zlacker

I don’t know of any examples of images being wholly recreated, but it’s certainly possible to use the name of some living artists to get work in their style. In those cases, it seems like not such a leap to say that the AI has obviously seen that artist’s work and that the output is a derivative work. (The obvious counterargument is that this is the same as a human looking at an artist’s work and aping the style.)

>>paulgb+(OP)
https://alexanderwales.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/image....

Left: “Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer” by Stable Diffusion Right: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

This specific one is not copyright violation as it is old enough for copyright to expire. But the same may happen with other images.

from https://alexanderwales.com/the-ai-art-apocalypse/ and https://alexanderwales.com/addendum-to-the-ai-art-apocalypse...

>>paulgb+(OP)
It’s not a copyright violation to commission an artist to make you something in the style of another artist and it’s also not copyright infringement for the artist you hired to look at that artist’s work to learn what that style means. And it’s also not always infringement to draw another artist’s work in your own style same as reimplementing code.

If you “trace” another artists work the hammer comes down though. For Copilot it’s way easier to get it to obviously trace.

>>matkon+U
I think this happens a lot with famous images since that image will be in the training set hundreds of times.

Even if deduplication efforts are done, that painting will still be in the background of movie shots etc.

>>matkon+U
> Left: “Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer” by Stable Diffusion Right: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

Even that if done by a person as far as I understand it would not constitute a copyright infringement. It's a separate work mimicking Vermeer's original. The closest real world equivalent I can think of is probably the Obama Hope case by AP vs Shepard Fairy but that settled out of court so we don't really know what the status of that kind of reproduction is legally. On top of that though the SD image isn't just a recoloring with some additions like Fairy's was so it's not quite as close to the original as that case is.

>>paulgb+(OP)
> n those cases, it seems like not such a leap to say that the AI has obviously seen that artist’s work and that the output is a derivative work.

"Copying" a style is not a derivative work:

> Why isn't style protected by copyright? Well for one thing, there's some case law telling us it isn't. In Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures, the court stated that style is merely one ingredient of expression and for there to be infringement, there has to be substantial similarity between the original work and the new, purportedly infringing, work. In Dave Grossman Designs v. Bortin, the court said that:

> "The law of copyright is clear that only specific expressions of an idea may be copyrighted, that other parties may copy that idea, but that other parties may not copy that specific expression of the idea or portions thereof. For example, Picasso may be entitled to a copyright on his portrait of three women painted in his Cubist motif. Any artist, however, may paint a picture of any subject in the Cubist motif, including a portrait of three women, and not violate Picasso's copyright so long as the second artist does not substantially copy Picasso's specific expression of his idea."

https://www.thelegalartist.com/blog/you-cant-copyright-style

>>rtkwe+B3
Have you been following the Andy Warhol Prince drawing case?

It is current at the SCOTUS so we should see a ruling for the USA sometime in the next year or so.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_t...

>>Spivak+V
Right, but what if you commission an artist to create a work similar to an already existing piece of art and the artist decides that the most efficient way to do that is to just place the original piece of art in a photocopier, crops out the copyright notice and original artist's signature, and sells you the resulting print?

>>blende+Ap
No hadn't heard of it, I don't follow copyright law extremely closely it tends to make me annoyed. On it's face reading the case summaries and looking at the two pictures, it feels like the act of manually repainting and the color choices should be enough to render it a transformative work. It's one of the fundamental problems with trying to apply copyright to anything other than precise copies, art remixes and recombines all the time, it's fundamental to the process.

>>rfrec0+wq
That's a violation but not what SD is doing. It's not copying it's recreating a similar (sometimes extremely similar image).

>>rtkwe+B3
It is a clear case of derivative work (see also https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Derivative_works - internal docs, but their explanation of copyright status tends to be well done)