>This is simple law. Why do people have such a hard time with this?
Because this isn’t simple law. It feels like simple infringement, but there’s no actual copying going on. You can’t open up the database and find a given duplicate of a work. Instead you have some abstraction of what it takes to get to a given work.
Also it’s important to point out that nothing in the law is sure. A good lawyer, a sympathetic judge, a bored/interested/contrarian juror, etc can render “settled law” unsettled in an instant. The law is not a set of board game rules.
If the AI were a human and that human made an image that copied substantial elements of another human's creative work after a careful review of the original creator's work, even if it was not an original copy and no archival copy was stored somewhere in the second creator's creative space, I would be concerned about copyright infringement exposure if I were the second (copying) creator.
I'm open to the idea that copyright law might need to change, but it doesn't seem controversial to note that scraping actual creative works to extract elements for an algorithm to generate new works crosses a number of worrying lines.
Have you seen the examples of midjourney reproducing exact frames of Dune, Star Wars etc? With vague prompting not asking for the media property specifically. It's pretty close to querying a database, except if you're asking for something that's not there it's able to render an interpolated result on the fly. Ask it for something that is there however and the model will dutifully pull it up.
Looking for it, I found this [1] which describes almost what you're saying. The key difference here is that these images aren't exact frames. They're close, of course, but close is not identical.Is there another instance you can point to that shows what you've described?
that's a good reference and yes that's what i'm talking about, but i mixed up the fact that you can get simpsons and star wars without asking for it by name - the "find the difference between these two pictures" game is the result of asking for a specific movie. I stand by my point tho that this is not substantially different than querying a database for copywrited material
Because this isn’t simple law. It feels like simple infringement, but there’s no actual copying going on. You can’t open up the database and find a given duplicate of a work. Instead you have some abstraction of what it takes to get to a given work.
Also it’s important to point out that nothing in the law is sure. A good lawyer, a sympathetic judge, a bored/interested/contrarian juror, etc can render “settled law” unsettled in an instant. The law is not a set of board game rules.