You sell your music for $1. I sell your music (but without copyright, it's my music, really) for $0.50 in all the same locations as you do. I'll win any race to the bottom, because my cost in time is absolutely less than yours in the effort to sell my music.
For example, Miracle of Sound doesn't do live performances, because his music is all electronic and created by one person.
Plus, I can take my music and do "live" performances of it too. I can also hire folks (say, DJ's) to do these "live" performances on my behalf.
It sold >100,000 units[3], and AFAIK no one's massively undercut the author. I guess he's kind of undercutting himself by making it available on github, but I bet most people would rather pay 3€ and have nice steam features than download and compile a game off a site they likely don't know.
And yes, I do realize he's still the copyright holder for SNKRX, but he's not really enforcing it with a permissive license like MIT.
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/915310/SNKRX/
The OC can spend their time on the updates, and I'll spend my time on marketing the new version. I'd probably want to report the original as a clone, because I can and it could help boost my own version's rankings. If the OC wants to fight that, it's his time, so cool.
And should the OC actually succeed in getting that clone off the store, the other 10 I've put up while they're busy fighting against the first clone can take its place easily enough.
After all, without IP - without copyright - it's mine to sell however I want to. Nobody can stop me, nobody can even really chastise me because nothing was taken and nothing was lost.
That copyright you're dismissing is worth a lot. It states that it is, indeed, the owners' work. It raises potential legal ownership issues with the compiled work (which isn't under the same license as the code) and store listings. Even if he's not actively using it, it's still busy protecting his work.
Some potential arguments you might use are that it does happen, and will happen eventually to this project, that it's simply a matter of time. Another is that it currently isn't worth it for the amount of work you might put into doing this for this project, but as soon as it is worth something, it will be. Which implies in this case, the cost of all of this activity would not be covered by the return, even if you didn't have to pay the creator.
There's almost certainly a market efficiency in scaling up this packaging activity -- so that the original creator could give up some of his copyrights to pay someone to do the packaging, as long as that packager is doing it for lots and lots of other projects. That's how IP really works.
But in a world of explosive creative access -- where making copies, and creating works is extremely popular and hypercompetitive, the chances are that copyright as a sellable, alienable right isn't going to be the thing that pulls in the money for the artists. It's a thing that maybe you speculatively sell to that large-scale packager, that promoter, in a buyer's market, for a vanishingly small amount. Which makes the contrast between a world without copyright, and a world with, far less diabolically opposed. IP gets you a pittance, but for the vast majority of artists, it's not nearly enough. It may actually be kind of cruel to incentivize artists to produce with an endlessly drawn out false promise of IP riches.
Could we do better? Well, one thing is that we could stop what you're describing without an alienable right to copy, more like a system to prevent the kind of fraud or misrepresentation you describe. There are components of this in our existing creative incentive laws, but they're actually some of the least "property"-like attributes, and do not revolve around making copies -- moral authorship, some elements of trademark. But it involves a lot of work to try and reform our outlook to come out with policies that genuinely rewards artists and enables innovation. I don't see it arising from those praising current intellectual property models, and arguing for their expansion.
Because you cherry-picked an example. This (separate publishing profiting from the same work) has been happening time and again to musicians and authors - even to those under copyright protection -- the only difference is that those have some legal recourse, and have been shutting down those alternate editions.
Well, if you don't have copyright, anybody could also publish the game on steam or in any other shop with the same "nice steam features", and get the money over him. It would just be up to the audience charity ("let's give our money to the original author instead of buying the cheaper same featured alternative release")
Nothing, that's my whole point.
>And if nothing is stopping it, why hasn't someone done it yet (that I know of).
Not everything that can happen has happened (or will happen).
But many programs in similar open status were indeed taken and sold this way. And sure, it's legal and a particular creator might be fine if that happened to his program. But that wasn't what we were discussing in this subthread, but the fitability of this model for people wanting to make a living, e.g. the proposition that: "I guess he's kind of undercutting himself by making it available on github, but I bet most people would rather pay 3€ and have nice steam features than download and compile a game off a site they likely don't know".
Well, first, the undercutters might put their version in a nice site like Steam as well. And that's just one case (or e.g. Steam discourages them, even though what they'd be doing is legal), there's also games/apps that they are sold in the author's website or on iOS/Android app stores - and for those anybody undercutting them with their own build/copy would have an equally convenient/prestigious delivery trivially.
Now, there are some cases where the original creator would fare better, but not because of the basic mechanics of the model, but because of other factors: e.g. a creator could have a nice following and be well loved in the community, to the point that most users would go out of their way to buy their version for support, and not the third party ones, even if the latter are undercutting it.
For the average program and the average creator without fans though, if they are concerned about their own sales, that's more of a "put it out in the open and pray you don't get undercut" proposition...
> including without limitation the rights to [...] sell copies of the Software.
I'm not sure if it's copyright that has really allowed for music to flourish, I think that's a claim that requires a bit more research behind it.
There are indeed some people who were able to make a good living from the money they received from the copyright collecting society, though they are a small minority; all musicians I know who are members of a copyright collecting society get a few hundered Swiss francs a year and don't live from their music.
Some years ago I analyzed the yearly business report of SUISA, the Swiss copyright collecting society responsible for musicians, and found that of the 120'000'000 CHF payed by the society only one sixth was given to Swiss composers ("Urheber"), and that the probability of any of those composers would get enough money from SUISA to make a decent living is less than 0.1%; for comparison, the probability of being seriously injured or killed in a traffic accident in Switzerland is > 0.2%; the vast majority (> 97%) gets nothing to less than 1900 CHF.
In comparison the administrative cost to run SUISA in the same year was 26 mio CHF (compared to the 20 mio CHF payed to musicians), and the publishers received 54 mio CHF. SUISA payed ~19 mio CHF to their 166 employees; in 2006 357'000 CHF was payed to the director alone.
Because of it, or in spite of it?
Consider it a black box where copyrighted work goes in and similar work pops out. Conflating what is essentially a function approximator with human beings when it comes to law is a stretch.
If a generated work is similar to an already existing copyrighted work, it is not relevant whether the work was generated by a DNN; the author of the original work can file a claim anyway. On the other hand a work generated by a DNN by itself is not copyrightable, since a human author is required by copyright law. The use of training data for the DNN is fair use according to jurisdiction in comparable cases.
That's more of an open question given that the lawsuits concerning exactly this haven't made it before a judge yet nor have concluded.
There are some very sound arguments against this particular case being considered fair use, and they haven't seen the inside of a courtroom to be tested.
You could get this score alongside the results if you wanted to generate images but know which ones probably shouldn't be used commercially, or you could choose to filter your results by some similarity threshold
I don't really understand the logic here. I have heard there is also some legal precidence to this claim. But surely using photoshop to create an image doesn't mean that you didn't create the image, but photoshop did? So why should this apply to tools that use neural networks?
Are you sure about that? https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/themes ;)
It's rather a rent-seeking industry; the actual artists benefit only marginally from this; the original intent, to give composers an income who would otherwise be out of the monetary loop, is long forgotten; ironically, composers (or musicians in general) today earn best, on average, when they work as a clerk for a copyright collecting society; I don't think patent and copyright law can be fixed; they can only make it even more complicated and unwieldy, so that it gets even further away from the original idea, and plays into the hands of trolls or monopolists.