#copyleft
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Remember when I told you Disney wasn't going to "save you" from AI?
Megacorps like Disney have mountains of exclusive data they "own" that they can use to create their own internal, proprietary, AI systems. They have every sketch, development photo, unused concept art piece, cut scene, note, doodle, rotoscope/animation reference footage, every storyboard, merch design document, you name it.
And that's on top of every single frame of every movie and TV show. Every panel of every comic.
That's why Disney supports the efforts to clamp down on AI for copyright reasons, because they own all the copyrights. They want that power in their hands. They do not want you to be able to use a cheap or free utility to compete with them. Along the way, they'll burn the entire concept of fair use to the ground and snatch the right to copyright styles. Adobe has confessed this intention, straight to congress.
When the lawyers come, you won't be accused of stealing from say, artist Stephen Silver. You'll be accused of stealing the style of Disney's Kim Possible(TM).
But don't listen to me. Listen to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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The James Somerton thing is one of those rare cases where the amount of force applied by a viral video exposee / public shaming is probably the exact amount that was necessary to stop a bad actor from acting badly. However. The aftermath of public violence is often fear. So I would caution people against taking the "live your life in a way that avoids hbomberguy making videos about you" atmosphere too seriously. Remix is ok. Pastiche is ok. Transformative works are ok. Citing sources in a way that isn't perfectly consistent with MLA and APA standards is generally fine. The problem with a vibes-based crime is that there are always going to be grey areas. Somerton went way past the grey and over the line, but don't let the fact that one person did crimes in the shittiest possible way scare you off of crimes entirely. Push the envelope.
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Hey, you know how I said there was nothing ethical about Adobe's approach to AI? Well whaddya know?
Adobe wants your team lead to contact their customer service to not have your private documents scraped!
This isn't the first of Adobe's always-online subscription-based products (which should not have been allowed in the first place) to have sneaky little scraping permissions auto-set to on and hidden away, but this is the first one (I'm aware of) where you have to contact customer service to turn it off for a whole team.
Now, I'm on record for saying I see scraping as fair use, and it is. But there's an aspect of that that is very essential to it being fair use: The material must be A) public facing and B) fixed published work.
All public facing published work is subject to transformative work and academic study, the use of mechanical apparatus to improve/accelerate that process does not change that principle. Its the difference between looking through someone's public instagram posts and reading through their drafts folder and DMs.
But that's not the kind of work that Adobe's interested in. See, they already have access to that work just like everyone else. But the in-progress work that Creative Cloud gives them access to, and the private work that's never published that's stored there isn't in LIAON. They want that advantage.
And that's valuable data. For an example: having a ton of snapshots of images in the process of being completed would be very handy for making an AI that takes incomplete work/sketches and 'finishes' it. That's on top of just being general dataset grist.
But that work is, definitionally, not published. There's no avenue to a fair use argument for scraping it, so they have to ask. And because they know it will be an unpopular ask, they make it a quiet op-out.
This was sinister enough when it was Photoshop, but PDF is mainly used for official documents and forms. That's tax documents, medical records, college applications, insurance documents, business records, legal documents. And because this is a server-side scrape, even if you opt-out, you have no guarantee that anyone you're sending those documents to has done so.
So, in case you weren't keeping score, corps like Adobe, Disney, Universal, Nintendo, etc all have the resources to make generative AI systems entirely with work they 'own' or can otherwise claim rights to, and no copyright argument can stop them because they own the copyrights.
They just don't want you to have access to it as a small creator to compete with them, and if they can expand copyright to cover styles and destroy fanworks they will. Here's a pic Adobe trying to do just that:
If you want to know more about fair use and why it applies in this circumstance, I recommend the Electronic Frontier Foundation over the Copyright Alliance.
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reblog this if you’re a linux, unix, old software, new software, copyleft, etc, nerd please. My dash is currently the tiniest bit dead and it’s giving me the boreds.
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so sad oh no
People trying to train AIs are now complaining that all of the AI data on the internet is making it hard for them to get quality data sets of natural language and images.
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Btw. I've been on a kick recently revisiting my hometown heroes, Negativland, and lately it seems like as good a time as ever to share their book "Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2"!
(Original illustration by @calware)
The book outlines the copyright infringement suits the band faced in response to their EP "U2", and more broadly argues in favor of protections for artists who use existing works in their own art. The book and accompanying CD is, of course, published copyright-free and is freely available to the public, though you can purchase a hard copy from the band if you want to support the remaining members. If you follow me because you're a Zapruder Films fan, if you've ever been curious about passing mentions of fair use protection or sampling/collage on here, or if you need arguments for why expanding copyright protections to "combat" AI will do nothing but hurt artists and expand the power of corporate monopolies, PLEASE consider checking this out!
[Link to purchase]
[Link to PDF of book]
[Link to CD audio]
(The CD is not an audiobook recording of the book, but instead includes "Dead Dog Records", a supplemental sound collage record on the subject of fair use and artistic appropriation, and an excerpt from an Over the Edge broadcast featuring "Crosley Bendix" (Don Joyce, r.i.p.) discussing the US Copyright Act.)
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Reminder:
You can be inspired by Magz art, learn from it, trace it, remix it, edit it, use it, print it, paste it - whatever
Can also show Magz about it. Is whatever.
It only becomes an issue if are doing it in way with intention of offense, or bigoted ignorance for some reason ? odd. the problem wouldnt be the copying itself, that for sure ...
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Please please please prioritize Tibetan, Vietnamese, Indian and Iranian voices & narratives when talking about self immolation and its history.
Dr Tenzin M Paldron has a brilliant thesis on this with so maybe references: Tibet, China, and the United States: Self-immolation and the limits of understanding
As well:
Tsering Shakya has an essay called Self-Immolation: the Changing Language of Protest in Tibet
Nicholas Michelsen wrote The Political Subject of Self-Immolation which is available in Occupying Subjectivity (available for free on annas-archive.org)
Michelle Murray Yang published Still Burning: Self-Immolation as Photographic Protest.
There are tons more! There is no shame in not knowing or understanding this intense action BUT! It is so easy for academics, reporters, and theorists living within western-colonial systems to completely disregard the incredibly powerful and horrific act that self-immolation is. Please don’t be a part of that!
*** all these links should be free & accessible - if they’re not & you want to read them reach out & let me know!
#protest#political protest#political history#politics#free palestine#tibetan buddhism#free tibet#colonialism#readings#resources#essays#to read#info dump#essay#copyleft#academia
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[ID: Writing in a font that looks like someone's handwriting that reads:
I've just passed six hundred followers, which is amazing. I've checked and blocked anyone who is a bot so all six hundred of you are real people which is neat. I decided to write a
handwritten note to show my gratitude and by hand written/ mean I turned my own handwriting into a font which is the font I'm using right now.
Thank you all and keep fighting against corporations and for the freedom of expression that public domain. Open source and COPYLeft movement embodies. End ID]
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No one has a right to destroy art.
Not even the people that "own" it. Because we don't own the art we make. We own a temporary patent on that work. Culture belongs to everyone, and the only reason IP exists is to encourage the production of cultural artifacts by making it a viable income stream.
So when it comes to things like the Batgirl movie, or Coyote Vs ACME, or the Micronauts cartoon, or the Capcom Alien Vs Predator beat-em-up, or any other piece of media that is destroyed or made unavailable due to rights issues or because it's being sacrificed for a tax break, there should be protections for that work.
Either a national database must be maintained to hold those works until their public domain dates are reached (a project that would at this point span a century) or, a much simpler correction should be applied.
If the law says it can't be made available for profit, it becomes public domain.
You write off your movie as a tax break? Fine, that movie is available for anyone to enjoy, remix or alter for free.
You can't work out a deal between the film company and the game company to keep the classic video game available? You're both willing to chop the baby in half rather than let the other one have it? King Solomon says the baby belongs to everyone.
And to close the loophole for companies employing more than X number of people, if you can't buy it, or stream it, then you can't enforce copyright on it. There's no excuse for any major media company not to have its entire catalog available to the public at least as a burned-DVD-on-request system.
These companies want to sit on piles of culture like dragons and reap the rewards. In the case of the oldest and largest, in many cases they claim ownership over what can only be called our modern folklore. The idea that a company can own Batman should be as insane as the idea of a company owning Hercules, Paul Bunyan or the Archangel Michael.
But if that isn't going to be insane, if we're going to give that kind of power to corporations, that power should come with responsibilities.
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I love you Blender I love you Krita I love you Godot I love you Kevin MacLeod I love you Wikimedia Commons I love you Firefox
I love all open source, copyleft and creative commons licenced works and I love everyone who contributes to them
Thank you for being the best examples of what humanity has to offer
#open source#copyleft#creative commons#every utility program i use is open source#open source or nothing
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The lack of Copyright on AI Images is a Feature, not a Bug.
The pictures I'm included are completely random, except that they are all generated with CLIP-Interrogator derived prompts and were not edited, they are, by my standards if not the law's, public domain.
Not going to be a whole lot to this one. Currently, there's no copyright on AI-generated images, under the "minimal human expression" rule. While I personally think that prompting and iterating alone can rise to meet that standard, I think the current situation is ideal for a number of reasons.
The big one is that a situation where people are jumping on and staking claim to prompt/seed/dataset combinations would be a recipe for disaster and open up whole new frontiers of copyright trolling.
But in general, I'm for the restoration of the commons by any means available. The use of AI elements should be, in terms of copyright, handled in the same way as any other public domain image source. That seems to be the way the US copyright system seems to be leaning, and that's good.
(Anything I wind up registering with them will have a maliciously compliant level of documentation about how much I've reworked my pieces, at least until they chill out. Zarya of the Dawn isn't doing anything differently than Wondermark is.)
By doing so, your day-to-day recreational user can make images for fun or personal projects and in doing so help replenish the commons, and anyone who is utilizing the tech for artistic or commercial purpose is incentivized to keep artists directly in the process (on top of all the other limitations of the tech).
This will incentivize the hoarding of original generations to make it more difficult to suss out what is edited and what's not, but as drawbacks go, its not the worst.
#copyright#copyleft#ai art#my thoughts#public domain#free images#public domain art#free art#unreality#midjourney v4#clip interrogator
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May I ask, for the Betty Boop character free copyright, what versions of hers we can use? like if you don't mind be a little more specific for my dumbass self understands
Only if you don't mind ofc!
Wow, I never made a follow up clarifying the Betty Boop situation. So uh... the situation is complicated.
So like... to play things safe... Betty Boop actually *unambiguously* enters the public domain in 2 years. Which is to say the original version of Betty Boop as depicted in Dizzy Dishes will be free to use.
That said, I'm calling bull. There's dozens of variants of Betty Boop who don't look like the modern incarnation who have fallen into the public domain, and at times, it feels like there's more Betty Boop stuff in the domain than outside of it.
On top of that, the rights to Betty Boop are a complicated mess. From the wikipedia page:
Global Icons, btw, is the same company that also owns the rights to the images of serveral real life celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley... and like... that really sucks.
I'm not a legal expert by any means, but I think this all reads a bit familiar. Disney continues to claim ownership of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, even though that's a lie. The same can be said for DC and any of the Fawcett Comic characters.
What I can tell you is that there's definitely a single recognizable variant of Betty Boop who has fallen into the public domain, with one rather extreme deviation from most other versions of the character.
Betty Boop was a redhead for exactly one cartoon, and nobody talks about that. Poor Cinderella is a solid Betty Boop short, and it's free for anybody to use. And this version of Betty, at least to me, reads as a different incarnation of Betty not commonly used in modern merchandise.
Use her. Call her Cindy or just remove the "Boop" from her name. Put her next to her unambiguously Public Domain friends Bimbo and Koko the Clown. Have her meet Steamboat Willie Mickey and Minnie. Put her into the spiritual successor to Epic Mickey that everybody wants but nobody seems to know how to make.
But allow me to back up for a second.
Right now, as we speak, big AI companies are scraping the art of millions of artists without pay. Original stories aren't being picked up by big networks... everybody wants big IP and indie projects aren't allowed a spotlight. And none of this is going to change anytime soon.
Now more than ever, we are morally obligated to steal art. Not just pirate it. Steal it. Bend it to our whims. Make our own version. Take advantage of parody law and fair use and produce our own frankensteinian creations.
In the future, copyright should belong to the artist, not a corporation. Showrunners who pitch cartoons should own the cartoons they produce; there's no reason Rebecca Sugar and Dana Terrace should be denied royalties for the cartoons they came up with. And in the event of an artists death, the copyright for a character should only by the artists estate for a short amount of time.
I'm sick of Disney. I'm sick of the Marvin Gaye Estate. I'm sick of Global Icons. If they're gonna take advantage of our hard work as artists, then we're morally obligated to take advantage of their IP.
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A pretty good video essay on why current US public domain is bullshit and what software/media companies abandon should be given over to public domain.
youtube
#based#fuck the system#piracy#archive#fuck disney#copyleft#copyright#i think this is my first post fuck it#Youtube
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OKAY, SO, I've heard a lot of folks talk about wanting to put their stuff under Creative Commons licenses, but being worried about megacorps using it and pulling up the ladder.
Which, I'd probably agree, is a sensible worry. Which is why I'm sharing this license with y'all that I found that does a really good job of addressing that!
Basically, it allows for people to use your work with creator credit even commercially, but only if it's on their own or as a part of a worker-owned enterprise.
So, it provides almost the maximum rights possible to the smaller creators this sort of thing is meant to benefit, while still keeping it away from the greedy megacorp bastards.
It's super cool, but it seems like I'm the only one who's heard of it, so that's why I'm boosting it! I'd love to see what works folks apply it to in the future...
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