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> Artists in Europe have already been fighting to protect the copyright of Tintin to keep the artwork away from large language models (LLMs) training various AI
by eadmund 2y ago
> Artists in Europe have already been fighting to protect the copyright of Tintin to keep the artwork away from large language models (LLMs) training various AI algorithms.
There is no copyright in the character anymore, so there’s nothing to protect.
I really do not understand this perspective. Do people also wish to use legal force to prevent others from working with, for example, Gainsborough, or Moliere, or Julius Caesar, or Homer? Come on: at some point something has to enter the public domain and become part of the shared treasure of all mankind.
- Timwi 2y agoI think I understand this perspective somewhat. It's coming from a mindset where it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism. They don't really want to keep Tintin from the common folk, but they want to keep it from the hands of greedy capitalists, and they assume that those will always be with us.
- Gormo 2y ago> it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism Well, yeah, it absolutely is easier to imagine civilization collapsing than to imagine it a world in which human being do not expect to benefit from their efforts. Noting, of course, that "capitalism" as you mean it doesn't really even exist in the first place, as it's just an analytical model used to describe patterns of behavior that emerge from the motivations people already have.
- Vecr 2y agoDuck Duck Go: end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism limit to last year I get: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-civilization-collapse-world-end-apocalypse-b2665336.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-civilizatio... (The end of the world as we know it? Theorist warns humanity is .) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine-the-end https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine... (It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of ...) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/apocalypse-stories-allure-dorian-lynskey-glenn-adamson/681097/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/apocaly... (A History of the End of the World - The Atlantic) https://medium.com/write-a-catalyst/imaging-a-world-after-capitalism-1e966b2952f0 https://medium.com/write-a-catalyst/imaging-a-world-after-ca... (Imaging a World After Capitalism - Medium) https://orwellsociety.com/can-we-truly-rebel/ https://orwellsociety.com/can-we-truly-rebel/ (Can We Truly Rebel? - The Orwell Society) Yes I think that's known. Astral Codex is about AI, so maybe we'll get the end of the world, and the end of capitalism, and huge quantities of AI slop Tintin!
- Gormo 2y agoYou're looking at aggregate patterns of human behavior, which originate in the pre-existing inclinations and motivations of those humans, and then trying to attribute them to some externalized, reified abstraction. "Capitalism" construed as some entity unto itself simply does not exist. There is no "end of capitalism" that isn't itself an element of a general collapse of social organization and economic exchange.
- marxisttemp 2y agoSo feudalism was a general collapse of social organization and economic exchange? Your analysis of capitalism is blinded by your obvious ideological bias
- Gormo 2y agoNo, that's another abstraction. "Feudalism" is a descriptive term for a particular pattern of reciprocal obligations that was common in Western societies (though not dominant in the particular society that our own evolved from) in the past. The emergent patterns shifted, but the underlying reality -- that it all is just patterns of behavior engaged in by human beings with the same fundamental motivations and intentions -- remains. There was never an separate entity called "feudalism" just as there is no entity called "capitalism" acting as a causal agent. And the problem here is that the things you're arguing against aren't particular to that emergent pattern -- they're the lower-order motivations that inform the underlying behavior itself. There is no "analysis of capitalism". Your either analyzing real-life human beings or you're analyzing imaginary phantoms in your own mind.
- spencerflem 2y agoWhen capitalism falls, we can reevaluate those laws. Both are equally impermanent ideas
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago>When capitalism falls, we can reevaluate those laws. If it falls, "we" won't get to reevaluate them, because neither of us will be allowed to express any opinion at all, let alone anything resembling political influence.
- spencerflem 2y agoI think you are confusing capitalism and democracy. But my point stands: being against a law because it wouldn't make sense without capitalism is a silly reason to oppose something when we live under capitalism for the foreseeable future
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago>I think you are confusing capitalism and democracy. You might think that. But the kind of people who show up to tear down a system from the inside aren't very democratically oriented, even if that's the rhetoric they espouse to rile up the crowds they need to tear it all down.
- labster 2y agoI look out my window and see the fires and the smoke and the homes lost forever. I look at Google News and half the stories are about cryptocurrency. The end of human civilization is much, much easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.
- fnordian_slip 2y agoWhile I don't have a dog in that fight, describing the opponents position as being against Tintin "becom[ing] part of the shared treasure of all mankind" seems rather unfairly dismissive. I would expect that most of those artists don't mind the journey into public domain. Rather, the are against large corporations hoovering up that treasure and regurgitating it with a profit motive.
- Gormo 2y agoSo they don't mind work entering the public domain, but they do mind people making use of that work in an organized way after it has? Seems a bit strange.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoIt’s not strange if you think how the worth of the images have plummeted down to zero, both emotionally and monetarily, in the last few years. I’m not an artist, nor directly in AI field, but it is weird how I have zero emotional response to any image I see, because I think it might be AI generated.
- kouru225 2y agothe fact that you can’t enjoy a good image or not without wondering whether or not it’s an AI image is the problem here; not the AI
- mihaic 2y agoLLMs are not people, and some organized way are worse than others, yes. In the same way we defined "fair use" for those reviewing a movie for instance to be ok, but we don't find it acceptable to put 99% of the movie with a single comment.
- Gormo 2y agoLLMs are tools used by people, like typewriters, paintbrushes, and other types of algorithm. If a work is in the public domain, that means that people are free to copy it, redistribute it, modify it, and create derivative works from it, using whatever tools suit them.
- mongol 2y agoI can see a difference between being allowed to publish an expired work as-is, and profit from it, vs reusing the characters for a completely different story.
- Gormo 2y agoWhat you're seeing might be a smudge on your glasses. Legally, there is no such difference.
- oharapj 2y agoAnd legal differences are the only differences that exist, right?
- bazoom42 2y agoTintin is notable in that the series was not continued by other artists after the desth of Hergé. While the estate is critized for guarding the IP too zealously, I greatly respect this decision, which is part of what makes it such a classic.
- bigmattystyles 2y agoMaybe not in the official series, though I’d love to see Al-far one finished by someone. But as far as tintin, there may not be official series, but there is a lot of new work based on it, from merch to the Spielberg movie, as bad as it was.
- lcouturi 2y agoSeveral fans have created their own (unauthorized) completed versions of the Alph-Art. Most famous is Yves Rodier's version from 1991.
- bigmattystyles 2y agoI’ll check it out, and thanks for the correct spelling, I was too lazy to look it up.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoEuropean comics are usually done by one artist only. I can’t explain why but it’s very different from American comics where the same concept (one character with a simple background) can be derived by a hundred people. Both are good but I guess they come from a different background and tradition. You have Joachim Phoenix playing a joker without Batman, but people would never understand why a new Tintin would have a different art style than the old one. It would be very confusing even to me.
- bazoom42 2y agoHergé had a whole studio working on the Tintin albums though.
- GuB-42 2y agoIn Europe, Tintin is under copyright until 2053 (death + 70 years). And the rightsholders (Tintinimaginatio, previously Moulinsart) are very aggressive about it, even more so than Disney. They don't have the lobbying power of Disney, but they are going to do everything in their power to protect and possibly overstep their rights. It includes using trademark laws and publishing new Tintin adventures against the will of the original author as an attempt to renew their copyright.
- jeffreyrogers 2y agoIf he sold his rights then it's not really against his wishes anymore.
- swores 2y agoHe died. So pedantically you can say he doesn't have any wishes any more, but it's clear they meant that it's against what he wanted when alive.
- jeffreyrogers 2y agoWell he chose not to make those wishes known in his will apparently, or in any of the contracts which assigned his IP to others.
- bazoom42 2y agoHe did. Hergé wished that the series should not be continued after his death.
- andrepd 2y agoSilly me, I thought there was ethics beyond The Profit Motive.
- jeffreyrogers 2y agoThe author owns the copyright unless they transfer it. His transference of those rights shows that he was motivated by profit.
- spencerflem 2y agoYes, or at least, we should prevent companies from cheapening our cultural legacy with endless tackyness, spin-offs, merchandice, advertisements, and other vulgar things.
- kmeisthax 2y agoIn Europe (and Japan), training LLMs and AI "art" generators on copyrighted work is explicitly permitted. So this is doubly confusing to me, since even if it wasn't public domain, it'd still be legal to train on it.
- Findecanor 2y agoIn legal terms, that is not entirely correct. In practice, it is however. For now. EU (which is not the whole of Europe) has regulation that allows a copyright owner to opt out of data mining for AI training. But the framework is incomplete: there does not exist a generally agree-upon method to actually opt out. There are a few protocols and file formats from a couple of organisation but none which has been given any official status. While a publisher may use one, a web scraper might support only another. Japan has traditionally been quite strict on copyright law. I would not be surprised if the law would get tightened to explicitly disallow AI training on copyrighted works.
- eboynyc32 2y agoI agree 100%.
- jaymzcampbell 2y agoThere's been weights on Civit.ai [1] for months, and I just assumed this was already done and a lost cause. When I asked ChatGPT/Dall-E for an image "... in the style of Herge" it didn't do a half bad job enough for me to see the inspiration either. [1] https://civitai.com/models/488165/herge-tintin-sdxl https://civitai.com/models/488165/herge-tintin-sdxl