The simple fact of the matter is that Disney and Getty invest a lot of money into these materials being out there in the first place. Open source programmers and artists spend a lot of time producing works for no cost other than some minor courtesies.
AI companies aren't your friend or the little mom ''n pop shop down the road. Their technology giants backed by billionaires. When it comes to Disney versus Google/Microsoft, I'm against both sides if it means giving up my rights.
Big AI taking your stuff and ignoring copyright law isn't some kind of protests against copyright, it's the very opposite; it shows that copyright doesn't matter if you have the money to defend yourself in court. Violate the the MPAA's copyright and you get extradited, violate some random person's copyright and you should feel honoured that people even want to steal your work.
In my opinion, the idea behind the current copyright system works fine if the terms weren't so ridiculously long. Restrict copyright to five or ten years and I'd be fine with the whole thing. This "70 years after the death of the author" crap is the biggest stifle on copyright adds.
It's Disney that are, by proxy, suing Stable Diffusion to create the legal precedent that you desire.
I firmly believe in "practice what you preach". I you declare you firmly believe in A but then do something directly counter to that because it's more convenient in this specific case, then that doesn't sit right with me.
Besides, further expanding copyright in this one area will only make it so much harder to reduce it later. And the pro-copyright folks will be able to say "you say you want less copyright, but you vigorously advocated in favour of copyright then, you hypocrite!" (and they wouldn't be entirely wrong, either). All this effort and energy fighting ML tools would be better directed at reducing copyright instead.
I don't disagree with your view on corporations. Do I like what CoPilot is doing? Not really. But at the end of the day: does CoPilot's or ChatGPT's mere existence really take away anything concrete from me? Am I harmed or even inconvenienced by it? Are my rights reduced? Is my code harmed by it? Is my income reduced? I don't really see how it concretely affects me, other than a general "feeling of unfairness".
And I see real risks with all of this: most regular people and small businesses don't have the resources to litigate as it's expensive and time-consuming, so a "license" that you or I slap on a piece of code is, realistically speaking, just ink on a piece of paper. GPL violations are rampant, violations of other licenses probably happen even more (but people generally care less about that, so not as widely publicized). Who will benefit with more copyright law on their side? The ones with deep pockets and many lawyers on retainer. i.e., the corporations neither of us like. Think creative new copyright lawsuits such "we claim copyright on the Java API" kind of stuff.
2. People using non-copyleft license just do it because public domain seems to have a complicated legal status across the world.
Then, a lot of open source authors understand that their works are not groundbraking inventions and want to share them with the world without any fees or costs. And others have groundbraking inventions and still share them for free with the world.
But there are almost always license terms attached to the piece of the work. They can be essentially non-limiting, like public domain or MIT. But they can also enforce some minimal requirements like attribution. Why should any entity, especially huge corporations, not be bound to those conditions? It was mostly those corporations which created a restrictive copyright. Try to draw an image of Micky Mouse and put it on your website and see what happens.
They aren't training it on Microsoft or GitHub code.
> A world where Getty and Disney control even more than they already do.
This is exactly what is currently happening though, it's okay to rip off the little guy artist or coder. The argument here is that one big guy stood on another big guys foot, and as the little folks we shouldn't stand for it either.
I can’t speak for everyone, but personally I find that copyright can be used properly or abused, at both sides (holder/consumer). It doesn’t mean that copyright is bad, only particular caregories of claims and usage are. But abusing copyrighted material from millions of little creators at insanely automated scale is another level of evil, especially when they explicitly require consent for exactly this type of use.
worrying that requiring consent to train an AI model will inevitably lead to requiring consent to make handmade art that’s a little too similar to some other existing artwork
That’s the root of misunderstanding, afaict. We can agree that at-scale processing is bad and that fair use is still okay. A human with a pen (or a text editor) can’t damage copyright at scale by learning terabytes of material in few weeks and producing the same amount in hours, so they can be excluded from this. Humans who use AI can, so they’re a target.
The copyright terms means that for Life+70 countries only works where a) the author died before 1953 and where the works were published before 1928 are in the public domain.
An AI training on a given work should comply with the law and with copyrights, just like anyone else. It should also respect the license or other terms the works were released under. -- You could easily silo the data by license, and have a different model per license.
Patents should be a good thing (they allowed inventions to be published instead of being kept secret). However, it is easy for large companies to get patents on trivial things, write overly broad patents, and collate a large number of patents in a domain. That means trying to innovate or compete in a highly patented field like audio or video compression is difficult.
Or you can (correctly) think it's a huge drag on innovation and human progress.
If you think the latter then hoping in this case for legal precedent to broaden the scope of copyright enforcement is just bizarre logic. This isn't a rule that already exists as such. The case will set a precedent (based on interpretation of existing law) for the future.
When a new technology is introduced, for example the compact disc was invented, lawyers get to poke whether that "distribute" applies to the music CDs, or just to vinyls and music tapes (because at the time of granting that license, CDs weren't yet a thing! gotcha!).
The answer to this conundrum might vary in different countries, and we can have fun discussing that in the context of AI, but it does not affect how handmade art shouldn't be too similar.
It’s also worrying that requiring consent to train an AI model will inevitably lead to requiring consent to make handmade art that’s a little too similar to some other existing artwork (ie, how all art works through reference, training, and inspiration). A world where Getty and Disney control even more than they already do.