An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip • Hacker News Board

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#851

Post by jokethrowaway » Fri, Apr 04, 2025, 10:37 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #466

djoldman wrote: post #332

I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws. That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for t…

> The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. That was the original purpose. It has since been coopted by people and corporations whose incentives are to make as much money as possible by monopolizing valuable intangible "property" for as long as they can. And the chief strategic move these people have made is to convince…

There's also a moral issue at play: To safeguard the interests of a few publishers (sometimes the creators, but they can easily end up with a shitty deal) you remove freedoms to the entire population to copy the same idea.

You need a central structure funded by everyone's taxes which enforce a contract almost nobody of the infringers has signed.

That's appaling, I hope with this AI wave we'll get rid of copyright all together.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#852

Post by saaaaaam » Fri, Apr 04, 2025, 10:45 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #815

saaaaaam wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t talking about LLMs, I was talking about human artists. With the LLM it would be nothing to do with likeness, it would be to do with the copyright in the image, the film, video or photograph. The image captures the likeness but the infringement would not be around the likeness.

> I wasn’t talking about LLMs Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was thinking of LLMs mostly. > With the LLM it would be nothing to do with likeness, it would be to do with the copyright in the image I guess I don't see why it wouldn't be about a character's likeness. It's not just a generic stock character, as an idea but it has enough distinctive characteristics, has a particular style hat, uses a whip. Showing that…

Trademarks can’t apply to characters, in themselves, no. A trademark can apply to a particular fixed representation but not the likeness, or ‘essence’ if you like. The essence of Indy is the whip, the hat, the grizzled demeanour, the dry humour, the archaeologist adventurer.

You can think of likeness as something that could be captured by hieroglyphics, or emoji - or a game of charades.

Think of Betty Boo or Wiley Coyote. You might not be able to close your eyes and picture them exactly but you can close your eyes and imagine the essence.

So in some jurisdictions if you register a broad representation - a likeness - you can protect that in law. In almost all jurisdictions if you photograph or draw something that literal snapshot is protected. But in many jurisdictions if I took a still from a scene of Indiana Jones (which WOULD be protected by copyright) and I described it to you and you were a great artist and drew the whip, the hat, the grizzled face, the safari vest, etc - there would be nothing to protect that likeness.

Trademarks are another thing entirely, and are things like logos, and the protection is more about commercial exploitation and preventing misleading us.

I could draw a cartoon logo of a man with a hat and a whip for my archaeological supplies shop. You could not take it and use it on your Chinese manufactured whips drop shipped via Amazon. But the owner of the Indiana Jones trademark- likeness rights, film copyright etc would be unlikely to be able to stop me using my logo until I start saying it is Indiana Jones, at which point they maybe invoke likeness rights.

There are at least three different rights classes here! It can be very confusing.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#853

Post by mzs » Fri, Apr 04, 2025, 10:59 PM UTC

This get really meta very fast, December last year: https://japantoday.com/category/entertainment/studio-ghibli-...

Did Karin or her children ever see a ¥ from this adaptation on robbers ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronja,_the_Robber%27s_Daughter...

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#854

Post by lazyasciiart » Fri, Apr 04, 2025, 11:48 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #841

umbra07 wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people would surprisingly agree with that.

Well, yes; some people would agree with the stronger proposition of you not getting that piano, or not without paying some tax on it.

How on earth do you classify estate taxes as stronger than fixed term ownership?

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#855

Post by GPerson » Fri, Apr 04, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

whycome wrote: post #775

GPerson wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you make no argument to justify your unfounded claim, I’ll simply respond by informing you that these (obviously) are not remotely similar. To claim they are indicates some kind of deep disrespect for your fellow human beings. You could not tell the difference between taking a screen shot of the Mona Lisa and spending a lifetime to perfect the art of painting and then putting years of effort into painting it.

> then putting years of effort into painting it. Which efforts do we decide deserve compensation? We collectively create so many useful things. People come up with new words to describe a concept and when it's apt, it's widely adopted. That brilliant idea is the culmination of all the other work they've been putting in. But others get to use the word and benefit from it. Indigenous farmers put hundreds of years of ef…

I’m not talking about compensation. I’m talking about a reason to live at all.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#856

Post by GPerson » Fri, Apr 04, 2025, 11:51 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #689

GPerson wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you make no argument to justify your unfounded claim, I’ll simply respond by informing you that these (obviously) are not remotely similar. To claim they are indicates some kind of deep disrespect for your fellow human beings. You could not tell the difference between taking a screen shot of the Mona Lisa and spending a lifetime to perfect the art of painting and then putting years of effort into painting it.

People have also spent lifetimes perfecting the art of painting, putting years of effort in, and then used those talents to... Make sellable copies of the Mona Lisa. Ironically, since copyright has a time limit, that's not even illegal (so long as they do not claim they're original works of da Vinci). Nor is photographing it and selling the photograph. I'm not sure what argument you're making given the observations y…

I respect those people quite a lot. A lot more than I respect the parasites and frauds filling out the machine learning department.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#857

Post by noduerme » Fri, Apr 04, 2025, 11:52 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #595

noduerme wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, precisely. What then is the AI company's justification for charging money to paint a picture of Harrison Ford to its users? The justification so far seems to have been loosely based on the idea that derivative artworks are protected as free expression. That argument loses currency if these are not considered derivative but more like highly compressed images in a novel, obfuscated compression format. Layers and…

It's reasonably well established that large neural networks don't contain copies of the training data, therefore their outputs can't be considered copies of anything. The model might contain a conceptual representation of Harrison Ford's face, but that's very different to a verbatim representation of a particular copyrighted image of Harrison Ford. Model weights aren't copyrightable; it's plausible that model outputs…

From the standpoint of using a human likeness, I don't see the difference between encoding a "conceptual representation" of Ford's face into a model and encoding it into any other digital or analog format from which it can later be decoded into a reasonable facsimile of the original.

I think that calling it a "conceptual representation" over-complicates the issue. At the very least, the model weights encode a process that can produce a copy of their training date. A 300x300 pixel image of Harrison Ford's face is one of what, like 1.5x10^12 possible images. Obviously, only a tiny fraction of all possible images are encoded in the model. Is encoding those particular weights into a diffuser which can select that face by a process of refinement really much different than, say, encoding the image into a set of fractal algorithms, or a set of vectors?

I'd argue that the largest models are akin to a compression method that has simply pre-encoded every word and image they've ingested, such that the "compressed file" is the prompt you give to the AI. Even with billions of weights trained on millions of texts and images, they've only encoded an infinitely tiny fraction of the entire space. Semantically you could call it something other than a "copy", but functionally how is it any different?

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#858

Post by ls612 » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 12:18 AM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #391

dragonwriter wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He has a point that in a society with strong legal protections on freedom of expression, copyright is one of the main tools the state has to stop expression that is deleterious to the ruling class. If the State wishes to prevent expression that is deleterious to the ruling class, it will simply not strongly protect freedom of expression. "Legal protection" isn't an exogenous factor that the State responds to, it is…

Of course; I don't think anybody disputes that. But the political cover of "but think of the poor artists!" is used as a cudgel for situations where "we prefer to censor Bob!" is unpalatable.

Every meme in history could be classified as a “derivative work” and DMCA’ed.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#859

Post by robocat » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 12:21 AM UTC

fennecfoxy wrote: post #666

InDubioProRubio wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked for china

In the context of when they want to borrow others' stuff. But then Chinese companies are _more_ than happy to take advantage of Western laws to defend their own IP. It's hypocrisy.

It's business or it's incentives make more sense.

Hypocrisy is a foolishly judgemental word, and it is anthropomorphising a jurisdiction. Western civ has advantages we don't decry - should we just cherrypick the things we don't like?

The main issue is Western laws are created by Western jurisdictions and if we don't like how the laws are used then the laws should be "fixed" (although maybe a bit better than the current attempt at a fix!)

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#860

Post by kazinator » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 12:26 AM UTC

ars wrote: post #848

kazinator wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be against copyright, but with the rise of scum like Altman, I'm going all in. Copyright should last forever, as long as the ownership is handed down through inheritance or other transactions and not assigned to the public domain.

Why should someone be able to charge multiple times for the same thing? That entire concept is a legal fiction, and the compromise was to make it last only a limited time.

Because then the creative individual, in order to sustain themselves, will basically need an ultra rich patron who pays a lot of money for just the one copy or one performance. You know, basically how things worked before printing presses and recorded music.

Most copyrighted works don't make any money. Those that do go through a period where they sell a bunch of copies and after that it's just a trickle, if anything.

Why should you be able to charge every separate individual who comes to your concert? Same per seat price whether the place is filled to the back row or to the second row!

If you rent something, you're getting charged multiple times for exactly the same thing. You just paid for one month of staying in an apartment, now they want you to pay for a month again! The mere passage of time is churning out month after month. They are all the same, but you get charged! Same with power tools, cars and everything else rentable. Fifty people before you rented this hammer drill from Home Depot, but you still have to pay the same as they did.

Anyway, suppose that one should not be able to charge multiple times for the same thing. Then, fine, let the purveyor of an AI service also not be allowed to charge for their algorithmic rehashing of someone else's works.

I'm for getting rid of all forms of rent. But it has to be all: no cherry picking. Don't take away renting from one, while allowing another one to sell unlimited copies of a work. Or vice versa.