AI Created images (generated by Midjourney) lose registered copyrights

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Assimov said:

All AI generated art that comes from models trained on datasets which are not 100% unique and created for the sole purpose of training AI, should be public domain.

Anyone trying anything else has zero interest in advancing the technology and just wants to stash cash in their pockets with other peoples hard work



 

Nope, that would be bad, very bad.

 

In a text model, you would be restricted to books written without the modern nuance.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jan/05/censoring-mark-twain-n-word-unacceptable

So the text models, (eg GPT) would end up being racist, entirely because the material it learned from came from a time where media was overtly racist. You'd also have the problem of the post WW-1, pre-WW2 era material being extremely racist over in Europe and Asia as well.

 

In an art model, good luck getting museums to scan their archives for your model, you can't just rip off someone elses photos of those paintings. 

 

And likewise with a music model, you may be able to scan vintage copies of sheet music, but you can never use a recording, because NO recordings exist in the public domain. Every recording you hear of classical music, not performed by the military, is not in the public domain, the publisher owns the recording.

 

Like the entire problem with restricting AI training only to PD materials is that you don't know if those materials were actually PD, or a "modern recording" of an otherwise PD work.

 

This problem shows up with LibriTTS. LibriTTS is a ASR/TTS corpus based on recordings from the Librivox project which itself are de-facto public-domain recordings of public-domain materials. Quality issues aside, you can tell when an TTS has been trained on LibriTTS because it will not be able to speak words that are purely modern inventions like "anime", "computer", "record", "data", and also foreign loan words like "karaoke" 

http://vll-minos.bl.uk/learning/langlit/changlang/activities/lang/twentieth/loanwords.html

 

It's the entire "you must dump your own rom", that nobody ever does, is why you'll never see a proper public domain dataset, because someone will ultimately own "the data" used for training the model, even if it was public domain in the first place.

 

That part of copyright law has to change first. Where a reproducing a public domain work, or a work you already have the rights to doesn't constitute an infringement if you get a like-for-like copy from another source. The first casualty of that will be bands who perform or sample PD music.

 

 

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Mihle said:

If I lived in a world without copyright, I wouldn't bother making things ab a lot of other people wouldn't either.

Good thing Da Vinci wasn't like you then, copyright is a pretty new concept and it has only been a detriment to human progress and artistic expression. Also I don't know about you but me? I get paid for the work I do and not based on royalties. Even most independent artists get paid mainly through commissions.

1 hour ago, Mihle said:

I know it's not exactly what this is about but:

If the AI itself had the copyright, (it shouldn't) where do you draw the line where it's rights stop compared to humans?

IT doesn't have any rights because it's an inanimate object, however the human prompting it might.

1 hour ago, Assimov said:

"Drawing inspiration" is a human trait. A computer program doesn't "get inspired", even with deep learning. This would require a level of self awareness which machines will not reach in our lifetimes and if they did would have a whole plethora of ethical implications. I don't think we're even equipped to actually design tests that could suggest or prove human level self awareness in AI.

That's not the point. The point is that a work produced through AI generation can be said to be linked to the works in its data sets no more than a human drawing can be said to be linked to works they have seen and unconsciously influenced their style. It's not throwing out a collage of stuff that was in its data set; no set of prompts can bring you back to a source work.

1 hour ago, Assimov said:

You seem to imply that human painters and AI are pretty much the same thing with just minimal differences. Either you are overevaluating AI or severly underevaluating human artists.

At no point have I mentioned value or ability or the quality of the result; it's irrelevant to the discussion. I'm talking about whether it can be said to be copying stuff from the training dataset any more than a human painter can be said to be copying the Monna Lisa when making a renaissance style portrait that otherwise looks nothing like the Monna Lisa.

[Mihle]

2 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Good thing Da Vinci wasn't like you then, copyright is a pretty new concept and it has only been a detriment to human progress and artistic expression.

I am not saying everyone is like that, have never said it.

I ment as in on my own artist vise. Ofc I would still work at a workplace to make stuff because I get paid directly for it.

I know a lot of artists do commissions, but it's also a lot of ones that don't, that instead get paid because people buy their things after the fact, they wouldn't be able to do what they do.

Da Vinci got paid by people to do most of his engineering work, didn't do it out of nowhere on his own. And for his paintings, he sold those (not all but you know). That's not possible with digital art, or ones that can easily be copied, if not copyright exists.

 

That said, I don't think it should last 70 year after the authors death. Limiting it to 10 years after its death or just have it last 50 years or whatever in total would be fine (don't look too much in to the spesific numbers)

 

 

[LAwLz]

5 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

Its interesting that you'd think that way when you've explained how a camera works by capturing the light entering its sensors instead of generating the scene. By that logic, the sun should hold all copyright in the world because its light rays render the world around us 

Can you please define the word "generating"?

 

 

Because I would argue that the camera generates the image based on the input it gets, such as the photons hitting the sensor.

Likewise, a program like Stable Diffusion generates an image based on the input such as the tokens inputted by a human.

If we just look at what's described in the two sentences above, to me it sounds like there is more human input and more human control over the AI generated art than the picture being taken, since, as you said, the sun is "rendering the world around us" and without it we wouldn't be able to take any pictures. The camera is just a tool for computationally capture and describe what is already created around us, by generating an image.

 

 

5 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

Although this section is lengthy, I've explained both the process of  building up and working down towards something in my earlier replies to you. Although yes you can definitely snap pictures of subject quickly there is always some basic composition needed to take one. Its funny you bring up the blind person because I feel just as blind working with the AI whenever it shows me a collage of variants of the image even though I know some of the technicalities behind it 

Can you please define "composition"? I feel like you dodged the question posed in my post when I brought up a blind person.

Would you say that a blind person taking a picture without even knowing what they take a picture of "composed" the picture? If the answer is yes, please describe how it is different from someone using an AI art program without using the word "generate", unless you also elaborate on precisely what "generate" means to you. 

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

Can you compose a scene with the help of SD? You certainly can. However the issues in this case arise when you let the AI take the wheel isn't it? You don't say you drove when you set a waypoint on uber. You say you were driven.

What is that even suppose to mean? Again, please elaborate on what you mean when you say "compose", because it seems like it is very integral to your reasoning and arguments and yet you have not once explained what you actually mean by it. And now it seems like you are agreeing that someone can compose a picture with SD, yet somehow it seems like that isn't enough to actually say "you created" the image or in your mind that you should be able to claim copyright over it.

 

I think that typing in random words into SD and then having a good picture come out is the same as randomly flailing the camera about and then by accident taking a good picture, or if some child uses a camera and manage to produce a great shot without having put thought or effort into it.

In both cases, the camera and SD are just tools that can be used with more or less effort, with more or less thought put into the creative process. Yet for some reason they get treated very differently by you and some other people, and there is a very stubborn refusal to explain in rational, objective and logical terms why they get treated so differently.

 

If I made a picture with SD, hung it up on my wall and someone asked me "did you make that?" I would say yes, I made it with SD.

If I animated something, showed it to someone and they asked "did you make that" I would say yes, I made it in Blender.

If I hung up a photograph on my wall and someone asked me "did you take that?" I would say yes, I took it with my phone. 

 

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

And by that logic I am not writing my replies to you the poster, I am writing to your computer because you did not construct the post bit by bit.

Isn't that your argument? That it's the machine who does things even though it is controlled by the human, and it's the human that inputs its thoughts and ideas to create the content.

My argument is that the computer and software are just tools used by me to get my thoughts and ideas across.

You are the one making the argument that at some arbitrary point, it doesn't matter if a human is the one controlling it, because it is the computer who "generates" the content.

 

 

5 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

I also do feel similarly about this conversation because it has essentially become this "You have answered it but can you answer it again?". 

But you haven't answered it. You have given extremely vague descriptions that you think makes sense but as soon as I bring up issues with that reasoning you do a bunch of mental gymnastics to try and explain why it is totally different when a program like Stable Diffusion is involved, or you completely ignore the issues such as with the blind person taking a picture example.

 

 

6 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

My personal line would be that AI generated images used in its entirety without significant modifications cannot not be copyrighted. Which make sense, I can't buy a license for an image and copyright that. Even if the license allows it for monetary purposes. 

Can you please define what you mean by "generated" as well as what would constitute "significant modifications"? How do we measure what is and isn't a "significant modification"? 

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, Mihle said:

That's not possible with digital art, or ones that can easily be copied, if not copyright exists.

This is the issue that NFTs tried to solve. Too bad it got associated with scams and people didn't seem to understand what it could be used for.

I think it could have been very beneficial to digital artists if it had been used properly.

 

 

4 hours ago, Mihle said:

That said, I don't think it should last 70 year after the authors death. Limiting it to 10 years after its death or just have it last 50 years or whatever in total would be fine (don't look too much in to the spesific numbers)

I think 10 years after the author's death would be a bad idea. I wouldn't put it past people to try and have artists murdered just so that their work could become public domain after 10 years.

Limiting it to 50 years after the creation date seems fair and would solve a lot of issues if you ask me.

 

I think it is hard to argue for why someone should own the rights to their creation more than 50 years after it was created. Does Cher really need to own the right to "Believe" past the year 2048?

Does Paramount really need to still have the exclusive rights to "The Godfather"?

 

Have they not already made enough money from those things?

[mr moose]

18 hours ago, Sauron said:

Good thing Da Vinci wasn't like you then, copyright is a pretty new concept and it has only been a detriment to human progress and artistic expression.

Absolutely wrong.  Copyright has been around for about 300 years now, prior to that artists like da vinchi, mozart, bach, grieg et al didn't need copyright laws because there was not the ability to record (or paint) and distribute the works. Da vinci had a name as a great painter so he was commissioned to paint things for people.  All the music artists had to do was keep the musical notation guarded.  Move into the 20th century and you have the ability to record and copy music, plus sell it anywhere you want, take that another step further into the 21st century and you have the internet which already has made music less profitable even with CR laws. 

 

18 hours ago, Sauron said:

Also I don't know about you but me? I get paid for the work I do and not based on royalties.

You create works of art for a living?  because this is not the same as working 9-5 or on a commission basis (even though copyright protects that too).

18 hours ago, Sauron said:

Even most independent artists get paid mainly through commissions.

But they get a pittance.  I've been over this ad nauseum on these forums, people just refuse to accept the facts.  All the independent artists in the world get about $2B in revenue (that's the best figure I could find the worst was $831M), the total music industry revenue was $21B.  That means that 90% of the worlds artist share 10% of the worlds music revenue.  Guess where the rest goes?   Only to A list artists and record labels.

 

 

Without copyright you lose any guarantee of revenue for artists therefore the only music you will get to listen to is anything that people want to make and share as a hobby, but they will be doing that in their spare time because they'll need a 9-5 to pay the bills.

[mr moose]

14 hours ago, LAwLz said:

This is the issue that NFTs tried to solve. Too bad it got associated with scams and people didn't seem to understand what it could be used for.

I think it could have been very beneficial to digital artists if it had been used properly.

 

 

I think 10 years after the author's death would be a bad idea. I wouldn't put it past people to try and have artists murdered just so that their work could become public domain after 10 years.

Limiting it to 50 years after the creation date seems fair and would solve a lot of issues if you ask me.

 

I think it is hard to argue for why someone should own the rights to their creation more than 50 years after it was created. Does Cher really need to own the right to "Believe" past the year 2048?

Does Paramount really need to still have the exclusive rights to "The Godfather"?

 

Have they not already made enough money from those things?

Music rights can be bought and sold after the artists dies just like any other IP.  So while IP laws exist so does the chance that someone will kill you to take the rights.

 

Now,  I have personal issue with companies buying music rights and trading them after an artists dies (when the artist is alive and wants to sell the rights that is fine after all it's their business,  but I firmly believe that the rights should only be passed on to the family if they have one,  maybe 1 generation then public domain.  I don't know exactly what would be fair, but I do know that if all other business and IP we personally develop can be passed onto family so why not your music/art too?  AS for movies and content created by a company, well that's their creation and work, who are you or I to tell them how long they can own their own work for?  I would be furious if someone told me anything I worked hard to create in a studio for 12 months had to be given freely away and I couldn't keep it as assets in my company.

[LAwLz]

16 minutes ago, mr moose said:

AS for movies and content created by a company, well that's their creation and work, who are you or I to tell them how long they can own their own work for?

I am not saying copyright shouldn't exist.

What I am saying is that it has become absurdly long because of massive companies like Disney spending millions, if not billions, paying off politicians to lengthen it over and over again. The only reason why they "own" the work in the first place is because the government has granted them that title. It is not an inherent human right to own copyright. The exclusive right to ideas and concepts is something modern society has invented. It's a privilege and not a right.

 

You can frame it as "who are you to say what they can and can't do with their work", but we already have people who dictate these things, and their decisions are affecting me. Why is Disney allowed to tell me what I can and can't do with an idea that was thought of almost 100 years ago by a person who has been dead for almost 60 years? It's been so long that not even Walt Disney's children are alive these days. 

 

The original copyright law was created to protect people from having their work stolen and printed when the printing press first came to the scene. The result of the law was actually that prices of literature rose and the availability of educational as well as scientific and technical information was greatly reduced. It did help some people to become very wealthy though.

The original copyright was 14 years. Now, because massively rich people have been lobbying like crazy, it's often times over 100 years.

 

The public domain is a hugely important thing which has been suffering massively because of these big companies stepping on it for their own benefits. Basically the entire Disney company is built upon public domain IP that they are now trying to eradicate to keep others down while themselves stay on top.

 

 

I think 50 years is a fair deal for copyright. If you die then the copyright can be transferred to your children or spose like any other asset, but I find the entire concept of having copyright after the author's death to be absurd. Once you are dead you no longer need copyright. I understand that it is necessary in order to discourage murder, but having a set time period that isn't related to the author's death would also be a way to avoid that.

[Kisai]

36 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Music rights can be bought and sold after the artists dies just like any other IP.  So while IP laws exist so does the chance that someone will kill you to take the rights.

That's why the "until X years after death" comes in, otherwise you betcha these stories about celebrities dieing from partying too hard would be a lot more common.

 

36 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Now,  I have personal issue with companies buying music rights and trading them after an artists dies (when the artist is alive and wants to sell the rights that is fine after all it's their business,  but I firmly believe that the rights should only be passed on to the family if they have one,  maybe 1 generation then public domain. 

What realistically should happen, is a copyright only exists as long as the original artist is alive. If that artist dies, all use of that copyright is terminated other than the one attached to the artist's name. So music, books, movies, artwork, etc, as soon as the artist dies, all the publisher's holding masters must return them to the estate. The estate then decides of they wish to continue to have that contract with that publisher, re-negotiate it, do something else with it or release it to the public domain immediately.

 

That creates an incentive to keep their artists alive as long as possible so the business can continue to profit from those contracts, even those that were negotiated in bad faith, such as work-for-hires.

 

The content will still go into the public domain at the time it was intended to. If someone bought a painting from X, and then X dies 2 months later, they are obligated to get permission from the estate to sell it to someone else. Which would again be to prevent a perverse blackmarket of killing creators to profit from their creations without paying them.

 

36 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I don't know exactly what would be fair, but I do know that if all other business and IP we personally develop can be passed onto family so why not your music/art too?  AS for movies and content created by a company, well that's their creation and work, who are you or I to tell them how long they can own their own work for?  I would be furious if someone told me anything I worked hard to create in a studio for 12 months had to be given freely away and I couldn't keep it as assets in my company.

 

With productions that are produced where the artists name is not used in the marketing, sure, a film that X actor is in, but isn't on the movie poster or trailer that is fair enough, they should still be paying the estate royalties. If they are a the lead actor, and the marketed focused on X, then no. The film only exists because X is in it, so by all accounts the estate of X has say over films X was the lead actor in. If the production company wants to remake that film without X, or digitally remove X and replace them with someone they don't have to pay royalties to, they have to get permission from the estate to do that, and likewise if they want to produce a sequel with an AI actor in X's likeness.

 

That said, an AI that can replace X in that scenario is still a long ways away, but I feel that the artist/actor while alive only gets to say in how their name, likeness and voice are used, when that is something principally designed to "be them", and not merely an impersonator/parody/satire of them. Elvis and Marilyn Monroe impersonators probably would not be a such a big thing if they weren't dead, and died young. Hence, if an actor is deceased, it's open season on the artificial use of their likeness or voice, as long as it's not attributed or implied "being them".

 

And that's how I feel the AI Art generator argument should be. If you generate art, you call it "AI generated art" not "art". If you generate art in a specific artists style, you do NOT call it attention to artist's style, because it clearly isn't, and you're trying to trade on that artists name rather than the AI generator that clearly isn't the artist.

 

And if you think people have a hard time with mislabeled and mis-attributed music.  TV Tropes has a list just of that https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MisattributedSong

 

[mr moose]

5 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

 It is not an inherent human right to own copyright. The exclusive right to ideas and concepts is something modern society has invented.

We are not talking about ideas, we are talking specifically about creative works, images and names of characters and music (edit: actual things that exist because someone worked on them).

 

[mr moose]

9 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

 

The original copyright law was created to protect people from having their work stolen and printed when the printing press first came to the scene.

 

This doesn't change the argument.

9 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The result of the law was actually that prices of literature rose and the availability of educational as well as scientific and technical information was greatly reduced.

Citation?  My research (watching a lot of doco's and reading articles about the mechanization of everything), is that it took information tot he masses, reduced the cost of books, and improved the general knowledge and education of even some of the poorest people.    About the worst thing you could say about it was that (just like the internet) it took off so fast that at times there was poor information being printed.  But you wouldn't argue that laws protecting information on the internet would be a bad thing? Especially considering I have seen you argue specifically that no one should be censored on the internet.   

 

9 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

It did help some people to become very wealthy though.

The original copyright was 14 years. Now, because massively rich people have been lobbying like crazy, it's often times over 100 years.

And thank god, modern artists can actually live off their work, imagine if that didn't happen.

9 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The public domain is a hugely important thing which has been suffering massively because of these big companies stepping on it for their own benefits. Basically the entire Disney company is built upon public domain IP that they are now trying to eradicate to keep others down while themselves stay on top.

How does a company step on public domain?  if you as a creator want to make your work public domain then that is your choice, it's like there is a secret organizations of corporate bullies conspiring to force you to restrict your work and make money form it.

[crystal6tak]

Reminds me of the monkey selfie dispute nearly a decade ago. (in summary, a monkey took a selfie, the camera owner tried to claim copyright, it didn't through as a "human being did not create the work")

 

I think the problem now is where we draw the line stating the AI is a tool, or an entity all by itself.

 

Is the art created by a human with the help of an AI tool (as you would with any tools in for example, photoshop)? Or is the art created by an AI all by itself (like a monkey picking a camera and snapping a selfie with no human intervention)?

[Sauron]

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

Absolutely wrong.  Copyright has been around for about 300 years now, prior to that artists like da vinchi, mozart, bach, grieg et al didn't need copyright laws because there was not the ability to record (or paint) and distribute the works. Da vinci had a name as a great painter so he was commissioned to paint things for people.  All the music artists had to do was keep the musical notation guarded.  Move into the 20th century and you have the ability to record and copy music, plus sell it anywhere you want, take that another step further into the 21st century and you have the internet which already has made music less profitable even with CR laws. 

There was always the ability to just copy a painting. Copyright goes well beyond preventing exact copies. As for music, copyright has existed throughout the 20th century and yet music sales have varied massively, peaking in the '90s but still being massively profitable today, so you can't really draw any correlation between its profitability and copyright; if anything it goes to show that copyright itself has been ineffective in preventing the profitability dip caused by the popularization of the internet, meaning it's useless as well as harmful to creativity.

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

You create works of art for a living? 

I create software, which is also covered by copyright.

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

because this is not the same as working 9-5 or on a commission basis (even though copyright protects that too).

Why not? Why can't music or drawn art be done in this fashion? I bet a lot of people who draw for a living would rather be paid a salary than take the one in a million chance of becoming famous enough that their copyrighted work is actually worth something.

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

But they get a pittance.  I've been over this ad nauseum on these forums, people just refuse to accept the facts.  All the independent artists in the world get about $2B in revenue (that's the best figure I could find the worst was $831M), the total music industry revenue was $21B.  That means that 90% of the worlds artist share 10% of the worlds music revenue.  Guess where the rest goes?   Only to A list artists and record labels.

That's a consequence of copyright law. Large music firms control the entire market precisely because they have the rights to copy and distribute works of thousands of famous artists and those artists get the majority of the revenue because those firms have interest in keeping a hold of those rights for over a century. Just a reminder: copyright currently exists, these are problems that exist in a world with copyright. This is a point in favor of my argument.

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

Without copyright you lose any guarantee of revenue for artists

There is currently NO guarantee of revenue because artists are not paid for the work they do but for how many copies of that work they sell, which would be unacceptable in any other industry.

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

the only music you will get to listen to is anything that people want to make and share as a hobby, but they will be doing that in their spare time because they'll need a 9-5 to pay the bills.

As mentioned, software developers technically have copyright of their work but nobody would accept working as a developer in a company that pays you some fraction of the software license revenue in proportion to how much of it you wrote and no salary, and what do you think would happen for software that is only or mostly used internally? I could also go a step beyond and say that actually you shouldn't have to choose between doing profitable work and starving; your basic needs should be met regardless.

 

We already have an answer to profitability in the service economy. Music distributors need music to distribute, as netflix has shown it's actually profitable to pay artists to make extra content so you can promote your distribution service even though you can't really do anything to prevent piracy; the revenue should come from the service itself for netflix or spotify or whatever, which would then pay artists to create and release new music so people stay subscribed.

[Splashboy3]

On 2/23/2023 at 9:06 AM, Fasterthannothing said:

I agree it's dumb and honestly I'm probably gonna be flamed for this but I don't see a big deal with AI art being able to be copywritten. If AI is really generating unique pieces every time then it's going to be unique no matter what.

 

but it's not 'unique' pieces; that's the entire point, it's taking whole huge parts of an original illustration and stitching it together. 

[wanderingfool2]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I think 50 years is a fair deal for copyright.

My personal opinion, taking the maximum of 25 years for copyright or life of author + 10 years is where I stand as what I want.  25 years is plenty time to capitalize on copyrighted works if the author happens to dies before the 25 year mark...and giving an additional 10 years for the estate to deal with the copyright feels about right.

 

4 hours ago, Kisai said:

That's why the "until X years after death" comes in, otherwise you betcha these stories about celebrities dieing from partying too hard would be a lot more common.

That is absolutely not the reason, a lot of the works would be under a record label which I think means its under corporate copyright (which lasts is it 90 years?  I can't remember it keeps increasing).

 

 

 

Anyways, in regards to this topic.  I think an important thing to note, where people are saying it can be generated using the same seed.  You have to use the same seed and you need to provide it with the same text input.

 

That creates an issue of how much input is enough input?  And they pretty much ruled that no amount is.  That creates an issue though.

 

Consider the following

What happens when it gets to the point where you can have it take a single image and create a video, and specifically tell it a story which then it acts out.  For all intents and purposes it's going to be something that is "unique", but the AI did all of the work.  Then what happens?  What happens when Disney is able to give it a computer model and describe what they want and the computer just does it?  What happens when Disney then employs the means of scanning someone in and it makes them into a disney character and then they describe what happens?  [All that would be essentially the AI doing the creative work]. 

 

I think ultimately it should be left as a grey area and copyrights should be allowed, but using the current method of how much copyright protection does a piece of work actually get.  Essentially have it like what it's been for years now, copyright being a sliding scale on whether or not something infringes.

 

[Kisai]

18 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

That is absolutely not the reason, a lot of the works would be under a record label which I think means its under corporate copyright (which lasts is it 90 years?  I can't remember it keeps increasing).

Did you miss the context? Or are you only aware of how convenient it is to someone when someone falls out a window in Russia?

 

The context, again, is that there is enough "time after the authors death" that it would not  be beneficial to outright murder a creator who a corporate IP landlord wants to stop paying.

 

 

 

18 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Anyways, in regards to this topic.  I think an important thing to note, where people are saying it can be generated using the same seed.  You have to use the same seed and you need to provide it with the same text input.

 

That creates an issue of how much input is enough input?  And they pretty much ruled that no amount is.  That creates an issue though.

You don't necesarily need the exact input, but if you use the same seed, and the some of the same keywords, you'll get the same image eventually by guessing what keywords were used to form the image.

 

Or to put it another way, If someone were to contest that a work is AI, they could theoretically prove it by demanding discovery of the defendant's computer, and checking their browser history to find their account on openAI, or better yet, if they have downloaded the model to their computer, the existing software leaves a history of use. Pretty much then all the plantiff has to prove is that the evidence points to this model, with this exact configuration was used to produce this image, because it can be reproduced on another computer with the same model and configuration.

 

It becomes somewhat harder to prove in a img2img context because you need the input image, thus having it show up by accident is pretty much impossible without knowing what that image was.

 

18 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

  What happens when Disney is able to give it a computer model and describe what they want and the computer just does it?

 

 

That's thinking too shallow. What if Disney runs a style transformer over an old film that was going to drop into the public domain, and then destroy the original? So now this AI-upscaled version is the only version of said film, and was created in 2024 and not 1934. All the celluloid copies, hand painted backgrounds, etc just burned in a bonfire in a backlot. All BD/DVD/VHS inventory destroyed, so nobody can ever own the original version?

 

I'd argue that the current ruling would say, that doesn't remove it from the public domain, because the input already existed, and the AI's transformation was minimum and not worthy of protection.

 

However, if Disney instead used their entire pre-WWII animation library to train an AI (eg Snow White and Pinocchio) they could do more than just reuse scenes.

 

They could effectively feed in pieces of an existing film, and "update" the animation. They could effectively produce an animated sequel to something that they produced 70+ years ago in the same style, and since they have the audio masters as well, they could also reuse the voice actors who are no longer alive too.

 

I doubt an AI could do this now, but it would be interesting to see Disney try and make a new film with no animators, and only an AI trained on their house style. What it would look like, would probably be a disaster, because the AI has no concept of scene composition, but if you are feeding it a pre-composed scene from an existing film to work with, that's probably going to result in a better output than keyword bashing on a per-cell basis.

 

[Lightwreather]

41 minutes ago, Kisai said:

because the AI has no concept of scene composition

However, the person in charge of getting the result probably would, so it might not be that bad either (not saying it'll be good tho)

[wanderingfool2]

30 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Did you miss the context? Or are you only aware of how convenient it is to someone when someone falls out a window in Russia?

 

The context, again, is that there is enough "time after the authors death" that it would not  be beneficial to outright murder a creator who a corporate IP landlord wants to stop paying.

I had thought you were talking about the concept that it would create a lot of murders if the time after death were to be removed...but that's not really the case as copyrights when it starts hitting that stage are typically becoming corporate level copyrights.

 

34 minutes ago, Kisai said:

What if Disney runs a style transformer over an old film that was going to drop into the public domain, and then destroy the original? So now this AI-upscaled version is the only version of said film, and was created in 2024 and not 1934. All the celluloid copies, hand painted backgrounds, etc just burned in a bonfire in a backlot. All BD/DVD/VHS inventory destroyed, so nobody can ever own the original version?

 

I'd argue that the current ruling would say, that doesn't remove it from the public domain, because the input already existed, and the AI's transformation was minimum and not worthy of protection.

Actually in the case you described Disney would own the copyright to it.  They wouldn't own the copyrights to the story anymore, so it does lose sense of protection there, but if Disney can show they destroyed all copies except their own master of it that they used to produce an AI upscaled version then yes there wouldn't be a way to distribute the images as Disney owns the copyright of it.

 

If they found someone distributing images, they could go after them (at which point it pretty much becomes the person defending who has to show they didn't just use the AI up-scaled version that they used the copies that was in public domain...but again the scenario is that all those copies were destroyed so it would be unable to show that).

 

40 minutes ago, Kisai said:

I'd argue that the current ruling would say, that doesn't remove it from the public domain, because the input already existed, and the AI's transformation was minimum and not worthy of protection.

The issue is that the ruling effectively says that if the AI is doing pretty much everything except the story, you don't own the rights to it.  It's why I'm saying they shouldn't be saying black and white that it doesn't have a copyright, instead it should be left like what currently is happening where there is a sliding scale.

[Kisai]

20 minutes ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

However, the person in charge of getting the result probably would, so it might not be that bad either (not saying it'll be good tho)

The idea I had in mind here was Disney taking one of their live action musicals, and running a style transfer over it with one of their animated films of the same vintage to produce a "new" film, keeping the audio soundtrack generally intact but updated to modern quality standards instead of that notoriously awful radio quality everything had till 1980.

[oali24]

On 3/2/2023 at 1:03 PM, LAwLz said:

Can you please define the word "generating"?

 

 

Because I would argue that the camera generates the image based on the input it gets, such as the photons hitting the sensor.

Likewise, a program like Stable Diffusion generates an image based on the input such as the tokens inputted by a human.

If we just look at what's described in the two sentences above, to me it sounds like there is more human input and more human control over the AI generated art than the picture being taken, since, as you said, the sun is "rendering the world around us" and without it we wouldn't be able to take any pictures. The camera is just a tool for computationally capture and describe what is already created around us, by generating an image.

 

 

Can you please define "composition"? I feel like you dodged the question posed in my post when I brought up a blind person.

Would you say that a blind person taking a picture without even knowing what they take a picture of "composed" the picture? If the answer is yes, please describe how it is different from someone using an AI art program without using the word "generate", unless you also elaborate on precisely what "generate" means to you. 

 

 

 

What is that even suppose to mean? Again, please elaborate on what you mean when you say "compose", because it seems like it is very integral to your reasoning and arguments and yet you have not once explained what you actually mean by it. And now it seems like you are agreeing that someone can compose a picture with SD, yet somehow it seems like that isn't enough to actually say "you created" the image or in your mind that you should be able to claim copyright over it.

 

I think that typing in random words into SD and then having a good picture come out is the same as randomly flailing the camera about and then by accident taking a good picture, or if some child uses a camera and manage to produce a great shot without having put thought or effort into it.

In both cases, the camera and SD are just tools that can be used with more or less effort, with more or less thought put into the creative process. Yet for some reason they get treated very differently by you and some other people, and there is a very stubborn refusal to explain in rational, objective and logical terms why they get treated so differently.

 

If I made a picture with SD, hung it up on my wall and someone asked me "did you make that?" I would say yes, I made it with SD.

If I animated something, showed it to someone and they asked "did you make that" I would say yes, I made it in Blender.

If I hung up a photograph on my wall and someone asked me "did you take that?" I would say yes, I took it with my phone. 

 

 

 

 

Isn't that your argument? That it's the machine who does things even though it is controlled by the human, and it's the human that inputs its thoughts and ideas to create the content.

My argument is that the computer and software are just tools used by me to get my thoughts and ideas across.

You are the one making the argument that at some arbitrary point, it doesn't matter if a human is the one controlling it, because it is the computer who "generates" the content.

 

 

But you haven't answered it. You have given extremely vague descriptions that you think makes sense but as soon as I bring up issues with that reasoning you do a bunch of mental gymnastics to try and explain why it is totally different when a program like Stable Diffusion is involved, or you completely ignore the issues such as with the blind person taking a picture example.

 

 

Can you please define what you mean by "generated" as well as what would constitute "significant modifications"? How do we measure what is and isn't a "significant modification"? 

I'm sorry but all you keep doing is asking for more and more clarification over subjective ideas on a brand new technology, the poster keeps answering you and you keep coming up with more and more questions, you can argue that its hard to draw a line but this is just getting ridiculous, we will figure out a line eventually, this is what the copyright office was doing by declining copyright on this specific piece which creates a precedent, you are asking the poster to define to you an objective standard for the subjective topic of human creativity which is a ridiculous burden to give the poster. clearly there is a line somewhere, like if I told a person to draw something and gave a vague description as to what I wanted to be drawn, that obviously isn't me using a tool, so the copyright of the work produced will go to the artist, the process would be effectively the same as giving an image generating AI a prompt but according to you it should be my copyright with the prompt to an AI and by this logic I also somehow get the copyright to the work I told the artist to draw becasue I gave him a description. what would you say for that?

[mr moose]

20 hours ago, Sauron said:

There was always the ability to just copy a painting. Copyright goes well beyond preventing exact copies. As for music, copyright has existed throughout the 20th century and yet music sales have varied massively, peaking in the '90s but still being massively profitable today, so you can't really draw any correlation between its profitability and copyright; if anything it goes to show that copyright itself has been ineffective in preventing the profitability dip caused by the popularization of the internet, meaning it's useless as well as harmful to creativity.

Absolutely wrong again, every industry has experienced a growth in revenue that correlates to demand and to inflation*.  What the music industry experienced was a massive drop in revenue whiles demand and content tripled.  It is not even back to the same revenue now as it was in 2001. That is twenty years of declining revenue whilst tripling output, and barely clawing back to where it once was post internet.   The figures absolutely do not back up your claims.  Not even remotely.

 

*EDIT: just to clarify, that is every industry that is still around 20 years later and growing, i.e not suffering from something obvious like they make VHS cassettes etc.

20 hours ago, Sauron said:

I create software, which is also covered by copyright.

Why not? Why can't music or drawn art be done in this fashion?

If you work for a company doing it then yes you do, but you do not own the copyright,  and the only reason the company can afford to pay you to create it 9-5 is because they own the copyright.  You can't escape the fact that copyright is what protects the value of creative works.

 

20 hours ago, Sauron said:

I bet a lot of people who draw for a living would rather be paid a salary than take the one in a million chance of becoming famous enough that their copyrighted work is actually worth something.

Maybe, but that doesn't support your notion.  They only have that option because of copyright, not in spite of it.

20 hours ago, Sauron said:

That's a consequence of copyright law. Large music firms control the entire market precisely because they have the rights to copy and distribute works of thousands of famous artists and those artists get the majority of the revenue because those firms have interest in keeping a hold of those rights for over a century. Just a reminder: copyright currently exists, these are problems that exist in a world with copyright. This is a point in favor of my argument.

Large music labels do not control the market, as an artist you are free to go independent.  But if you want the fame that goes with global marketing then you basically have to sign with a label.  You are conflating the ability to promote an artist on a large scale with market control.  They are not the same thing.

20 hours ago, Sauron said:

There is currently NO guarantee of revenue because artists are not paid for the work they do but for how many copies of that work they sell, which would be unacceptable in any other industry.

If you can't sell your wares then you don't have an income, its the same no matter what industry you are in and copyright has no effect on this basic economics principal.

 

20 hours ago, Sauron said:

As mentioned, software developers technically have copyright of their work but nobody would accept working as a developer in a company that pays you some fraction of the software license revenue in proportion to how much of it you wrote and no salary, and what do you think would happen for software that is only or mostly used internally? I could also go a step beyond and say that actually you shouldn't have to choose between doing profitable work and starving; your basic needs should be met regardless.

So?  I am not sure how this opinion has any bearing on your notion that copyright has issues.   You know that when you develop software you can only earn as much as the number of licenses you sell? and if you work as a team you can only earn a percentage of those sales?  or the alternative is you work as a developer for a company that earns profit as a percentage of those sales and you get a simple income package.    It doesn't matter which way you earn your money, all revenue comes from the number of licenses you sell and copyright retains the value of those licenses by preventing other people from copying said product and selling it cheaper.  Again, without copyright protecting a companies IP there is no incentive for them to develop it, which means there is no reason for them to hire developers. 

20 hours ago, Sauron said:

We already have an answer to profitability in the service economy. Music distributors need music to distribute, as netflix has shown it's actually profitable to pay artists to make extra content so you can promote your distribution service even though you can't really do anything to prevent piracy; the revenue should come from the service itself for netflix or spotify or whatever, which would then pay artists to create and release new music so people stay subscribed.

You do realize that netflix only makes money on said content because copyright protects it? otherwise they would have no incentive to pay artists to do shit because it would just get streamed on every other service reducing their product value.   No one is going to invest in content they can't own the rights to.

 

 

 

[Sauron]

57 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Absolutely wrong again, every industry has experienced a growth in revenue that correlates to demand and to inflation*.  What the music industry experienced was a massive drop in revenue whiles demand and content tripled.  It is not even back to the same revenue now as it was in 2001. That is twenty years of declining revenue whilst tripling output, and barely clawing back to where it once was post internet.   The figures absolutely do not back up your claims.  Not even remotely.

I don't get why you think this contradicts what I said in any way. Copyright exists. Whatever issues the music industry may have had recently cannot be blamed on a lack of copyright.

59 minutes ago, mr moose said:

If you work for a company doing it then yes you do, but you do not own the copyright,  and the only reason the company can afford to pay you to create it 9-5 is because they own the copyright.

That's not true, you could release all my software with an MIT license and my employer's revenue wouldn't change at all because the real money is made with continued support and on demand customization. Software needs to be written to do stuff and that in itself is worth a salary, regardless of whether it's then the exclusive property of the company or not. Companies that do rely on software being their exclusive property should just change their business model because hindering human progress just because you can't think of a better way of making money isn't acceptable in my opinion.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Large music labels do not control the market, as an artist you are free to go independent.

Oh yeah, you're "free" to just starve if you want.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

You are conflating the ability to promote an artist on a large scale with market control.  They are not the same thing.

In an economy where you either get fame or starve it is the same thing.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

If you can't sell your wares then you don't have an income, its the same no matter what industry you are in and copyright has no effect on this basic economics principal.

You can sell your work just like every other form of labor that isn't covered by copyright.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

So?  I am not sure how this opinion has any bearing on your notion that copyright has issues.   You know that when you develop software you can only earn as much as the number of licenses you sell? and if you work as a team you can only earn a percentage of those sales?  or the alternative is you work as a developer for a company that earns profit as a percentage of those sales and you get a simple income package.    It doesn't matter which way you earn your money, all revenue comes from the number of licenses you sell

That's not true. As I said, support is where the money is in a lot of cases. There are exceptions like the videogame market (which could very well be changed to fit a world without copyright) but that's all those are, exceptions.

 

Also when you earn a salary it doesn't matter how many licenses are sold, at all. You generally get paid the average salary for your job in the current job market. That has downsides but if the software doesn't sell well that's not your problem, at worst you may need to find another job if the company dies.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

You do realize that netflix only makes money on said content because copyright protects it? otherwise they would have no incentive to pay artists to do shit because it would just get streamed on every other service reducing their product value.

It's funny how you insist that a thing that already happens would destroy an industry that is clearly not destroyed. Piracy is a thing, it has been a thing before streaming caught on, copyright isn't effective in stopping it, clearly this isn't a crushing issue for netflix. What copyright DOES do is limit what you can do in your own art, and incidentally what is hurting netflix is companies like disney pulling their content off of netflix to launch their own streaming platform so now the main incentive to even pay for this stuff, convenience, is gone.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

I don't get why you think this contradicts what I said in any way. Copyright exists. Whatever issues the music industry may have had recently cannot be blamed on a lack of copyright.

I never said it was, I said the notion that copyright has only caused problems is wrong

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

That's not true, you could release all my software with an MIT license and my employer's revenue wouldn't change at all because the real money is made with continued support and on demand customization.

But the MIT license still requires copyright law.  you cannot abolish copyright then try to use a license that protects IP under said copyright law.

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Software needs to be written to do stuff and that in itself is worth a salary, regardless of whether it's then the exclusive property of the company or not. Companies that do rely on software being their exclusive property should just change their business model because hindering human progress just because you can't think of a better way of making money isn't acceptable in my opinion.

what do you think they should change to?  please show a me a single business model that can support a companies software products without requiring some form of copyright.   (remember MIT is a form of copyright protection).

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Oh yeah, you're "free" to just starve if you want.

In an economy where you either get fame or starve it is the same thing.

Huh?  anyone who thinks the music labels owes you a job or a start in the industry is fooling themselves.  It is not controlling the market to not offer a record deal to an artist.  IF you aren't good enough for them then either go independent or get another job.  Stop conflating a tuff market to break into as being the same as a controlled market.

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

You can sell your work just like every other form of labor that isn't covered by copyright.

You've missed the point, if you cannot sell your product then you don't have a market, if no one wants to buy what you have to offer then you aren't going to make money. This is an economic principal not a result of copyright.     Bands failing to sell their music is proof copyright doesn't work, copyright protects their music and gives them exclusive rights to distribute it.  I really do struggle to understand how you can think the opposite is true.

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

That's not true. As I said, support is where the money is in a lot of cases. There are exceptions like the videogame market (which could very well be changed to fit a world without copyright) but that's all those are, exceptions.

 

Also when you earn a salary it doesn't matter how many licenses are sold, at all. You generally get paid the average salary for your job in the current job market.

Please show me a way any company or video game can make money if there is no copyright to protect it.   You can;t just say people will pay for the product, because if there is no copyright then the second any company releases a game, song, movie etc then another person is just going to copy it and sell it for less, then someone will try to undercut them and so on until no one makes money from it.    Without copyright there is no IP, without IP your work is free to take by anyone.  How on earth do you think any business can sustain itself under those conditions long enough to provide you with a job?

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

That has downsides but if the software doesn't sell well that's not your problem, at worst you may need to find another job if the company dies.

And if there is no copyright that is exactly what will happen, the software won't sell because people will just take it. 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

It's funny how you insist that a thing that already happens would destroy an industry that is clearly not destroyed. Piracy is a thing, it has been a thing before streaming caught on, copyright isn't effective in stopping it, clearly this isn't a crushing issue for netflix. What copyright DOES do is limit what you can do in your own art, and incidentally what is hurting netflix is companies like disney pulling their content off of netflix to launch their own streaming platform so now the main incentive to even pay for this stuff, convenience, is gone.

It's funny how you fail to grasp such a basic principal.   Piracy is still held at bay by copyright laws (quite a bit), if you remove the only laws that are stopping them from going full leech on the industry then the industry will die.  Also if you bothered to do even a little bit of research on the topic you'd know that piracy has taken it's toll on the music industry.  but you seem to not understand the figures or how any of it works.

 

IF you remove copyright laws then netflix will post everything from all the producers without paying them, what are they going to use to fund their next movie if no one pays for their current content?, And this applies to all of them.  Right now netflix has exclusive rights to certain programs which enables them to set a fee for their services, without copyright those exclusive rights disappear, who is going to pay for something they can have for free? no one, so where is the next netflix special going to come from if they can't get enough people to pay for it?  A. it's not coming from anywhere. 

 

 

[Sauron]

44 minutes ago, mr moose said:

But the MIT license still requires copyright law.

It doesn't require copyright, it's just the only legal way to de facto waive it on your software. Or if it isn't and I'm misremembering what the MIT license does, who cares, that's not my point.

45 minutes ago, mr moose said:

you cannot abolish copyright then try to use a license that protects IP under said copyright law.

I'm saying that if that software was available to the public and not exclusive to my employer through copyright it would be the same. Engage with the point rather than trying to get a semantic gotcha.

47 minutes ago, mr moose said:

what do you think they should change to? please show a me a single business model that can support a companies software products without requiring some form of copyright.

Anything that involves supporting users of said software, selling actual physical products that use that software, providing a service that goes through that software.

 

You think that, say, amazon wouldn't have a reason to invest in its software infrastructure if it couldn't prevent everyone else from copying parts or all of that software? There are also many companies making money right now on software that is free and open source and invest money and resources into making that software better despite not controlling the copyright. Microsoft directly employs a lot of core linux kernel developers.

59 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Huh?  anyone who thinks the music labels owes you a job or a start in the industry is fooling themselves.  It is not controlling the market to not offer a record deal to an artist.  IF you aren't good enough for them then either go independent or get another job.  Stop conflating a tuff market to break into as being the same as a controlled market.

What do you think a "controlled market" means? Having a quasi-monopoly on what gets widespread attention fully qualifies in my book.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

You've missed the point, if you cannot sell your product then you don't have a market, if no one wants to buy what you have to offer then you aren't going to make money.

You're just assuming that people only want to pay for things if they are covered by copyright, which is demonstrably not true. Aside from the examples I cited earlier, people have shown they're even willing to pay for work that would be legally accessible to them for free in its entirety, like a youtube video or a stream.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Please show me a way any company or video game can make money if there is no copyright to protect it.   You can;t just say people will pay for the product, because if there is no copyright then the second any company releases a game, song, movie etc then another person is just going to copy it and sell it for less, then someone will try to undercut them and so on until no one makes money from it.

Again, empirically not true. If you look up from the first page of "Economics 101" you'll observe that in the real world this isn't how things actually work. Piracy has been a thing for decades, if people really want to they can get any game or movie for free, and yet streaming services have boomed and so have videogame sales. People value convenience, not just the content; and when they do value the content they're often willing to pay for it even if other avenues of getting it exist. If the copy itself weren't copyrighted you'd likely see that distribution of games itself would get monetized, just like the distribution of movies and tv series has been monetized through streaming services.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

And if there is no copyright that is exactly what will happen, the software won't sell because people will just take it. 

*sigh* piracy exists. people still pay for things.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Piracy is still held at bay by copyright laws (quite a bit)

No it's not. If you want a game or movie or music for free you can literally just go and take it.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Also if you bothered to do even a little bit of research on the topic you'd know that piracy has taken it's toll on the music industry.

And copyright did not stop that from happening. That happened in part because people could literally just pirate the music and it was way more convenient than buying a CD; the music industry started growing again when it transitioned to a model that was actually more convenient to people than piracy.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

but you seem to not understand the figures or how any of it works.

You don't seem to understand that the examples of lost profitability you gave happened with copyright in place and given how little you seem to know about how software is monetized I'd slow down on the patronizing.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

IF you remove copyright laws then netflix will post everything from all the producers without paying them, what are they going to use to fund their next movie if no one pays for their current content?

Netflix constantly pays for new content to be produced. The majority of movies produced by "traditional" publishers make back their budget at the box office (go figure, people are willing to pay for the experience of cinema even though watching the movie on a streaming service or pirating it is cheaper?) and those that don't typically don't get funding anyway.

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

who is going to pay for something they can have for free? no one

Actually lots of people, all the time, with or without copyright. Riddle me this: you can go on youtube right now and listen to the top hits (legally) for free, why hasn't this killed the music industry yet?

[LAwLz]

On 3/3/2023 at 1:15 PM, mr moose said:

We are not talking about ideas, we are talking specifically about creative works, images and names of characters and music (edit: actual things that exist because someone worked on them).

It doesn't protect ideas per say, but it does restrict people from creating things based on the ideas.

If I have an idea for a Mickey Mouse movie set in WW2, I am not allowed to create that because Disney can say no. Copyright restricts the freedoms of everyone for the purpose of protecting a single entity (in most cases, massive billion dollar companies).

 

I am not against copyright, but I think it is  very abused and in dire need of being reworked.

 

 

 

On 3/3/2023 at 1:31 PM, mr moose said:

Citation?  My research (watching a lot of doco's and reading articles about the mechanization of everything), is that it took information tot he masses, reduced the cost of books, and improved the general knowledge and education of even some of the poorest people.    About the worst thing you could say about it was that (just like the internet) it took off so fast that at times there was poor information being printed.  But you wouldn't argue that laws protecting information on the internet would be a bad thing? Especially considering I have seen you argue specifically that no one should be censored on the internet.   

I think you are confusing the invention of the printing press with the invention of copyright law.

The printing press took information to the masses and made books very cheap so that even the poor people could start reading.

 

Copyright was a response to this because there was a lot of "knowledge piracy" going around. With access to cheap printing presses, anyone could just take a book and print copies of it which resulted in a race to the bottom price wise.

Countries like England and France implemented copyright laws (although very different from our modern laws because they, as mentioned earlier, only lasted for 14 years and not ~100 years) around 1710 which resulted in big companies being created who bought up the rights to certain literature and then could charge whatever they wanted for it.

Germany on the other hand, was a very divided country at the time and as a result were much slower to implement copyright laws. As a result, we have a great way of comparing two countries, one with copyright law and one without, during the same time period. Germany published and printed far more books, at a lower price, than England during the same time period.

 

You can read more about it here but here are some snippets:

Quote

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Quote

Until now, copyright was seen as a great achievement and a guarantee for a flourishing book market. Authors are only motivated to write, runs the conventional belief, if they know their rights will be protected.

 

Yet a historical comparison, at least, reaches a different conclusion. Publishers in England exploited their monopoly shamelessly. New discoveries were generally published in limited editions of at most 750 copies and sold at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker.

 

London's most prominent publishers made very good money with this system, some driving around the city in gilt carriages. Their customers were the wealthy and the nobility, and their books regarded as pure luxury goods. In the few libraries that did exist, the valuable volumes were chained to the shelves to protect them from potential thieves.

 

In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.

 

 

On 3/3/2023 at 1:31 PM, mr moose said:

How does a company step on public domain?  if you as a creator want to make your work public domain then that is your choice, it's like there is a secret organizations of corporate bullies conspiring to force you to restrict your work and make money form it.

Have you missed the last ~100 years of copyright legislation?

There is a reason why copyright has a limited time, and that's because we as a culture benefit from having access to public domain works. Not just for cultural reasons but also because it makes information widely available to people by limiting the powers a monopoly can have.

A company steps on public domain when they, like Disney, continues to weaken the obligation companies have to give back to the public domain through lobbying. Disney haven't spent millions of upon millions of dollars on strengthening their rights because they think it is good for the public. They do it because it is good for their business.

 

Copyright is a legally given monopoly on something that the general public would want access to. It is a system that restricts creativity for everyone except a single entity.