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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Last week I not so popularly defended copyright, and I still believe it's the best compromise available to us. But it doesn't exist because of a fundamental right

How do you feel about software license agreements? Plenty of software/code is publicly visible on the internet and can be downloaded for free, but it's accompanied by complex licensing terms that state what you can and can't do with it, and you agree to those terms just by downloading the software. Do you think that license agreements are just nonsense? Once something is out on the internet then no one can tell you what you can and can't do with it?

If you think that once a sequence of bits is out there, it's out there, and anyone can do anything with it, then it would follow that you wouldn't see anything wrong with AI training as well.

In the case of images for training image generation AI, I don't think they were published on the internet with license agreements stipulating limitations on what people could do with the images after downloading them. IANAL, but I think if you publish an image online and don't gate it in some way like behind a password login and license agreement, you get nothing beyond the default basic legal protections for how people use it, i.e. not publishing a copy or derivative work and whatnot.

I think many images on the internet, particulary those posted to art sites like dA, ArtStation, HentaiFoundry and maybe also Pixiv, do tend to come with a Creative Commons or Berne Convention license disclaimer thing, but as you suggest, this doesn't really do much against scraping. Artists generally ask and demand that their art not be reused without permission.

I don't think they were published on the internet with license agreements stipulating limitations on what people could do with the images after downloading them.

Because no artist knew what ML training even was until early-ish 2022.

If you think it's possible for an artist to have any rights at all over whether their work is used for AI training or not, then clearly they should be able to seek redress for images that have already been used without their permission. Trying to get off on a technicality of "aww shucks, maybe if you had published your work back in 2015 along with an explicit notice that said 'you do not have permission to use this image to train any AI models' then you would have a case, but, you didn't, so too bad..." is just silly.

I'm sure there's a Latin legal phrase that translates to "Bruh. Come on." and I would cite that principle as my justification.

But obviously if you don't think that artists have any right even going forward to control the use of their work for training then this point will be irrelevant for you.

If you think it's possible for an artist to have any rights at all over whether their work is used for AI training or not, then clearly they should be able to seek redress for images that have already been used without their permission. Trying to get off on a technicality of "aww shucks, maybe if you had published your work back in 2015 along with an explicit notice that said 'you do not have permission to use this image to train any AI models' then you would have a case, but, you didn't, so too bad..." is just silly.

I think it's possible for an artist to have such rights, but IANAL, and that's ultimately a question for the courts to decide. But in any case, no artist would have had to predict the advent of machine learning if they didn't want their images to become part of, to quote aqouta, "general inspiration in the air;" they could have just gated their images behind license agreements that included standard boilerplate stuff about how anyone who downloads the images are only granted rights to do XYZ, all other rights reserved. Again, IANAL and I don't know if the courts would see their lack of such gating and license agreements as giving implicit permission for viewers to use to train ML software, like how it gives other implicit permissions to viewers. Honestly, all this is so new that I'm not sure even a lawyer would be able to make a meaningful prediction on how things will go.

I think such a regime could be set up, but it would not be justified in the way that current copyright is.

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