Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.

We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.::Artists and researchers are exposing copyrighted material hidden within A.I. tools, raising fresh legal questions.

  • orclev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    42·
    10 months ago

    Data is not copyrighted, only the image is. Furthermore you can not copyright a number, even though you could use a sufficiently large number to completely represent a specific image. There’s also the fact that copyright does not protect possession of works, only distribution of them. If I obtained a copyrighted work no matter the means chosen to do so, I’ve committed no crime so long as I don’t duplicate that work. This gets into a legal grey area around computers and the fundamental way they work, but it was already kind of fuzzy if you really think about it anyway. Does viewing a copyrighted image violate copyright? The visual data of that image has been copied into your brain. You have the memory of that image. If you have the talent you could even reproduce that copyrighted work so clearly a copy of it exists in your brain.

    • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      10 months ago

      only distribution of them.

      Yeah. And the hard drives and networks that pass Midjourney’s network weights around?

      That’s distribution. Did Midjourney obtain a license from the artists to allow large numbers of “Joker” copyrighted data to be copied on a ton of servers in their data-center so that Midjourney can run? They’re clearly letting the public use this data.

      • orclev@lemmy.worldEnglish
        42·
        10 months ago

        Because they’re not copying around images of Joker, they’re copying around a work derived from many many things including images of Joker. Copying a derived work does not violate the copyright of the work it was derived from. The wrinkle in this case is that you can extract something very similar to the original works back out of the derived work after the fact. It would be like if you could bake a cake, pass it around, and then down the line pull a whole egg back out of it. Maybe not the exact egg you started with, but one very similar to it. This is a situation completely unlike anything that’s come before it which is why it’s not actually covered by copyright. New laws will need to be drafted (or at a bare minimum legal judgements made) to decide how exactly this situation should be handled.

        • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          10 months ago

          derived

          https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work

          Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product. Derivative works can be created with the permission of the copyright owner or from works in the public domain. In order to receive copyright protection, a derivative work must add a sufficient amount of change to the original work.

          Are you just making shit up?