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0 pointsdangus2y ago0 comments

The AI generating it (Hosted on OpenAI-controlled servers in the case of ChatGPT and DALL-E) is the entity redistributing the work. The end user who asked for the infringing content isn't the entity that is infringing on the copyrights and trademarks.

I'm perfectly free to ask people on the street for t-shirt with Mario on it, but as soon as someone who isn't Nintendo or licensed by Nintendo sells me that t-shirt they're the ones infringing on the copyright and trademark. As the consumer I did nothing illegal, and a court would say that I was deceived by the infringing party.

Distribution (seeding, uploading) and facilitating copyright infringement is what gets you in trouble. When you ask DALL-E (a paid, commercial product) for a picture of Italian plumbers and it gives you an obvious picture of Mario 100% recognizable to the layperson as Mario and not a distinctly different image of a similar character, that's blatant trademark and/or copyright infringement on the part of OpenAI.

> If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing works even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the author very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully making and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of the AI creator then.

I see some parallels to the Napster lawsuit. The fact that the users were the bad people asking for infringing content didn't give Napster the right to facilitate infringement. Napster was ordered to monitor its network and make sure that they were blocking non-legitimate uses. They couldn't logistically comply and went bankrupt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster

Which begs the question: Does OpenAI even have the technological ability to block trademark and copyright infringing content generation? Even if they do, how useful will ChatGPT be if all phrases and imagery that closely resemble copyrighted works are blocked from output?

Whats even worse for OpenAI compared to Napster is that it wasn’t individual users uploading copyrighted content, it was OpenAI’s ingesting the data. Nobody twisted their arm to include copyrighted works in their models.

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madamelic2y ago· 1 in thread

> OpenAI is the entity redistributing the work

It's difficult to say really.

If I essentially encode knowledge of something then can recall and remix at will, am I redistributing the exact work or the knowledge of it?

Yes, it is capable of producing a close to exact replica, if not the exact same input image byte-for-byte, but I find it difficult to say OpenAI is willfully redistributing copyrighted work in a whole like you would with torrenting a movie or right-click saving an image from Google where you are copying the intellectual property 1:1.

Opening this Pandora's box could have large implications on a lot of creative work that could cause artists to be unable to work if taken to the end conclusion: you cannot create any creative work that has a talking mouse if you have knowledge of Mickey Mouse existing because you have been tainted (similar to whiteroom re-creations but now any sufficiently large copyrighted figure causes a deadlock condition for all derivative ore even similar topics).

Is Ratatouille derative of Mickey Mouse? Ehhh, well they are both talking rodents. They both have cartoon faces. You can certainly draw parallels between them but they aren't the same character. Is Mickey with a chef hat infringing on Ratatouille?

The trademark law, to my knowledge, is asking would someone be tricked or misled into believing you are the other guys. I think that is applicable here where someone drawing a talking mouse isn't infringing as long as it cannot be mistaken for Mickey Mouse, which again would be the fault of the person inducing the creation and not the tool that allowed it to happen.

Where does "inspired by" / derived from the encoded knowledge turn into outright exploitation of copyrighted work? There's certainly _a_ line but I find it difficult to define it at it being encoded into knowledge of it existing.

dangusOP2y ago

This “close to exact” thing is actually the Achilles heel of this argument. The example images in this article are so close to exact that they are quite clearly infringement, trademark or copyright. We aren’t talking about Ratatouille mouse versus Mickey Mouse, we are talking about the source picture of Mario versus a slightly altered picture of Mario that every layperson would immediately recognize as Mario composed in the exact same manner as the source image.

Courts have already defined this line over decades of copyright and trademark cases, and the examples in this article definitely cross that line.

> which again would be the fault of the person inducing the creation and not the tool that allowed it to happen.

This is not really true in practice, we can see that in various legal cases against Napster or The Pirate Bay.

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