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And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools. Even if you argue that an AI is "human enough" the artists should still have the right to

And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools. Even if you argue that an AI is "human enough" the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.

deeviant 3y ago
> the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies. Why? That certainly isn't a right spelled out in either patents or copyrights, both of which are supposed to support the development of arts and technology, not hinder it. If I discover a new mathematical formula, musical scale, or whatnot, should I be able to prevent others from learning about it?
- withinboredom 3y ago
  It’s called a license and you can make it almost anything. It doesn’t even need to be spelled out, it can be verbal: “no, I won’t let you have it” It’s yours. That’s literally what copyright is there to enforce.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    License doesn't matter if fair use applies. > Fair use allows reproduction and other uses of copyrighted works – without requiring permission from the copyright owner – under certain conditions. In many cases, you can use copyrighted materials for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research. Reminder that you can't own ideas, no matter what the law says. NOTE: This comment is copyrighted and provided to you under license only. By reading this comment, you agree to give me 5 billion dollars.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      I'd love to see you try to enforce that license because it would only prove my point. You'd have to sue me; then I would point to the terms of service of this platform and point out that by using it, you have no license here. Fair use though, only applies as a legal defense because someone asserts you stole their work. Then ONLY the court decides whether or not you used it under fair use. You don't get to make that decision; you just get to decide whether to try and use it as a defense. Even if you actually did unfairly use copyrighted works, you would be stupid not to use that as a defense. Because maybe somebody on the jury agrees with you...
  - boolemancer 3y ago
    Copyright is there to allow you to stop other people from copying your work, but it doesn't give you control over anything else that they might do with it. If I buy your painting, you can stop me from making copies and selling them to other people, but you can't stop me from selling my original copy to whomever I want, nor could you stop me from painting little dinosaurs all over it and hanging it in my hallway. That means that if I buy your painting, I'm also free to study it and learn from it in whichever way I please. Studying something is not copying it.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      There's an implied license when you buy a work of art. However, there can also be explicit licenses (think Banksy) to allow the distribution of their work. These explicit license can be just about anything (MIT, GPL, AGPL, etc)
      - boolemancer 3y ago
        Any explicit license would only apply to copyrights, including all of the ones you listed there. Buying a painting is not copying it, neither is looking at it, so it wouldn't matter if I had a license for it or not. The fact is that copyright only applies to specific situations, it does not give you complete control over the thing you made and what can be done with it. If I buy your book, I can lend it to a friend and they can read it without paying you. I can read it out loud to my children. I can cross out your words and write in my own, even if it completely changes the meaning of the story. I can highlight passages and write in the margins. I can tear pages out and use them for kindling. I can go through and tally up how many times you use each word. Copyright only gives you control over copies, end even then there are limits on that control.
        withinboredom 3y ago
        > Copyright only gives you control over copies, end even then there are limits on that control. If that were true, nobody would be afraid of the GPL's. When you buy a painting, you get an implicit license to do pretty much what you want and resell it, but you still can't put it in your YouTube videos (yeah, nobody cares, but "technically..."), create your own gallery, or put it on a stage ... but we're not talking about paintings. Not directly, anyway. We are talking about implicit licenses, though; people's work is listed online with some implicit license. At the crux of this AI issue is whether or not there is an implied license when AI scans stuff and, if not, whether it is covered under fair use. For example, my blog posts and short stories. I don't care if someone uses it for training, but if it is over-fitting and spitting out my stories as if it were its own ... I'd be pretty furious. I'm interested to see what happens, but I have a sinking suspicion that for some AI companies, it won't be an issue (non-profit, actually research motivated, etc.) and probably will win a "fair use" argument. Then others create AI from people's code they host, doing it purely for profit; I highly doubt they would be able to defend themselves.
dehrmann 3y ago
> And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools. You can either make it for yourself and keep it for yourself or you can put it out into the world for all to see, criticize, study, imitate, and admire.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  that's not how licensing work, be it art, software or just about anything else. We have some pretty well defined and differentiated rules what you can and cannot do, in particular commercially or in public, with someone else's work. If you go and study a work of fiction in a college class, unless that material is in the public domain, you're gonna have to pay for your copy, you want to broadcast a movie in public, you're going to have to pay the rightsholder.
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > If you go and study a work of fiction in a college class, unless that material is in the public domain, you're gonna have to pay for your copy, No you wont! It is only someone who distributes copies who can get in trouble. If instead of that you as an individual decide to study a piece of art or fiction, and you do no distribute copies of it to anyone, this is completely legal and you don't have to pay anyone for it. In addition to that, fair use protections apply regardless of what the creative works creator wants.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      Making a profit off variations of someone's work isn't covered under fair use.
      - stale2002 3y ago
        Gotcha. I wasn't talking about someone creating and selling copies of someone else's work, fortunately. So my point stands and your completely is in agreement with me that people are allowed to learn from other people's works. If someone wants to learn from someone else's work, that is completely legal no matter the licensing terms. Instead, it is only distributing copies that is not allowed.
deadbeeves 3y ago
>the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies. No, that right doesn't exist. If you put your work of art out there for people to see, people will see it and learn from it, and be inspired by it. It's unavoidable. How could it possibly work otherwise? Artist A: You studied my work to produce yours, even when I asked people not to do that! Artist B: Prove it. What kind of evidence or argument could Artist A possibly provide to show that Artist B did what they're accusing them of, without being privy to the internal state of their mind. You're not talking about plagiarism; that's comparatively easy to prove. You're asking about merely studying the work.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  The right to not use my things exists everywhere, universally. Good people usually ask before they use something of someone else's, and the person being asked can say "no." How hard is that to understand? You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want. Example: If you studied my (we will assume "unique") work and used it without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use," and the courts would decide whether it was fair use (ask everyone who used a mouse and got sued for it in the last ~100 years). The court would either agree that you used my works under "fair use" ... or not. It would be up to how you presented it to the court, and humans would analyze your intent and decide. OR, I might agree it is fair use and not sue you. However, that weakens my standing on my copyright, so it's better for me to sue you (assuming I have the resources to do so when it is clearly fair use).
  - deadbeeves 3y ago
    >You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want. You have a right to say anything you want. Others aren't obligated do as you say just because you say it. >If you studied my (we will assume "unique") techniques and used them without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use," On what grounds would you sue me? You think my defense would be "fair use", so you must think my copying your style constitutes copyright infringement, and so you'd sue me for that. Well, no, I would not say "fair use", I'd say "artistic style is not copyrightable; copyright pertains to works, not to styles". There's even jurisprudence backing me up in the US. Apple tried to use Microsoft for copying the look-and-feel of their OS, and it was ruled to be non-copyrightable. Even if was so good that I was able to trick anyone into thinking that my painting of a dog carrying a tennis ball in his mouth was your work, if you've never painted anything like that you would have no grounds to sue me for copyright infringement. Now, usually in the artistic world it's considered poor manners to outright copy another artist's style, but if we're talking about rights and law, I'm sorry to say you're just wrong. And if we're talking about merely studying someone's work without copying it, that's not even frowned upon. Like I said, it's unavoidable. I don't know where you got this idea that anyone has the right to or is even capable of preventing this (beyond simply never showing it to anyone).

And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools. Even if you argue that an AI is "human enough" the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.

deeviant 3y ago

> the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies. Why? That certainly isn't a right spelled out in either patents or copyrights, both of which are supposed to support the development of arts and technology, not hinder it. If I discover a new mathematical formula, musical scale, or whatnot, should I be able to prevent others from learning about it?

withinboredom 3y ago
It’s called a license and you can make it almost anything. It doesn’t even need to be spelled out, it can be verbal: “no, I won’t let you have it” It’s yours. That’s literally what copyright is there to enforce.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  License doesn't matter if fair use applies. > Fair use allows reproduction and other uses of copyrighted works – without requiring permission from the copyright owner – under certain conditions. In many cases, you can use copyrighted materials for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research. Reminder that you can't own ideas, no matter what the law says. NOTE: This comment is copyrighted and provided to you under license only. By reading this comment, you agree to give me 5 billion dollars.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    I'd love to see you try to enforce that license because it would only prove my point. You'd have to sue me; then I would point to the terms of service of this platform and point out that by using it, you have no license here. Fair use though, only applies as a legal defense because someone asserts you stole their work. Then ONLY the court decides whether or not you used it under fair use. You don't get to make that decision; you just get to decide whether to try and use it as a defense. Even if you actually did unfairly use copyrighted works, you would be stupid not to use that as a defense. Because maybe somebody on the jury agrees with you...
- boolemancer 3y ago
  Copyright is there to allow you to stop other people from copying your work, but it doesn't give you control over anything else that they might do with it. If I buy your painting, you can stop me from making copies and selling them to other people, but you can't stop me from selling my original copy to whomever I want, nor could you stop me from painting little dinosaurs all over it and hanging it in my hallway. That means that if I buy your painting, I'm also free to study it and learn from it in whichever way I please. Studying something is not copying it.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    There's an implied license when you buy a work of art. However, there can also be explicit licenses (think Banksy) to allow the distribution of their work. These explicit license can be just about anything (MIT, GPL, AGPL, etc)
    - boolemancer 3y ago
      Any explicit license would only apply to copyrights, including all of the ones you listed there. Buying a painting is not copying it, neither is looking at it, so it wouldn't matter if I had a license for it or not. The fact is that copyright only applies to specific situations, it does not give you complete control over the thing you made and what can be done with it. If I buy your book, I can lend it to a friend and they can read it without paying you. I can read it out loud to my children. I can cross out your words and write in my own, even if it completely changes the meaning of the story. I can highlight passages and write in the margins. I can tear pages out and use them for kindling. I can go through and tally up how many times you use each word. Copyright only gives you control over copies, end even then there are limits on that control.
      - withinboredom 3y ago
        > Copyright only gives you control over copies, end even then there are limits on that control. If that were true, nobody would be afraid of the GPL's. When you buy a painting, you get an implicit license to do pretty much what you want and resell it, but you still can't put it in your YouTube videos (yeah, nobody cares, but "technically..."), create your own gallery, or put it on a stage ... but we're not talking about paintings. Not directly, anyway. We are talking about implicit licenses, though; people's work is listed online with some implicit license. At the crux of this AI issue is whether or not there is an implied license when AI scans stuff and, if not, whether it is covered under fair use. For example, my blog posts and short stories. I don't care if someone uses it for training, but if it is over-fitting and spitting out my stories as if it were its own ... I'd be pretty furious. I'm interested to see what happens, but I have a sinking suspicion that for some AI companies, it won't be an issue (non-profit, actually research motivated, etc.) and probably will win a "fair use" argument. Then others create AI from people's code they host, doing it purely for profit; I highly doubt they would be able to defend themselves.

dehrmann 3y ago

> And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools. You can either make it for yourself and keep it for yourself or you can put it out into the world for all to see, criticize, study, imitate, and admire.

Barrin92 3y ago
that's not how licensing work, be it art, software or just about anything else. We have some pretty well defined and differentiated rules what you can and cannot do, in particular commercially or in public, with someone else's work. If you go and study a work of fiction in a college class, unless that material is in the public domain, you're gonna have to pay for your copy, you want to broadcast a movie in public, you're going to have to pay the rightsholder.
- stale2002 3y ago
  > If you go and study a work of fiction in a college class, unless that material is in the public domain, you're gonna have to pay for your copy, No you wont! It is only someone who distributes copies who can get in trouble. If instead of that you as an individual decide to study a piece of art or fiction, and you do no distribute copies of it to anyone, this is completely legal and you don't have to pay anyone for it. In addition to that, fair use protections apply regardless of what the creative works creator wants.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    Making a profit off variations of someone's work isn't covered under fair use.
    - stale2002 3y ago
      Gotcha. I wasn't talking about someone creating and selling copies of someone else's work, fortunately. So my point stands and your completely is in agreement with me that people are allowed to learn from other people's works. If someone wants to learn from someone else's work, that is completely legal no matter the licensing terms. Instead, it is only distributing copies that is not allowed.

deadbeeves 3y ago

>the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies. No, that right doesn't exist. If you put your work of art out there for people to see, people will see it and learn from it, and be inspired by it. It's unavoidable. How could it possibly work otherwise? Artist A: You studied my work to produce yours, even when I asked people not to do that! Artist B: Prove it. What kind of evidence or argument could Artist A possibly provide to show that Artist B did what they're accusing them of, without being privy to the internal state of their mind. You're not talking about plagiarism; that's comparatively easy to prove. You're asking about merely studying the work.

withinboredom 3y ago
The right to not use my things exists everywhere, universally. Good people usually ask before they use something of someone else's, and the person being asked can say "no." How hard is that to understand? You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want. Example: If you studied my (we will assume "unique") work and used it without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use," and the courts would decide whether it was fair use (ask everyone who used a mouse and got sued for it in the last ~100 years). The court would either agree that you used my works under "fair use" ... or not. It would be up to how you presented it to the court, and humans would analyze your intent and decide. OR, I might agree it is fair use and not sue you. However, that weakens my standing on my copyright, so it's better for me to sue you (assuming I have the resources to do so when it is clearly fair use).
- deadbeeves 3y ago
  >You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want. You have a right to say anything you want. Others aren't obligated do as you say just because you say it. >If you studied my (we will assume "unique") techniques and used them without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use," On what grounds would you sue me? You think my defense would be "fair use", so you must think my copying your style constitutes copyright infringement, and so you'd sue me for that. Well, no, I would not say "fair use", I'd say "artistic style is not copyrightable; copyright pertains to works, not to styles". There's even jurisprudence backing me up in the US. Apple tried to use Microsoft for copying the look-and-feel of their OS, and it was ruled to be non-copyrightable. Even if was so good that I was able to trick anyone into thinking that my painting of a dog carrying a tennis ball in his mouth was your work, if you've never painted anything like that you would have no grounds to sue me for copyright infringement. Now, usually in the artistic world it's considered poor manners to outright copy another artist's style, but if we're talking about rights and law, I'm sorry to say you're just wrong. And if we're talking about merely studying someone's work without copying it, that's not even frowned upon. Like I said, it's unavoidable. I don't know where you got this idea that anyone has the right to or is even capable of preventing this (beyond simply never showing it to anyone).