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Comment by LocalH | Hacker News Reader

The signature can certainly be copyright protected, I would think?

There's a difference between reproducing a signature in an encyclopedia or in some way that makes it clear that you are recording the thing as it is.

Putting a signature on a work is forgery and in most jurisdictions charged as fraud.

If you produce an artwork in the style of someone and then clone the signature of someone who produces art in that style, there is a reasonable case for fraud.

Yeah, the references to copyright/trademark in this thread are confusing to me. I feel like there are much more straightforward legal arguments against falsely claiming artwork is by a famous artist.

you have to sell it (or deceive for material gain) for it to be fraud.

You could argue that you did that to entertain your social media followers and gain more of them, which is somehow a material gain.

For starters people pay for ChatGPT accounts used to generate these things. Secondly people use ChatGPT to generate stuff they put up on social media slop accounts to earn money. You'd probably build a case by finding a collection of these to justify discovery for more and build your fraud case based on that kind of thing where people are generating and publishing work with your signature on it for money. That's both a criminal and civil case.

When you are no-one, it’s fraud. “When you're famous they let you do it”

Wikipedia doesn't think so, citing the US copyright office

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_P...

This is true, it'd be a trademark issue if anything, not a copyright one. From this page:

> it may be reproduced, as long as the reproduction cannot be mistaken for an authentic signature.

>as long as the reproduction cannot be mistaken for an authentic signature.

Which seems applicable in this case, because the image is clearly generated by AI (at least to the guy who prompted it).

The guy who forges a signature isn't confused about who wrote that signature either.

The fine citizens of the Internet the forger posts on may be.

Visual artists have a right of attribution via the Visual Artists Rights Act (17 U.S.C. § 106A). This includes protection against misattribution.

>This includes protection against misattribution.

What does the case law say on what counts as "misattribution"? If a paste the "BLOPER" signature onto a jpeg, did I commit a crime right then and there? What if I put a notice next to it saying "btw it's not actually Brendan Loper"? What if I took that image (with the notice), uploaded it for the whole world to see, then some guy cropped out the "btw it's not actually Brendan Loper"?

This reminds me of the Helen Green David Bowie Gif image (https://dollychops.tumblr.com/post/107517113745/happy-birthd... ) that got changed, tweaked, cropped, distorted and distributed by humans without attribution in all sorts of places [0] over ten years ago. I recall Mediachain (which was later acqui-hired by Spotify to help address attribution and licensing) would talk about this problem and proposing blockchain ledger approaches to help validate a media files similarity to existing content and notification to the original artist of its use. Didn’t follow them closely, but Spotify saw some value in their attribution ideas.

[0]. https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/16/digital-images-photos-gi...

In this scenario it sounds like you're fine, and if there's confusion then the guy that cropped it out is the source of the problem.

CopyRight isn't the relevant legal concept here at all. It's more of impersonation through a specifically protected identification mechanism.

No but in the article he makes the explicit case that its the mark of his trade.

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