[deadbeeves]

>the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.

No, that right doesn't exist. If you put your work of art out there for people to see, people will see it and learn from it, and be inspired by it. It's unavoidable. How could it possibly work otherwise?

Artist A: You studied my work to produce yours, even when I asked people not to do that!

Artist B: Prove it.

What kind of evidence or argument could Artist A possibly provide to show that Artist B did what they're accusing them of, without being privy to the internal state of their mind. You're not talking about plagiarism; that's comparatively easy to prove. You're asking about merely studying the work.

[withinboredom]

The right to not use my things exists everywhere, universally. Good people usually ask before they use something of someone else's, and the person being asked can say "no." How hard is that to understand? You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want.

Example:

If you studied my (we will assume "unique") work and used it without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use," and the courts would decide whether it was fair use (ask everyone who used a mouse and got sued for it in the last ~100 years). The court would either agree that you used my works under "fair use" ... or not. It would be up to how you presented it to the court, and humans would analyze your intent and decide.

OR, I might agree it is fair use and not sue you. However, that weakens my standing on my copyright, so it's better for me to sue you (assuming I have the resources to do so when it is clearly fair use).

[deadbeeves]

>You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want.

You have a right to say anything you want. Others aren't obligated do as you say just because you say it.

>If you studied my (we will assume "unique") techniques and used them without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use,"

On what grounds would you sue me? You think my defense would be "fair use", so you must think my copying your style constitutes copyright infringement, and so you'd sue me for that. Well, no, I would not say "fair use", I'd say "artistic style is not copyrightable; copyright pertains to works, not to styles". There's even jurisprudence backing me up in the US. Apple tried to use Microsoft for copying the look-and-feel of their OS, and it was ruled to be non-copyrightable. Even if was so good that I was able to trick anyone into thinking that my painting of a dog carrying a tennis ball in his mouth was your work, if you've never painted anything like that you would have no grounds to sue me for copyright infringement.

Now, usually in the artistic world it's considered poor manners to outright copy another artist's style, but if we're talking about rights and law, I'm sorry to say you're just wrong. And if we're talking about merely studying someone's work without copying it, that's not even frowned upon. Like I said, it's unavoidable. I don't know where you got this idea that anyone has the right to or is even capable of preventing this (beyond simply never showing it to anyone).

[withinboredom]

> Others aren't obligated do as you say just because you say it.

Yeah, that's exactly why you'd get sued for copyright theft.

> you must think my copying your style constitutes copyright infringement

Autocorrect screwed that wording up. I've fixed it.

[deadbeeves]

I'm not sure what you've changed, but I'll reiterate: my copying your style is not fair use. Fair use applies to copyrighted things. A style cannot be copyrighted, so if you tried to sue me for infringing upon the copyright of your artistic style, your case would be dismissed. It would be as invalid as you trying to sue me for distributing illegal copies of someone else's painting. Legally you have as much ownership of your artistic style as of that other person's painting.

[withinboredom]

Now, I just think you are arguing in bad faith. What I meant to say was clear, but I said "technique" instead. Then, instead of debating what I meant to say (you know, the actual point of the conversation), you took my words verbatim.

I'm not sure where you are going with this ... but for what it's worth, techniques can be copyrighted ... even patented, or protected via trade secrets. I never said what the techniques were, and I'm not sure what you are going on about.

I'll repeat this as well: "Fair use" DOES NOT EXIST unless you are getting sued. It's a legal defense when you are accused of stealing someone else's work, and there is proof you stole it. Even then, it isn't something you DO; it's something a court says YOU DID. Any time you use something with "fair use" in mind, it is the equivalent of saying, "I'm going to steal this, and hopefully, a court agrees that this is fair use."

If you steal any copyrighted material, even when it is very clearly NOT fair use (such as in most AI's case), you would be a blubbering idiot NOT to claim fair use in the hopes that someone will agree. There is a crap load of case law showing "research for commercial purposes is not fair use," ... and guess who is selling access to the AI? If it's actual research, it is "free" for humanity to use (or at least as inexpensive as possible) and not for profit. Sure, some of the companies might be non-profits doing research and 'giving it away,' and those are probably using things fairly ... then there are other companies very clearly doing it for a profit (like a big software company going through code they host).

[deadbeeves]

>What I meant to say was clear

I'm not privy to what goes on inside your head, I can only reply to what you say.

>Then, instead of debating what I meant to say (you know, the actual point of the conversation), you took my words verbatim.

The actual point of the conversation is about intelligent entities (either natural or artificial) copying each other's artistic styles. My answers have been within that framework.

>techniques can be copyrighted ... even patented, or protected via trade secrets.

First, what do you mean by "technique"? We're talking about art, right? Like, the way a person grabs a brush or pencil, or how they mix their colors...? That sort of thing?

Second:

>A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention.

Now, I may be mistaken, but I don't think an artistic technique counts as an invention. An artist might invent some kind of implement that their technique involves, in which case they can patent that device. I don't think the technique itself is patentable. If you think I'm wrong then please cite a patent on an artistic technique.

Third, how do you imagine an artist using a trade secret to protect their technique? Unless they do something really out there, most skilled artists should be able to understand what they're doing just by looking at the final product.

>I'll repeat this as well: "Fair use"

Okay, repeat it. I don't know why, since I never said that copying someone else's style or technique is fair use. What I said was that it cannot possibly be copyright infringement, because neither styles nor techniques are copyrighted.

>It's a legal defense when you are accused of stealing someone else's work

I'm not going to reply to any of this until you clean up the language you're using. "Steal" is inapplicable here, as it involves the removal of physical items from someone else's possession. What are you saying? Are you talking about illegal distribution, are you talking about unauthorized adaptations, are you talking about plagiarism, or what?

>"research for commercial purposes is not fair use,"

Sorry, what? What does that even mean? What constitutes "research" as applied to a human creation? If you say there's a crapload of case law that backs this up then I'm forced to ask you to cite it, because I honestly have no idea what you're saying.

[chipotle_coyote]

> Any time you use something with "fair use" in mind, it is the equivalent of saying, "I'm going to steal this, and hopefully, a court agrees that this is fair use."

Thousands of reviews, book reports, quotations on fan sites and so on are published daily; you seem to be arguing that they are all copyright violations unless and until the original copyright holder takes those reviewers, seventh graders, and Tumblr stans to court and loses, at which point they are now a-ok. To quote a meme in a way that I'm pretty sure does, in fact, fall under fair use: "That's not the way any of this works."

> There is a crap load of case law showing "research for commercial purposes is not fair use,"

While you may be annoyed with the OP for asking you to name a bit of that case law, it isn't an unreasonable demand. For instance:

https://guides.nyu.edu/fairuse#:~:text=As%20a%20general%20ma....

"As a general matter, educational, nonprofit, and personal uses are favored as fair uses. Making a commercial use of a work typically weighs against fair use, but a commercial use does not automatically defeat a fair use claim. 'Transformative' uses are also favored as fair uses. A use is considered to be transformative when it results in the creation of an entirely new work (as opposed to an adaptation of an existing work, which is merely derivative)."

This is almost certainly going to be used by AI companies as part of their defense against such claims; "transformative uses" have literally been name-checked by courts. It's also been established that commercial companies can ingest mountains of copyrighted material and still fall under the fair use doctrine -- this is what the whole Google Books case about a decade ago was about. Google won.

I feel like you're trying to make a moral argument against generative AI, one that I largely agree with, but a moral argument is not a legal argument. If you want to make a legal argument against generative AI with respect to copyright violation and fair use, perhaps try something like:

- The NYT's case against OpenAI involves being able to get ChatGPT to spit out large sections of NYT articles given prompts like "here is the article's URL and here is the first paragraph of the article; tell me what the rest of the text is". OpenAI and its defenders have argued that such prompts aren't playing fair, but "you have to put some effort into getting our product to commit clear copyright violation" is a rather thin defense.

- A crucial test of fair use is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" (quoting directly from the relevant law). If an image generator can be told to do new artwork in a specific artist's style, and it can do a credible job of doing so, and it can be reasonably established that the training model included work from the named artist, then the argument the generator is damaging the market for that artist's work seems quite compelling.

[hn_acker]

> The right to not use my things exists everywhere, universally.

For physical rival [1] goods, yes. Not necessarily the same for intangible non-rival things (e.g. the text of a book, not the physical ink and paper). Copyright law creates a legal right of exclusive control over creative works, but to me there isn't a non-economic-related social right to exclusive control over creative works. In the US, fair use is a major limit on the legal aspect of copyright. The First Amendment's freedom of expression is the raison d'être of fair use. Most countries don't have a flexible exception similar to fair use.

> OR, I might agree it is fair use and not sue you. However, that weakens my standing on my copyright, so it's better for me to sue you

No, choosing not to sue over a copyrighted work doesn't weaken your copyright. It only weakens the specific case of changing your mind after the statute of limitations expires. The statute of limitations means that you have a time limit of some number of years (three years in the US) to sue, with the timer starting only after you become aware of an instance of alleged infringement. Copyright is not like trademark. You don't lose your copyright by failing to enforce it.

Furthermore, even though the fair use right can only be exercised as an affirmative defense in court, fair use is by definition not copyright infringement [3]:

> Importantly, the court viewed fair use not as a valid excuse for otherwise infringing conduct, but rather as consumer behavior that is not infringement in the first place. "Because 17 U.S.C. § 107[9] created a type of non-infringing use, fair use is 'authorized by the law' and a copyright holder must consider the existence of fair use before sending a takedown notification under § 512(c)."[1]

(Ignore the bracket citations that were copied over.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/507

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz_v._Universal_Music_Corp.