Earlier quoted context omitted.
To the best of my knowledge, all claims that fanfiction is in the clear, that it's okay to do derivative works if you aren't charging money, and so on, are all just fandom folklore. If any author wanted to legally shut down fanfic, to my knowledge they could. And I'm against that - hell, in my opinion fanfiction writers should be able to sell their work even without authorial consent. Look at the Touhou scene, look h…
> if you aren't charging money, Yeah, that's to the best of my knowledge true but IANAL. I'm with you about the fanfic scenario too. I'm also very open about sampling. But I think these issues are different than the data that we're talking about in this thread. If data can be recovered (an in some ways it is, others it isn't) then that's not really derivative. Derivative also needs some distance and not be too close.…
Sure, it's a continuum. I'd say it's more that, viewed as a continuum, my opinion about the ends of the spectrum is binary, in that I want one end to go up and the other to go down. That doesn't mean I want to split it into two cases so much as that I want to consider it among other things on an axis between two points, "private" and "public", and my opinion is a function of placement between those two points.
Artists are frustrated about fanfic too! They feel genuine ownership of these characters. I've seen people have borderline breakdowns at fanfics. The idea that people are doing things that they didn't intend to "their" characters can be genuinely traumatic to a writer. If you make that a question about consent then fanfic becomes comparable to abuse, and I just don't agree that those should be the terms. Any work placed before the public is inherently participatory. Copyright splits the world into "creators" and "consumers" and I think that's problematic, because there's no such thing as passive consumption of a work. The listener or reader recreates the experience of the work in their head, based on their own assumptions, preconceptions and personality, and if they have an experience or viewpoint that diverges from that of the author, they must be able to share that in turn. So I have a genuine values disagreement with some of what we currently call "rightsholders" in the matter.
What's that got to do with deep learning? Very little: I just see where it leads if you phrase the topic about consent, and it's not a world where unwashed readers can get their dirty mitts on their characters.
(My personal favorite is... closed-source Minecraft (Java) mods. "Do not decompile against my wishes!", the description said. Minecraft mods, meanwhile, are only possible in the first place by decompiling Minecraft's source code against Mojang/Microsoft's wishes. You were this close to learning something!)