[dlg]

I am not a lawyer, but like many Internet entrepreneurs, I’ve had to learn a bit about copyright. There are two cases in the 9th Circuit that speak to this: Perfect 10 vs Amazon and Kelly vs Arriba Soft.

As I understand it, the cases established a multi-part test for whether a particular use of images is infringing. One of the key parts is whether the use is “transformational”—I would argue that most GAN output would fall under this fair use exception for transformational use and thus would be ok (at least here in Calif).

In the aforementioned cases, thumbnailing a la Google images was sufficiently transformational so synthesizing whole new images certainly should be. The tests do, however, depend on the use so I wouldn’t say that re-synthesizing similar-but-different images with a NN is always and automatically fair use.