In going through these arguments, Iāll also be drawing from a few other sources, in order to give a more comprehensive description of the arguments being made.
The Authors Guild Amici Curiae Brief is a document submitted to the court by The Authors Guild in support of the plaintiffās argument.
Combining lending with digital technology is tricky to do within the constraints of copyright.
But itās important to still be able to lend, especially for libraries.
With a system called Controlled Digital Lending, libraries like the Internet Archive (IA) made digital booklending work within the constraints of copyright, but publishers still want to shut it down.
Itās a particularly ghoulish example of companies rejecting copyright and instead pursuing their endless appetite for profit at the expense of everything worthwhile about the industry.
This was the precipitating announcement: VRChat releasing a beta for an in-game real-money store.
Paid Subscriptions: Now in Open Beta! ā VRChat
Over the last few years, weāve talked about introducing something weāve called the āCreator Economy,ā and weāre finally ready to reveal what the first step of that effort is going to look like: Paid Subscriptions!
As it stands now, creators within VRChat have to jump through a series of complicated, frustrating hoops if they want to make money from their creations. For creators, this means having to set up a veritable Rube Goldberg machine, often requiring multiple external platforms and a lot of jank. For supporters, it means having to sign up for those same platformsā¦ and then hope that the creator youāre trying to support set everything up correctly.
(The problem, of course, is that āfrustrating jankā was designed by VRChat, and their āsolutionā is rentiering.)
Currently, the only thing to purchase is nebulous āsubscriptionsā that would map to different world or avatar features depending on the content. But more importantly, this creates a virtual in-game currency, and opens the door to future transaction opportunities. Iām especially thinking of something like an avatar store.
I quit playing VRChat two years ago, when they started to crack down on client-side modifications (which are good) by force-installing malware (which is bad) on playersā computers.
Since then Iāve actually had a draft sitting somewhere about software architecture in general, and how you to evaluate whether itās safe or a trap. And, how just by looking at the way VRChat is designed, you can tell itās a trap theyāre trying to spring on people.
Currently, the VRC Creator Economy is just a currency store and a developer api. Prior to this, there was no way for mapmakers to ācharge usersā for individual features; code is sandboxed, and you only know what VRC tells you, so you canāt just check against Patreon from within the game1.
But the real jackpot for VRC is an avatar store.
Currently, the real VRC economy works by creators creating avatars, maps, and other assets in the (mostly-)interchangeable Unity format, and then selling those to people. Most commonly this is seen in selling avatars, avatar templates, or custom commissioned avatars.
Users buy these assets peer-to-peer.
This is the crucial point: individuals cannot get any content in the game without going through VRC. When you play VRChat, all content is streamed from VRChatās servers anonymously by the proprietary client. There are no URLs, no files, no addressable content of any kind. (In fact, in the edge cases where avatars are discretely stored in files, in the cache, users get angry because of theft!) VRChat isnāt a layer over an open protocol, itās its own closed system. Even with platforms like Twitter, at least there are files somewhere. But VRChat attacks the entire concept of files, structurally. The user knows nothing and trusts the server, end of story.
When Iām looking for an example of copyright abuse, I find myself returningto Nintendoa lot on this blog.
Nintendo is a combination hardware/software/media franchise company, so they fit a lot of niches.
Theyāre a particularly useful when talking about IP because the ābig Nā is both very familiar to people and also egregiously bad offenders, especially given their āfriendlyā reputation.
Nintendo has constructed a reputation for itself as a āgoodā games company that still makes genuinely fun games with āheartā.
Yet itās also infamously aggressive in executing ātakedownsā: asserting property ownership of creative works other people own and which Nintendo did not make.
Youād think a company like Nintendo ā an art creation studio in the business of making and selling creative works ā would be proponents of real, strong, immutable creative rights. That, as creators, theyād want the sturdiest copyright system possible, not one compromised (or that could be compromised) to serve the interests of any one particular party. This should be especially true for Nintendo even compared to other studios, given Nintendoās own fight-for-its-life against Universal, its youth, and its relatively small position1 in the market compared to its entertainment competitors Disney, Sony, and Microsoft.
But no, Nintendo takes the opposite position. When it comes to copyright, they pretty much exclusively try to compromise it in the hopes that a broken, askew system will end up unfairly favoring them. And so they attack the principles of copyright, viciously, again and again, convinced that the more broken the system is, the more they stand to profit.
Nintendo, even compared to its corporate contemporaries, has a distinctly hostile philosophy around art: if they canāt control something themselves, they tend to try to eliminate it entirely.
What Nintendo uses creative rights to protect is not the copyright of their real creative works, itās their control over everything they perceive to be their āshareā of the gaming industry.
Let me start with a quick history, in case youāre not familiar with the foundation Nintendo is standing on.
Nintendo got its footing overseas by looking to see what video game was making the most money in America, seeing it was Space Invaders, and copying that verbatim with a clone game they called āRadar Scopeā:
But then Nintendo was almost itself the victim of an abuse of IP law. āDonkey Kongā derived from King Kong, and even though the character was in the public domain, Universal Studios still sued Nintendo over the use.
Ultimately the judge agreed with the Nintendo team and threw out the lawsuit, in an example of a giant corporation trying to steamroll what was at the time a small business with over-aggressive and illegitimate IP enforcement.
This was such an impactful moment for Nintendo that they took the name of their lawyer in the Universal Studios case ā Kirby ā and used it for the mascot of one of their biggest franchises. It was a significant move that demonstrates Nintendoās extreme gratefulness ā or even idolization ā of the man who defended them against abuse of IP law.
You would hope the lesson Nintendo learned here would be from the perspective of the underdog, seeing as they were almost the victim of the kinds of tactics they would later become famous for using themselves. But no, it seems they were impressed by the ruthlessness of the abusers instead, and so copied their playbook.
Apple puts its logo on the devices it sells. Not just on the outer casing, but also each internal component. The vast majority of these logos are totally enclosed and invisible to the naked eye.
This seems like an incredibly strange practice ā especially since Apple doesnāt sell these parts separately ā except it turns out to be part of a truly convoluted rules-lawyering exploit only a company like Apple could pull off and get away with.
Remember, trademarks are a consumer protection measure to defend against counterfeits. Appleās registered logo trademark protects consumers from being tricked into buying fake products, and deputizes Apple to defend its mark against counterfeits.
While some counterfeiting happens domestically the major concern is usually counterfeits imported from foreign trade. This brings us to Customs and Border Patrol, which you might know as the other side of the ICE/CBP border control system. You might be surprised to see them involved with this, since Border Patrol agents are fully-militarized police outfitted to combat armed drug cartels.
But among its other duties, Border Patrol takes a proactive role in enforcing intellectual property protection at ports of trade ā backed by the full force of the Department of Homeland Security ā by seizing goods it identifies as counterfeit and either destroying them outright or else selling them themselves at auction.1
To get your property back, you have to sue Border Patrol ā an infamously untouchable police force ā and win.
Hi, The EFF, Creative Commons, Wikimedia, World Leaders, and whoever else,
Do you want to write a license for machine vision models and AI-generated images, but youāre tired of listening to lawyers, legal scholars, intellectual property experts, media rightsholders, or even just people who use any of the tools in question even occasionally?
You need a real expert: me, a guy whose entire set of relevant qualifications is that he owns a domain name. Donāt worry, hereās how you do it:
This is an extremely condensed set of notes, designed as a high-level overview for thinking about the problem
Given our current system of how AI models are trained and how people can use them to generate new art, which is this:
The model and the works produced with the model are both distinct products. The model is more like processing software or tooling, while the artistic works created with the model are distinctly artistic/creative output.
Models do not keep the original images they were trained on in any capacity. The only keep mathematical notes about their properties. You (almost always) cannot retrieve the original image data used from the model after training.
There is a lot of misinformation about this, but it is simply, literally the case that a model does not include the training material, and cannot reproduce its training material. While not trivial (you canāt have a model if you canāt train it at all), when done properly, the specific training data is effectively incidental.
AI-generated art should be considered new craftsmanship ā specifically, under copyright law, it is new creative output with its own protections ā and not just a trivial product of its inputs.
The fact that AI art is new creative output doesnāt mean AI art canāt be plagiarism.
Just like with traditional art, itās completely possible for specific products to be produced to be copies, but that doesnāt make that the case for all works in the medium. You can trace someone elseās artwork, but that doesnāt make all sketches automatically meritless works.
The inner workings of tools used in the creation of an artistic work are not what determines if a given product is plagiarism, or if it infringes on a copyright. Understanding the workings of the tool can be used in determining if a work is an infringement, but it is not the deciding factor.
Thereās this popular description of someone āhaving brain wormsā. It invokes the idea of having your mind so thoroughly infested with an idea to the point of disease. As with the host of an infestation, such a mind is poor-to-worthless at any activity other than sustaining and spreading the parasite.
Okay, so letās back way up here, because this is just the tip of the iceberg of a story that needs years of context. Iāll start with the most recent event here, the Mastodon tweet.
Mastodon is an open-source alternative social networking platform. Itās licensed under an open license (the AGPLv3), so you are allowed to clone it and even rebrand it for your own purposes as was done here. What you absolutely are not allowed to do is claim the codebase is your own proprietary work, deliberately obscure the changes you made to the codebase, or make any part of the AGPL-licensed codebase (including your modifications) unavailable to the public. All of which Truth Social does.
CDL: The AAP is Wrong About Everything
Notes on the VRC Creator Economy
So you want to write an AI art license
