Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

1. Copying is theft (contents of a CD [software], movies, stuff on a website sometimes, etc)

2. Copying is not theft (VHS copies of broadcasts, cassettes, etc)

Problem is "implied license" (eula-roofie) where we've, without any good reason I think, decided that,

(a) Copying is theft when someone unilaterally declares what you buy to be different from the medium (CD vs what's on it [software, movie, etc])

(a)(2) except when it's a really old medium like a book which you're allowed to quote, and use in derivation, but don't you dare "quote a movie" by copying portions off that DVD or blu-ray because that's different. Shut up is why.

(b) Copying is theft when someone unilaterally declares their putting something up to view, which necessarily requires copying to view (sent over internet), can't be copied for derivative fair use

(b)(2) except when it's over another old medium like public broadcast because... fuck you? I haven't a clue myself how this makes any sense and I suspect it is because "it doesn't".

(c) Copying is theft if you take the copy sent you over the internet and do anything with it somebody unilaterally declares they don't want you to be able to do

(c)(2) except if it's an old medium, like a book, where you can borrow it and quote from it and do all the fair use stuff, or borrow a picture, or a painting, or...

All the fair use and copying and other sensible stuff without this weird "implied license" stuff doesn't exist for formats we've had before to the extent it does now. These formats, in principle, are still just "you get a copy of a thing on some medium", and yet we have two completely different laws based on this pure fiction of an "implied license" that declares you can't copy even portions of one on some format because... because.

I am trying, desperately, to explain there is fundamentally and in principle no difference. The root of all of our problems and why the law doesn't make any sense is the pure fiction that there IS a difference. And I feel like a goddamn madman yelling in the streets trying to explain something that feels so dog gon obvious to me but seems like is obvious to nobody else.

... Same ways I do for humans. That's why I wrote "the same as for people" that line was supposed to contextualize everything else I wrote and somehow it hasn't.

edited to fix a screwup. because somehow I swear I hit "copy" but it didn't copy

Train an AI just on a few techniques. Then a couple fundamental stock photos with nothing but the subject. Then have it generate things outside of the realm of the stock photos recombined in a general style. Let us see your completely unique and unpredictable results.

In this way, ML training is just not the same as a person being inspired by or even being asked to recreate another person's creative work. Over the course of making something, an artists' "voice" would be best characterized I feel as the tiny choices they make along the way that all point to and reinforce a larger point or purpose to the piece. This "voice" shows up in all creative output, not just spoken word. That is what I feel people are feeling is lacking in generated art: because a machine-learning model does not have a voice, it does not have intent, it has a mandate from a third party from which it tries to draw from, and instead of making numerous, tiny but contributory choices, it instead decides on a weighted average of all the choices made in the art that the model was trained upon, which is simply not the same thing.

It makes all generated art have this very sterile, soulless feeling to it because these tiny choices that would otherwise be made by a person trying to illicit an effect are instead just the machine sort of shrugging and being like "well in most things I've seen where a woman is sitting this way, her hand is tilted this way" but it doesn't know why the hand is tilted or what that means for the subject, which means the hand-tilt might be applied to subjects for whom it makes absolutely no sense at all to tilt the hand.

A machine has no rights, and it doesnt learn as humans do.

I know the cult leader, altman, wants you to think otherwise, but no, stealing people’s work to make ai viable is not OK.