[mortureb]

All artists are trained on copyrighted work.

[callalex]

And they pay a license fee to do so. Artist textbooks are not free, because they pay the rights holders to reproduce their work.

[karmajunkie]

categorically false.

[callalex]

What is categorically false?

[karmajunkie]

that artists pay a license fee to learn from other artists work. it’s an utterly ridiculous argument.

[mortureb]

Bullshit. You can look up all works up for free online. What a sorry argument. Copyrighted means you can’t reproduce it, not not look at it.

[callalex]

There’s probably an argument against my point, but this sure ain’t it. I can watch every Disney movie for free on the internet, but that doesn’t make it legal.

[Timwi]

It's legal in Germany.

What's illegal here is unauthorized distribution. Downloading a copy of something from a public server cannot get you in trouble here. Only publishing does.

[V__]

It's not and never was. In 2008 it even got raised from a civil to a criminal offense. It's a common misconception because it is more lucrative to go after people that also upload/publish due to higher possible damages.

[mortureb]

For the most part we’re talking about static images here, atleast for the current state of LLMs and those are all freely viewable online.