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Licenses can strip you of your fair use rights. In fact, it's common practice to take away fair use even for really weak licenses (e.g. D&D's OGL 1.1, a license
by kmeisthax 2y ago
Licenses can strip you of your fair use rights. In fact, it's common practice to take away fair use even for really weak licenses (e.g. D&D's OGL 1.1, a license to do nothing). Creative Commons has to have an explicit clause stating that any fair use is allowed regardless of the other clauses of the license just to not be interpreted as a restriction of fair use.
Whether we should be stripping people of their free speech rights[0] to stop a parasitic enclosure of the commons that might sidestep existing copyright law, which is being cheered on by the proprietary world, is another question. Copyright law as it currently stands does not and cannot protect artists against AI that is going to salami slice tiny bits of statistical data from their work and mix it with hundreds of other slices to form a new image. That sort of harm is difficult to prosecute even if I personally think it's Not Fair Use. So adding a NoAI clause to Creative Commons would mainly serve to add a bunch of new incompatible licenses, and argumentation over whether or not this is Free Culture.
The correct way to stop generative AI is with collective action, not individual action, because the harm is to the whole class of artists, not a single artist. There is no "collective copyright" that would allow regulation or prohibition of generative AI.
[0] Under US law, fair use is the projection of the 1st Amendment into copyright law.