zlacker

>>skille+(OP)
If you run a store on Main Street,

should you get to decide if people can take pictures of your store?

>>konsch+ub
If you run a store on Main Street, should people be allowed to take pictures of your store, copy its content and put it up for sale on another store?

I see this argument made over and over again here on HN and it’s puzzling that people always stop at the first part.

Companies won’t stop at the “look at your content” phase. They will use the knowledge gathered by looking at your content to do something else. That’s the problematic part.

>>manuel+tc
...Yes?

Retail companies research what other retail companies are doing and copy them all the time... was the answer supposed to be no here?

>>safety+dd
It is a no depending on what you sell. If they sell original pictures, you cannot copy them. You are allowed to sell the same products, but not to copy them.

>>rat998+td
You can take a photo of someone else's copyrighted picture (photo, art, whatever). Or any other merchandise they're selling. You can even do it while you're on their property, standing next to a sign that says no photos allowed. All legal.

The business has the right to ask you to leave if you violate their policies. In fact, they can ask you to leave for (almost) any reason at all. They may have some limited right to remove you using a reasonable amount of force, depending on the jurisdiction.

Once you've left or been removed from their property, you still have the legal right to take photos of it from the public place you're now standing in. If you can view the photos or are they're selling through their window, you can keep taking photos of it.

They don't have the right to confiscate your camera or the pictures you took. Your rights in terms of what you can do with those photos may have limitations (e.g. redistribution, reproduction), particularly if you photographed copyrighted works.

This is why the parent's comment confused me so much. In most of the world you live in a society where yeah you have the freedom to take photos of stuff, or copy it down on a clipboard or whatever, and use it as competitive intelligence to improve your own business. And thousands of businesses are doing it every day.

>>safety+if
Everything you wrote ignores the fact that this content taken from websites are not just parked there to be used as “competitive intelligence”

It becomes integral part of a business product. That is the problematic part.

You going into a store and take pictures of some art to use as a reference material is not an issue.

But if you take those pictures and you use them to make a program that than spits out new art that is just a mix of those images patched together then, imo, that’s an issue.

>>manuel+qg
It sounds to me like we agree. With respect, people have a lot more rights than they realize when it comes to taking photos of stuff in public (or semi-public) places, which is the scenario in your analogy. But this has questionable bearing on whether an AI can scoop up Internet content and do something with it.

I think it's almost a guarantee that courts will start finding exact AI reproductions of copyrighted work to be infringement.

Where the analogy might come into play is that if you take a photo of a copyrighted work there are limitations on what you can do with your photo, without infringing on that copyright. I have no idea if the courts will apply that stuff to AI, for instance there's actually a fair bit of leeway if you take a photo which contains only a portion of a copyrighted work and then you want to sell or redistribute that photo. One might argue that this legal principle applies to AI as well... lawyers are already having a field day with this stuff I'm sure.