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Comment by ungreased0675 | Hacker News Reader

Massive, industrial scale copyright infringement

IANAL but artistic style is not copyrightable. Many many human artists have created images and animated films in the style of Ghibli or Disney or Pixar and there's no direct copyright issue there.

A friend of mine tried to create stock illustrations in Disney style on Etsy, got banned almost immediately for copyright infringement. I guess it depends.

Etsy as a private platform banning it doesn't necessarily mean it was actually legally infringing. Like all the content hosting platforms, they would err super cautiously to avoid any possibility of anything even remotely resembling any legal case, even if they would virtually certainly be in the clear.

Did your friend describe it as "Disney style"? In that case there would be a trademark infringement.

Also, Disney have deep pockets and Etsy would not want to argue it out with them if they got a complaint.

Maaybe, but you'd also have to pass the three-prong test of fair use, and one of the prongs of the test is that your fair use of the material can't eliminate the market for the original material.

I fail to see how taking a distinctive artistic style that was incredibly difficult to produce and shitting out massive amounts of it everywhere as a super low quality commodity would pass the test of fair use.

>Maaybe, but you'd also have to pass the three-prong test of fair use, and one of the prongs of the test is that your fair use of the material can't eliminate the market for the original material.

"artistic style" is outright not copyrightable. Fair use doesn't play into it, any more than fair use doesn't play into whether a photo taken by a monkey can be redistributed[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

It isn't the distribution here that's the usage, it's training the model. If I take a copyrighted work and train a model with it and there's no longer any demand for the original, training the model was not a fair use

It is complicated. Tom Waits won a case where a commercial imitated his style.

> Tom Waits won a case where a commercial imitated his style.

Not under US copyright law, AFAICT. He's won cases where he sued over things like false endorsement - i.e. claiming that listeners would believe it was actually him, not just that the style was similar.

(Apparently he did win a similar case in Spain under their copyright law, but from skimming articles it sounds like the issue there also was impersonation, not just stylistic similarity.)

the laws for music are different & much stricter than images.

It's not about the style and it's a mistake to perceive generative AI models as analogues of human artists:

- When does generative AI qualify for fair use?:

https://suchir.net/fair_use.html

- AI is currently just glorified compression:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399753

Yeah but humans aren't exactly fast at replicating any particular art style.

Speed of replication isn't a part of copyright law, is it?

No, but I have to wonder if the reason it isn't is because up until now it was so slow and time consuming etc to create a replication.

Nope.

But I do feel bad for partaking in part for Louis CK's Twitter-Jesus rant.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSSDeesUUsU

Should I be concerned about my drawing speed lest it qualifies as copyright informant?

IMO, massive industrial scale indignation of humanity.

Not a lawyer, but I don't think art styles are copyrightable, though maybe they could be in Japan.

Unlikely since there's a studio led by a former ghibli lead that does visuals in the very same style.

That feels like an omission in the law. Previously it was simply impossible to "take" a style wholesale. You would at least have to become an artist versed in that style, and it in investing your life into that style you would also make it yours.

AI can take a whole style wholesale with no effort and no contribution. It is greivous theft in the moral sense if not the legal sense.

There were some AI training exceptions passed in Japan if I recall correctly, but with the copyright culture in Japan lacking anything resembling fair use, there was pretty much zero chance something like Stable Diffusion could have been built and proliferated in such a culture. Those AI laws seem pretty reactionary to the West's innovations to stay relevant in my view.

Style is not copyrightable.

Marvin Gaye estate tried to argue that style is copyrightable, and sued some artists as their songs use similar chord progressions as Marvin Gaye songs; they won one case (which I won't google) but they lost with Sheeran.

In music, copyright is (relatively) clearly defined: it's the melody. You can't touch that. There are also reproduction rights, which protect the (recorded) performance, even if the music's copyright belongs to someone else.

It's not copyright infringement / not illegal if it's legal and / or there's an exception for "information analysis": https://www.privacyworld.blog/2024/03/japans-new-draft-guide...

This is the tricky part; is it immoral? I think so, but that's a personal opinion. Is it illegal? Not by Japanese copyright laws.

Infact it isn't the style which has been copyright infringed but the original works which had been fed into the Neuronal networks in order to learn how to produce such works. There is no consent from the authors. I'm not a fighter copyright but if someone makes money from someone others work than the author should be compensated. The AI industry is standing on the shoulders of giants and make a lot of money. If the authors had been asked beforehand if their works could be use to train NN than I'm sure this whole AI blubble is has burst long time ago.

Good. Down with intellectual "property." Ideas are gifts from the divine, meant for self-propagation.

...perhaps this is what it takes to finally end the farcical narrative of "intellectual property" and usher in an internet age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved knowledge.

The copyright infringement is on the part of the models being trained on Studio Ghibli's work without permission. There's no law against you "accessing the entire corpus of evolved knowledge" and doing the work yourself.

Yeah, and culture will stagnate forever at the 2020 mark, as nobody in his right mind will create anything new only to be immediatly copied without anything in return.

>usher in an internet age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved knowledge

We have had that for decades and everything is going to shit. People now just reject facts.

> culture will stagnate forever at the 2020 mark, as nobody in his right mind will create anything new only to be immediatly copied without anything in return.

right, because before copyright laws nobody ever created anything...

Then why were copyright laws created immediately after the advent of the printing press? One wonders...

Yes, immediately, just a short three hundred years later (printing press 1440, first copyright law 1710). And if you look into that law (Statute of Anne) then you will find that poor hardworking authors where not exactly on the receiving end of that protection.

> nobody in his right mind will create anything new only to be immediatly copied without anything in return

If this take is serious, I can confidently tell you: for many professional artists, it's incorrect.

I'm sure you didn't look at my profile and don't know my background, but I'm a professional bluegrass musician.

Believe me when I tell you: few of us believe that 'intellectual property' is designed to help us make a living. And we're happy to see it go. Copy my music all you want - that's half the point.

Creativity, especially in traditional arts, does not benefit from state intervention or shoehorning property concepts into our work.

>as nobody in his right mind will create anything new only to be immediatly copied without anything in return.

People consuming and copying your work means you are making a cultural impact

You think the only reason to create anything is to profit?

Where is the problem here? There already exist multiple lifetimes of whatever creativity you enjoy.

Japanese firms take copyright pretty seriously, and Miyazaki is famously not a fan of CG or automation or indeed the US. I suspect lawsuits will not be long in coming.

Apparently current Japanese law allows models to be trained on copyrighted content.

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-exp...

Such a law doesn't automatically imply that everything a model outputs is automatically copyright free though, does it?

Otherwise: Meet my new and surprisingly performant new model, IdentityFunctionGPT! Oh, the weights? Sorry, trade secret.

I don't know, I'm no lawyer.

However, if I make a drawing in the style of Ghibli, I own the copyright because I made it. I don't know if in Japan, art style is copyrightable.

I don't know if copyright applies to generated content (of any sort) though. It probably does.

The important question here isn't who owns the copyright in the output, but rather whether the output also infringes on somebody else's, and if so, who's liable for that: The company that trained the AI, the one that hosts it as a service, or the user that prompted it.

On the other hand, Japan pretty much ignores the amateur comics community using copyrighted works for their fan fiction. Even when they have big, well known, events where they sell the comics.

There's an industry consensus to leave it alone in most* cases, since it is considered to expand the total manga market and generate new talent. Micro-publishers are very different from megacorporations, though.

* Unsurprisingly a famous exception involves Nintendo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_doujinshi_inciden...

There's a unwritten framework regulating it, unwritten but enforced by selective C&D. I think that's how a lot of industries work anyway, see Oracle v. Google drama on use of Java in Android.

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