[boolemancer]

Copyright is there to allow you to stop other people from copying your work, but it doesn't give you control over anything else that they might do with it.

If I buy your painting, you can stop me from making copies and selling them to other people, but you can't stop me from selling my original copy to whomever I want, nor could you stop me from painting little dinosaurs all over it and hanging it in my hallway.

That means that if I buy your painting, I'm also free to study it and learn from it in whichever way I please. Studying something is not copying it.

[withinboredom]

There's an implied license when you buy a work of art. However, there can also be explicit licenses (think Banksy) to allow the distribution of their work.

These explicit license can be just about anything (MIT, GPL, AGPL, etc)

[boolemancer]

Any explicit license would only apply to copyrights, including all of the ones you listed there. Buying a painting is not copying it, neither is looking at it, so it wouldn't matter if I had a license for it or not.

The fact is that copyright only applies to specific situations, it does not give you complete control over the thing you made and what can be done with it.

If I buy your book, I can lend it to a friend and they can read it without paying you. I can read it out loud to my children. I can cross out your words and write in my own, even if it completely changes the meaning of the story. I can highlight passages and write in the margins. I can tear pages out and use them for kindling. I can go through and tally up how many times you use each word.

Copyright only gives you control over copies, end even then there are limits on that control.

[withinboredom]

> Copyright only gives you control over copies, end even then there are limits on that control.

If that were true, nobody would be afraid of the GPL's. When you buy a painting, you get an implicit license to do pretty much what you want and resell it, but you still can't put it in your YouTube videos (yeah, nobody cares, but "technically..."), create your own gallery, or put it on a stage ... but we're not talking about paintings. Not directly, anyway.

We are talking about implicit licenses, though; people's work is listed online with some implicit license. At the crux of this AI issue is whether or not there is an implied license when AI scans stuff and, if not, whether it is covered under fair use.

For example, my blog posts and short stories. I don't care if someone uses it for training, but if it is over-fitting and spitting out my stories as if it were its own ... I'd be pretty furious.

I'm interested to see what happens, but I have a sinking suspicion that for some AI companies, it won't be an issue (non-profit, actually research motivated, etc.) and probably will win a "fair use" argument. Then others create AI from people's code they host, doing it purely for profit; I highly doubt they would be able to defend themselves.