Fan art is not illegal. As long as you’re not selling it, it would generally fall under fair use.
Comment on AI Didn't Break Copyright Law, It Just Exposed How Broken It Already Was
Grimy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It doesn’t break copyright laws because training something on any kind of data, as long as the data was legally obtained is legal (this includes scrapping publicly available data).
You can’t generate a sonic picture and sell it for the same reason you can’t draw sonic in Photoshop and sell it. These are tools and it’s up to the user to use them in a legal way.
Fan art is actually illegal, companies let it be because they get instantly thrashed by fans if they complain.
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Luminous5481@anarchist.nexus 2 days ago
Fan art is not illegal.
Off the top of my head, I know both Disney and Nintendo have sued people for making fan art. Fair use doesn’t explicitly allow you to make fan art, regardless of its transformative nature, and whether or not you owe Disney hundreds of thousands of dollars for drawing Mickey depends on court review on a case-by-case basis because it not technically legal in the US. It may also not be technically illegal, but that doesn’t mean a corporation can’t sue you and be awarded millions in civil damages if they think you profited off the art in some way.
A quick google search will source you lawyers saying such.
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Just to clarify, somebody suing another party doesn’t automatically mean that party broke any laws. Big companies especially will sooner sue the little guy even if they did nothing legally wrong because the know the little guy most likely won’t have the resources to fight it, even if they would have won.
Luminous5481@anarchist.nexus 2 days ago
Just to clarify, somebody suing another party doesn’t automatically mean that party broke any laws.
Yes, that’s literally what I said. Fan art may not be illegal, but it’s not legal either. The point is moot, however. If a corporation with billions or trillions of dollars can sue you with impunity, while even a meager defense can financially ruin you for life, then there is no practical difference between a legal and illegal act. The fact remains that fighting someone like Disney over something like fanart is beyond the ability of nearly everyone on earth.
Grimy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
…chicagobar.org/…/the-fine-line-between-fan-art-f…
It’s copyright infringements but like I said, most won’t bother fans not making a dime. There’s economic advantages to having fans create and distribute your content for free. A company can choose to copyright strike anything with their characters in it at anytime.
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Skimming the article seems to affirm that the danger is profiting off of fan works, not the works themselves. Just because a company can sue you over it (even in situations where you made no profit off of it), that doesn’t mean you broke any laws. You can be sued for anything, its up to the court to determine if a law was broken.
Grimy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Fan fiction and fan art, without appropriate permissions or licenses, are usually an infringement of the right of the copyright holder to prepare and license derivative works based on the original. Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product.
Seems pretty clear. It’s at the discretion of the owner. The profit aspect doesn’t matter in terms of the law, it just makes it likely that companies will go to court over it.
Additionally, usually as long as the fan content is non-commercial, it is not a problem with copyright holders.
Notice how it says with copyright holders and not with copyright laws.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 days ago
It's weird how AI has turned so much of the internet from its generally anti-copyright stance. I've seen threads in piracy and datahoarding communities that were riddled with "won't someone please think of the copyright!" Posts raging about how awful AI was.
I maintain the same view I always have. Copyright is indeed broken, because of how overly restrictive and expansive it has become. Most people long ago lost sight of what it's actually for.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The AI topic is botted massively, almost as much as political topics.
I don’t know who would benefit from a large portion of the Western youth being made to be disinterested in this emerging technology, but it isn’t the Western economies.
Grimy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Copyright companies and big AI. Google stands to profit massively if they are the only ones with the budget for a “legal” LLM. In any other context, strengthening copyright laws would be met with riots but they have managed to convince a good portion of the population that it’s somehow in their best interest in the space of a year.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah, whatever it is, it isn’t just a bunch of suddenly concerned citizens who discovered their love of copyright laws.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
“Copyright” is an overloaded word that can both mean “IP/copyright law, it’s terms and enforcement” as well as “the rights of an author to decide how their work should be used”
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
In the vein that LLM are just a tool? Wouldn’t it be legally a problem if a photoshop filter had filters specifically to generate Sonic art?
Btw, why is that blue hedgehog still a thing?