[PuddleCheese]

Re. Point 2:

Artists are granted copyright for their work by default per the Berne Convention. These copyrighted works are then used without consent of the original author for these models.

Additionally, the argument that you can't copyright a style is playing fast and loose with most things that are proprietary, semantically.

[PeterisP]

A key part of the concept of copyright is that having copyrighted works used without consent is perfectly fine. Copyright grants an exclusive right to make copies of the work. It does not grant the author control over how their work is used, quite the opposite, you can use a legitimately obtained copy however you want without the consent of the author (and even against explicit requirements of the author) as long as you are not violating the few explicitly enumerated exclusive rights the author has.

You do not need an author's consent to dissect or analyze their work or to train a ML model on it, they do not have an exclusive right on that. You do not need an authors consent to make a different work in their style, they do not have an exclusive right on that.

[PuddleCheese]

I feel there's a lot missing from this, and some terminology would require clarification (What constitutes "used"?).

Generally speaking, this supposition skirts around the concept of monetizing from the work of others, and seems at odds with what the Berne Convention seems to stipulate in that context, and arguably seems in violation of points 2 and 3 of the three-step test.

That's to say nothing regarding the various interpretations on data scraping laws that preclude monetizing outputs.

I don't feel it's that black and white, personally...

[UncleEntity]

> Additionally, the argument that you can't copyright a style is playing fast and loose with most things that are proprietary, semantically.

This has been true since copyright existed, Braque couldn’t copyright cubism — Picasso saw what he was doing and basically copied the style with nothing to be done aside from not letting him into the studio.

[AlgorithmicTime]

But if I train my own neural network inside my skull using some artist's style, that's ok?

Either a style is copyrightable or it's not. If it's not, then I can't see any argument that you can't use it yourself or by proxy.

[PuddleCheese]

The brain-computer metaphor is not a very good one, it's a pretty baseless appeal. Additionally, it's an argument that anthropomorphizes something which has no moral, legal, or ethical discretion.

You do not actively train your brain in remotely similar methods, and you, as an individual, are accountable to social pressures. An issue these companies are trying to avoid with ethically questionable scraping/training methods and research loop holes.

Additionally, many artists aren't purely learning from others to perfectly emulate them, and it's quickly spotted if they are, generally. Lessons learned do not implicitly mean you perfectly emulate that lesson. At each stage of learning, you bias things through your own filter.

Overall, the idea that these two things are comparable feels grotesque and reductionist, and feel quite similar to the "Well I wasn't going to buy it anyway" arguments we've been throwing around for decades to try to justify piracy of other materials.

At the end of the day, an argument that "style can't be copyrighted" is ignoring a lot of aspects of it's definition, including the means, and can be extrapolated into an argument that nothing proprietary should be allowed to exist...

[aqsalose]

> But if I train my own neural network inside my skull using some artist's style, that's ok?

How well the network inside your skull can manipulate your limbs to reproduce good-quality work in some artist's style?

Our current framework for thinking about "fair use", "copyright", "trademark" and similar were thought about into existence during an era when the options for "network inside the skull" were to laboriously learn a skill to draw or learn how to use a machine like printing press/photocopier that produces exact copies.

Availability of a machine that automates previously hand-made things much more cheaply or is much more powerful often requires rethinking those concepts.

If I copy a book putting ink on paper letter by letter manually, that's ok, think of those monks in monasteries who do that all the time. And Mr Gutenberg's machine just makes that ink-on-paper process more efficient...

[odessacubbage]

unless you are in fact a living and breathing cyborg [in which case, congratulations] , the wet work inside your head is not analogous to the neural networks that are producing these images in any but the most loosely poetic sense.