The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.
They are taking an artist work and reproducing it - changed slightly. If you did that to a Disney work (AI or not) would they consider it copyright or fair use?
you can take a movie still-frame and make an oil painting of it and it’ll be your work.
Maybe but not usually. This is making a derivative work. Derivative have their own copyright, but permission of the original owner is required to make them. In US terms, it might be fair use, if the painter wants to, say, make an artistic statement about consumer culture. EG Mickey Mouse has shown up in South Park episodes for the purpose of satire. That’s fine.
Whether the OP describes infringement is doubtful to me. No one owns the right to make pictures of EG people next to wooden dogs. On its face, there is no infringement.
OTOH, if there’s nothing deeper behind the painting, then it’s just unlicensed merch. EG, Disney has come down on day care centers for using their IP.
I’m not sure if it affects your larger point, but I suspect the problem with day care centers is not that they’re copying a specific work, but that they’re using characters that Disney owns.
True, I chose a very bad example there and muddied the waters.
Normally, trademarks aren’t so bad, relatively speaking. As long as there’s no confusion about who is responsible for the product, and there’s no defamation, you should be able to use those pretty freely. When “trademark dilution” comes into play, it can get onerous, though.
Dual copyright is a thing, if your work is not sufficiently transformative (for example if you retain enough substantial original features that it’s clearly recognizable) then it can be infringing if the original even if your changes is under your copyright.
it’s worse than that, the article talks about img2img using AI. so these click farms are ripping real images and using that as the img2img prompt
So? its not stealing.
They are taking an artist work and reproducing it - changed slightly. If you did that to a Disney work (AI or not) would they consider it copyright or fair use?
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Maybe but not usually. This is making a derivative work. Derivative have their own copyright, but permission of the original owner is required to make them. In US terms, it might be fair use, if the painter wants to, say, make an artistic statement about consumer culture. EG Mickey Mouse has shown up in South Park episodes for the purpose of satire. That’s fine.
OTOH, if there’s nothing deeper behind the painting, then it’s just unlicensed merch. EG, Disney has come down on day care centers for using their IP.
Whether the OP describes infringement is doubtful to me. No one owns the right to make pictures of EG people next to wooden dogs. On its face, there is no infringement.
Removed by mod
I’m not sure if it affects your larger point, but I suspect the problem with day care centers is not that they’re copying a specific work, but that they’re using characters that Disney owns.
There’s no difference from s copyright perspective
True, I chose a very bad example there and muddied the waters.
Normally, trademarks aren’t so bad, relatively speaking. As long as there’s no confusion about who is responsible for the product, and there’s no defamation, you should be able to use those pretty freely. When “trademark dilution” comes into play, it can get onerous, though.
Dual copyright is a thing, if your work is not sufficiently transformative (for example if you retain enough substantial original features that it’s clearly recognizable) then it can be infringing if the original even if your changes is under your copyright.
Depends on what you are using it for.
“The general fair use definition is that fair use is any use of a work that is not done in an effort to profit from the copyrighted work.”
Source
AI companies are most certainly making an effort to profit from the content they’re deriving from copyrighted works.
That’s not sufficient alone