Today I learned, or inferred anyway from what you wrote, that Roy Lichtenstein was gay.. I promise you, I am no more annoyed with his career now than I was two minutes ago. :-)
I'm not annoyed that Lichtenstein made cartoonists into unwilling collaborators. I'm only annoyed that he didn't pay them or credit them. (It's possible that he would have preferred to pay and acknowledge them, but didn't dare for fear of being sued? In which case I should blame our dumbass legal system and not Lichtenstein.)
I'm not bothered by AI, and I agree with you there's still artists involved. But I wonder if maybe AI that is trained on the public domains should be uncopyrightable.
AI is also devastating to low-level artists - the people who do $20 commissions for people who want a drawing of their D&D character, and other low-level art jobs. It's a first step for many illustrators and cartoonists, and it's already being replaced by AI. But it feels pointless to me to try and stop that; it would be like trying to stop the typewriter industry from being devastated by computers.
I think you should generally be able to copyright art that uses public domain works in a transformative way. Like, a hip hop song using public domain samples would still be copyrightable.
I'm not sure it's pointless to try to stop the current AI drawing tools...I think some of the lawsuits percolating now may effectively end them? It's hard to know but the legal system hasn't been super friendly to innovations that depend on aggressively pushing on the edges of copyright in this way. it might take a while but I can see the courts just shuttering the whole thing (though AI based on public domain or collaborating with particular artists could still be possible). But who knows?
Today I learned, or inferred anyway from what you wrote, that Roy Lichtenstein was gay.. I promise you, I am no more annoyed with his career now than I was two minutes ago. :-)
I'm not annoyed that Lichtenstein made cartoonists into unwilling collaborators. I'm only annoyed that he didn't pay them or credit them. (It's possible that he would have preferred to pay and acknowledge them, but didn't dare for fear of being sued? In which case I should blame our dumbass legal system and not Lichtenstein.)
I'm not bothered by AI, and I agree with you there's still artists involved. But I wonder if maybe AI that is trained on the public domains should be uncopyrightable.
AI is also devastating to low-level artists - the people who do $20 commissions for people who want a drawing of their D&D character, and other low-level art jobs. It's a first step for many illustrators and cartoonists, and it's already being replaced by AI. But it feels pointless to me to try and stop that; it would be like trying to stop the typewriter industry from being devastated by computers.
I think you should generally be able to copyright art that uses public domain works in a transformative way. Like, a hip hop song using public domain samples would still be copyrightable.
I'm not sure it's pointless to try to stop the current AI drawing tools...I think some of the lawsuits percolating now may effectively end them? It's hard to know but the legal system hasn't been super friendly to innovations that depend on aggressively pushing on the edges of copyright in this way. it might take a while but I can see the courts just shuttering the whole thing (though AI based on public domain or collaborating with particular artists could still be possible). But who knows?