All this latest ML growth is built on massive copyright violations.
Maybe not myself, but many averagely-talented artists can draw Mickey Mouse.
They might even draw one for me if I ask! Or I can just find it on Google… (technically my computer is producing it on the screen…)
That in itself is not a copyright violation. But if I use it, in a commercial manner, then it becomes a copyright violation.
Producing copyrighted things isn’t illegal. It’s on the user to not use copyrighted things, in a way that’s illegal (not fair use or licenced).
> But if I use it, in a commercial manner, then it becomes a copyright violation.
No, that's incorrect. Commercial use has nothing to do with it. Any act of distribution, regardless of whether or not it's for commercial or personal use, regardless of whether you charge $100,000 or $0, falls under copyright law.
The U.S. Copyright Office has some guidelines about fair use, and non-commercial as well as personal use are listed as considerations that courts take into account when judging whether an unlicensed copy constitutes an infringement:
The bigger fry are and will keep fighting to change the ideas of copryright, now that it's inconvinient for them after spending decades strenghening it.
But those are more "medium fries" anyway. The "big fries" aren't gonna take any risk whatsoever unless they are going the edgy parody route (someone like Adult Swim). There's little upside to Bungie or Microsoft or Laika posting Mickey mouse to begin with
My point is that it is perfectly legal to draw Mickey Mouse for your own personal use because it does not violate the law.
In summary, you probably can and Disney won't care, but it is technically not allowed outside of fair use constraints. It's not legal in the same realm that it's illegal to ride a bike in a swimming pool in Baldwin Park,CA. Key point: don't make money, don't be stupid, and don't be unlikeable.
Even then, most platforms control the content and they probably won't defend you and would take it down. That's not a legal matter so much as a platform policy.
>people aren't getting sued for drawing Mickey Mouse for personal use because Disney would rather go after the big guys.
It's even simpler than that. If a lawyer costs $10k to run a small claims case, and they have a shaky chance (fair use) or a low payout, it's not profitable to go after you.
That's why other factors need to come into play, like potential brand damage, scaring off imitators, or simply pissing off the wrong lawyer somehow.
That isn't true, strictly speaking. The right to reproduce work is covered by copyright law, irrespective of whether the reproduction is commercial or not.
But enforcement-wise, Disney won't bother going after every copyright potential. They will focus on the biggest money makers or the biggest potential to brand damage. So it's not a worry for most people who will just draw some mickey mouse for a friend, or even private client as long as they aren't stupid.
ML models are not "learning" in the same way as human do, and while they use the misleading word "learning" is has completely different meaning; also, ML models are not humans and therefore they are not subject of laws; the engineers who perform calculations are.
So comparing calculation of ML model parameters to a person studying art is incorrect; you should compare engineers performing calculations with data from copyrighted material to a person studying art. It is immediately obvious that there cases are not equivalent. And those engineers are not learning anything in the process so the cannot use the analogy as an excuse.
There's no difference between producing and copying. Let's take a real world example: music samples. There's an entire clearinghouse process for music sampling, more or less forged after the 80s/90s when sampling blew up. Record companies and artist were like, "hey that's my song", courts agreed, a market was created.
This is pretty analogous to what's happening now, which is code samples. Developers are like, "hey that's my code". But that's where we're diverging, and this is probably because big companies aren't involved. People were sampling Atlantic Records' stuff. People aren't sampling Microsoft's stuff, they're sampling random GitHub OSS project guy's stuff.
But to your point, you're basically arguing that it's fine as long as no one listens to "Bitter Sweet Symphony". Most people think it's not the end user (listener) who's infringing copyright, but the party doing the copying (The Verve). Even if we accept your principle here, you're putting way too heavy a burden on people who use services like Copilot. Am I supposed to check that everything I autocomplete is properly licensed? You more or less said "shut these services down" in so many words.