[deadbeeves]

>the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.

No, that right doesn't exist. If you put your work of art out there for people to see, people will see it and learn from it, and be inspired by it. It's unavoidable. How could it possibly work otherwise?

Artist A: You studied my work to produce yours, even when I asked people not to do that!

Artist B: Prove it.

What kind of evidence or argument could Artist A possibly provide to show that Artist B did what they're accusing them of, without being privy to the internal state of their mind. You're not talking about plagiarism; that's comparatively easy to prove. You're asking about merely studying the work.

[withinboredom]

The right to not use my things exists everywhere, universally. Good people usually ask before they use something of someone else's, and the person being asked can say "no." How hard is that to understand? You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want.

Example:

If you studied my (we will assume "unique") work and used it without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use," and the courts would decide whether it was fair use (ask everyone who used a mouse and got sued for it in the last ~100 years). The court would either agree that you used my works under "fair use" ... or not. It would be up to how you presented it to the court, and humans would analyze your intent and decide.

OR, I might agree it is fair use and not sue you. However, that weakens my standing on my copyright, so it's better for me to sue you (assuming I have the resources to do so when it is clearly fair use).

[deadbeeves]

>You might believe they don't have the right to say "no," but they can say whatever they want.

You have a right to say anything you want. Others aren't obligated do as you say just because you say it.

>If you studied my (we will assume "unique") techniques and used them without my permission, then let us say I sue you. At that point, you would claim "fair use,"

On what grounds would you sue me? You think my defense would be "fair use", so you must think my copying your style constitutes copyright infringement, and so you'd sue me for that. Well, no, I would not say "fair use", I'd say "artistic style is not copyrightable; copyright pertains to works, not to styles". There's even jurisprudence backing me up in the US. Apple tried to use Microsoft for copying the look-and-feel of their OS, and it was ruled to be non-copyrightable. Even if was so good that I was able to trick anyone into thinking that my painting of a dog carrying a tennis ball in his mouth was your work, if you've never painted anything like that you would have no grounds to sue me for copyright infringement.

Now, usually in the artistic world it's considered poor manners to outright copy another artist's style, but if we're talking about rights and law, I'm sorry to say you're just wrong. And if we're talking about merely studying someone's work without copying it, that's not even frowned upon. Like I said, it's unavoidable. I don't know where you got this idea that anyone has the right to or is even capable of preventing this (beyond simply never showing it to anyone).

[hn_acker]

> The right to not use my things exists everywhere, universally.

For physical rival [1] goods, yes. Not necessarily the same for intangible non-rival things (e.g. the text of a book, not the physical ink and paper). Copyright law creates a legal right of exclusive control over creative works, but to me there isn't a non-economic-related social right to exclusive control over creative works. In the US, fair use is a major limit on the legal aspect of copyright. The First Amendment's freedom of expression is the raison d'être of fair use. Most countries don't have a flexible exception similar to fair use.

> OR, I might agree it is fair use and not sue you. However, that weakens my standing on my copyright, so it's better for me to sue you

No, choosing not to sue over a copyrighted work doesn't weaken your copyright. It only weakens the specific case of changing your mind after the statute of limitations expires. The statute of limitations means that you have a time limit of some number of years (three years in the US) to sue, with the timer starting only after you become aware of an instance of alleged infringement. Copyright is not like trademark. You don't lose your copyright by failing to enforce it.

Furthermore, even though the fair use right can only be exercised as an affirmative defense in court, fair use is by definition not copyright infringement [3]:

> Importantly, the court viewed fair use not as a valid excuse for otherwise infringing conduct, but rather as consumer behavior that is not infringement in the first place. "Because 17 U.S.C. § 107[9] created a type of non-infringing use, fair use is 'authorized by the law' and a copyright holder must consider the existence of fair use before sending a takedown notification under § 512(c)."[1]

(Ignore the bracket citations that were copied over.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/507

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz_v._Universal_Music_Corp.