has always been illegal. People don't get sued for it all the time because it isn't worth the hassle and most small time copyright holders simply lack the resources to pursuit action against random Internet strangers across the Internet. That doesn't mean they don't have a copyright, they merely chose to not exercise it. And that's not a W for technology. That's literally just more abuse than a person can cope with. It's an L for society. That's like if you started getting so much spam in your e-mail that you gave up marking them as spam. That doesn't make them not spam. For example, if I wrote something in my blog and someone made a scrapper that reposted it entirely in their website full of stolen posts, I could take legal action against them. For a blog post. For something I wrote on the Internet. That's my right. But imagine how much time I'd have to spend to do this. It would be easier to check if Google has a way to tell someone stole my content and just get them delisted from Google than going through legal channels.
      - golol 3y ago
        But I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about what we should make the law to be. Just imagine memory implants become commonplace, shouldn't they be allowed to store copyrighted media you have consumed? If not how do you separate between your natural memory and the artificial one? How is it going to work?
- noitpmeder 3y ago
  OpenAI is selling a service. In the terms of this service they explicitly reassign rights of the output to the user. So implicitly they believe they own the rights and are legally able to reassign them to you, a user of their service. In my view they do not own those rights originally and thus are unable to resign them.

Looking at a copyrighted image posted by an author is not infringement. Printing that image onto a shirt and selling it is infringement. That’s what OpenAI is doing.

golol 3y ago

But OpenAI is not selling the rights to any images, or are they? When I pay for Dall-E, does the contract give me any rights for a work? If not then there is no issue.

AlienRobot 3y ago
Copyright is the right to copy things. You don't even need to sell it. This is why Wikipedia images are mostly Copyleft images. Google gets a pass because nobody is suing Google. When people try to sue Google, Google simply stops indexing them and then they start begging Google to infringe their copyright again.
- golol 3y ago
  This interpretation of copyright only made sense while the transfer and storage of information was tied to physical objects. That time is long and we dont consider it infringement to remember a media or reproduce it at home. Furthermore, we are now entering an era where the production of information is also being untied from physical objects, so it'll only get worse for copyright. I made a post to diacuss this stuff as I find it interesting right now and want to hear more opinions.
  - AlienRobot 3y ago
    I completely disagree. Tech exceptionalism makes no sense. We should be making technology to ensure people have their rights protected, not to come up with technobabble excuses to pretend such rights don't exist. Just because people having been posting memes and reposting pictures and comics with cropped credits and pirating stuff that doesn't mean any of this is legal. Legality isn't about what you can technically do thanks to how the computer works, or how HTTP works, or how the laws of physics work. Legality is just about what is law and what is not. Redistributing copyrighted works without license has always been illegal. People don't get sued for it all the time because it isn't worth the hassle and most small time copyright holders simply lack the resources to pursuit action against random Internet strangers across the Internet. That doesn't mean they don't have a copyright, they merely chose to not exercise it. And that's not a W for technology. That's literally just more abuse than a person can cope with. It's an L for society. That's like if you started getting so much spam in your e-mail that you gave up marking them as spam. That doesn't make them not spam. For example, if I wrote something in my blog and someone made a scrapper that reposted it entirely in their website full of stolen posts, I could take legal action against them. For a blog post. For something I wrote on the Internet. That's my right. But imagine how much time I'd have to spend to do this. It would be easier to check if Google has a way to tell someone stole my content and just get them delisted from Google than going through legal channels.
    - golol 3y ago
      But I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about what we should make the law to be. Just imagine memory implants become commonplace, shouldn't they be allowed to store copyrighted media you have consumed? If not how do you separate between your natural memory and the artificial one? How is it going to work?
noitpmeder 3y ago
OpenAI is selling a service. In the terms of this service they explicitly reassign rights of the output to the user. So implicitly they believe they own the rights and are legally able to reassign them to you, a user of their service. In my view they do not own those rights originally and thus are unable to resign them.