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Comment by mvieira38 | Hacker News Reader

It's an IP theft machine. Humans wouldn't be allowed to publish these pictures for profit, but OpenAI is allowed to "generate" them?

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I would 100% be allowed to draw an image of Indiana Jones in illustrator. There is no law against me drawing his likeness.

No, you aren't allowed to monetize an image of Indiana Jones even if you made it yourself.

That depends. There are situations where you are. Satire in particular would be a common one, but there can be others.

Rules around copyright (esp. Fair use) can be very context dependent.

Those are the exceptions that confirm the rule, as they say.

But would you be allowed to publish it in the same way the AI companies do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_Stat...

but selling it is another and these ai companies sell their IP theft with a monthly subscription.

I don't think those links support the point you are trying to make (i assume you are disagreeing with parent). Copyright law is a lot more complex then just a binary, and fictional characters certainly don't enjoy personality rights.

harrison ford certainly does

edit - also, I wasn't making a binary claim, the person I was responding to was: "no law". There are more than zero laws relevant to this situation. I agree with you that how relevant is context dependent.

You 100% wouldn't be allowed to sell your Indiana Jones drawing services.

You wouldn't be able to offer a service to draw 1 to 1 recreations of Indiana Jones movie frames, though...

I'm honestly trying to wrap my head around the law here because copyright is often very confusing.

If I ask an artist to draw me a picture of Indiana Jones and they do it would that be copyright infringement? Even if it's just for my personal use?

IANAL, but if OpenAI makes any money/commercial gains from producing a Ghibli-esque image when you ask, say you pay a subscription to OpenAI. What percentage of that subscription is owed to Ghibli for running Ghibli art through OpenAI's gristmill and providing the ability to create that image with that "vibe/style" etc. How long into perpetuity is OpenAI allowed to re-use that original art whenever their model produces said similar image. That seems to be the question.

Yeah that's fair, I'm trying to create an analogy to other services which are similar to help me understand.

If e.g. Patreon hosts an artist who will draw a picture of Indiana Jones for me on commission, then my money is going to both Patreon and the artist. Should Patreon also police their artists to prevent reproducing any copyrighted characters?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Derivative_works has some commentary on how this works you might find interesting

Thanks for the link.

I get that copyright is a bit of a minefield, and there's some clear cases that should not be allowed, e.g. taking photos of a painting and selling them

That said, I still get the impression that the laws are way too broad and there would be little harm if we reduced their scope. I think we should be allowed to post pictures of Pokemon toys to Wikipedia for example.

I'm willing to listen to other points of view if people want to share though

Keep in mind that wikimedia takes a rather strict view. In real life the edge cases of copyright tend to be a bit risk-based - what is the chance someone sues you? What is the chance the judge agrees with them?

Not to mention that wikimedia commons, which tries to be a globally reusable repository ignores fair use (which is context dependent), which covers a lot of the cases where copyright law is just being reduculous.

Probably that would be a derrivative work. Which means the original owner would have some copyright in it.

It may or may not be fair use, which is a complicated question (ianal).

I would think yes. Consider the alternate variation where the artist proactively draws Indiana Jones, in all his likeness, and attempts to market and sell it. The same exchange is ultimately happening, but this clearly is copyright infringement.

To me a lot has to do with what a human does with them one the tool generates them no?

Won't somebody think of the billionaire IP holders? The horror.

And the small up and coming artists whose work is also stolen, AI-washed, and sold to consumers for a monthly fee, destroying the market for those up and coming artists to sell original works. You don't get to pretend this is only going to hurt big players when there are already small players whose livelihoods have been ruined.

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