#copyleft

[amigac0debasic13]

Here’s another thing I made, a lot better than the last comic cover replication I did but I’m not fully substituting my style to reach that goal

My art is OPEN SOURCE.

If you want to use my art for anything (profile picture, recolor, tracing for practice, etc) go ahead. I do not care. I’d prefer if credit was given to me but like. Idk whatever. Flourish and make art

Closeups

If anyone wants like. idk high quality images of my work that are not compressed just tell me and I’ll try to do so,thing about that

[deepdreamnights]

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.

[therobotmonster]

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.

[canmom]

stay true to principle//make a break with the artist-tribe

i miss drawing, i should draw something again. drawing is simply fun. and it gives you a specific way of looking at and engaging with the world. i hope we all keep drawing. I don't see any sign we're going to stop, tbh.

copyright must be abolished

3. it's almost inevitable that my illustrations have been included in web scrape training datasets so honestly playing with the barn door at this point is a bit silly, the horse is in another country

that said, if you do wanna use my drawings, renders, writing or anything else (e.g. pixiv, @canmom-art, itch.io) to finetune a model or use it for image to image generation or some other AI thing and make something specifically based on them? I've come to round to the feeling that my answer is just basically go for it - please credit my contribution if it's significant, and show me what you make, exactly the same as if you did a fanart or cutout poem or collage, it's cool to play a part in someone else's project!!

tbh I'll probably help you do it if you ask, I've been planning to finetune an LLM on my blog at some point regardless.

how this is all gonna interact with copyright law is still quite unclear, but if it turns out to be relevant, then by default I release everything I'm the sole author of under CC-BY-SA-NC 4.0 International. [considering dropping that NC so it can be used on projects like Wikimedia, talk to me if that is a problem for your use case].

you may question whether that will plausibly be enforced and if I'm just farting into the wind with those stipulations - but like, hopefully that's fair to request and not too onerous. we can agree that expanding the volume of creative commons works is a good thing? and develop good habits for the post-copyright future? let's keep the viral license spreading

[miochimochi]

Made 2 new lino cuts. The fabric here isn't the best for stamping it seems but it's enough to show off.

[my-cat-is-ensign-chekov]

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

[salamanderinspace]

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.

[that-hippie-user]

alrighty! ya gurl is jammin out to Hypnotic Audio Tracks🄯, i mean music! ... X3 no i dont

:D and with my brain melting along with my anxiety and my paperwork shunted off as tomorrow's problem, its time to binge many much asks in my inbox because i feel wrong if i half-ass answers and also i have executive dysfunction!

X3 i WILL do an awkward lil wiggle if more asks are sent WHILE i answer these old ones, like Sisyphus about to lose grip on the boulder!

:D but hey! when i do it, i make a cute lil crinkle noise, and also my name is Sissyphus, so one must imagine me happy. :3 and gay.

:3 hopefully my answers make my plans a lil clearer.

[futurebird]

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.

[archivlibrarianist]

"A day after the US Copyright Office dropped a bombshell pre-publication report challenging artificial intelligence firms' argument that all AI training should be considered fair use, the Trump administration fired the head of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter—sparking speculation that the controversial report hastened her removal.

"What the Copyright Office says about fair use

"[The report] comes after the Copyright Office parsed more than 10,000 comments debating whether creators should and could feasibly be compensated for the use of their works in AI training.

"'The stakes are high,' the office acknowledged, but ultimately, there must be an effective balance struck between the public interests in 'maintaining a thriving creative community' and 'allowing technological innovation to flourish.' Notably, the office concluded that the first and fourth factors of fair use—which assess the character of the use (and whether it is transformative) and how that use affects the market—are likely to hold the most weight in court.

"...To prevent both harms [harm to human copyright holders as well as developers of AI], the Copyright Office expects that some AI training will be deemed fair use, such as training viewed as transformative, because resulting models don't compete with creative works. Those uses threaten no market harm but rather solve a societal need, such as language models translating texts, moderating content, or correcting grammar. Or in the case of audio models, technology that helps producers clean up unwanted distortion might be fair use, where models that generate songs in the style of popular artists might not, the office opined.

"But while 'training a generative AI foundation model on a large and diverse dataset will often be transformative,' the office said that 'not every transformative use is a fair one,' especially if the AI model's function performs the same purpose as the copyrighted works they were trained on. Consider an example like chatbots regurgitating news articles, as is alleged in The New York Times' dispute with OpenAI over ChatGPT.

"'In such cases, unless the original work itself is being targeted for comment or parody, it is hard to see the use as transformative,' the Copyright Office said. One possible solution for AI firms hoping to preserve utility of their chatbots could be effective filters that 'prevent the generation of infringing content,' though."

So: the Copyright Office doesn't want AI to be trained on pirated works, and they got punished for such a statement.

[fox-stuck]

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!

[deepdreamnights]

TL:DR, it's exactly what it's always been.

Raw outputs aren't copyrightable, and are in the public domain.

Modified work is protectable.

Prompts don't presently provide enough control to qualify on their own, but that can change as the tech improves.

And the current legal structure is adequate to handling AI.

None of which should be a surprise to anyone following this blog.

[therobotmonster]

22 Alternate Reinterpretations of Partially Public Domain Characters

For when "horror monster" is too obvious. As the public domain catches up with more and more of our media darlings' most inaccessible and irrelevant iterations, some variety is in order. Any B-to-D grade movie, game, tv or quick-service-restaurant style-studio/entity/cabal is welcome to use these as jumping off points.

Reinterpretation is the 'true story' that it is implied the still-in-copyright-media-franchise is based on, used as vehicle to criticize/parody megacorp owners through their supposed revisions.

Your collection of Public Domain players go all "Muppets _____" on an unrelated story.

They're furries now (The "Disney's Robin Hood")

It's a monster movie, but a kaiju monster movie.

Rock opera.

The Shonen or Shojo reboot.

We aren't doin' the 'and zombies' or 'vampire hunter' thing anymore? When did that stop?

Similar story, completely different historical time/setting.

Jason and the Argonauts, the public domain character(s) are there. The Argo was the ancient Greek Avengers and also your grandpa was there, so this one's actually like, literary.

Retired 1920s toon becomes livestreamer/tiktoker/whatever in misguided avenue to relevancy.

They're brand-safe pocket monsters.

They're exactly the same, the world is contemporary around them (ala Brady Bunch movie)

Straight-faced monsterfucker romance w' public domain character in the sexy fishman role.

Surreal office comedy.

The Next Generation AKA they have kids.

The Preadolescent Prequel, AKA they ARE kids.

Rule 63, all female, all male, all capybara, etc, reinterpretation.

90s XTREME retro style.

The Inappropriate Saturday Morning Cartoon Adaptation (Gatsby and Pals!)

Nigh-insufferable yet undeniably interesting Grant Morrison-y meta-fictional fantasy take.

... in space!

22. Full 1950s style musical with showgirls*.

*non-negotiable.

[alliwantisai]

[commiegoth]

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.)

[funkmasterfuma]

I don't want to see a single fucking person saying it's a good thing that Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney. As fun as it is to watch an AI company take an L, any kind of ruling in favor of Disney and Universal (a very likely outcome given their legal prowess) will be an absolute fucking disaster for anybody online who enjoys things that adapt or transform originally copyrighted works.