Also, Stable Diffusion is already on my laptop so I don’t need an Internet connection, but I digress.
You’re right, I can’t make the same art with Stable Diffusion as without. The same holds for the art I can make with DAW software like Logic Pro and without. Or my guitar and without. Basically you’re leaving me with nothing but my voice, and personally, I’m in luck because I do sing and have already put effort into getting better.
I can’t see how an image that has never existed before cannot be considered original… it might not have taken much effort, but that’s something else entirely! How is any part of photography even remotely considered original in your theory of art?
The burden is on the accuser but the accuser has been 'shredded' and that makes them all but anonymous. So if you dilute inputs enough then you can ignore the rights? There is a close equivalent to this in music sampling. The rule there is that if you want to remix someone else's production that you will have to ask for their permission, which, crucially, they are not required to give.
https://www.romanolaw.com/2022/10/14/music-sampling-rights-w...
This seems to me to be a reasonable middle ground. Once you start breaking things down further it gets harder and harder to nail down where the limit lies. In music you probably won't find any useful samples shorter than 1/32th of a beat and even that would be pushing the limits. But the rules don't say anything about how long those samples are: even the tiniest sliver would have to be accounted for: you would need permission. And yes the burden is on the accuser. But it would make sense from an ethical point of view and as an artist to just play by the rules, rather than to see what you can get away with and so even for short samples that might never be detected by that particular accuser as a rule permission is obtained.
> You’re right, I can’t make the same art with Stable Diffusion as without. The same holds for the art I can make with DAW software like Logic Pro and without. Or my guitar and without. Basically you’re leaving me with nothing but my voice, and personally, I’m in luck because I do sing and have already put effort into getting better.
That's disingeneous and you are likely well aware of it, but just to spell it out: Logic Pro 'Sample Packs' all have clear attribution and use rights attached, and your guitar is (unless it is some advanced model that I'm not currently aware of) unable to make you play like Al Di Meola without putting in the endless hours of practice. Neither of these contain a combined mountain of copyrighted artists works that you can then re-use at your discretion without attribution and if and when they do those are very carefully sourced and marked as such. So the comparison with SD doesn't hold.
> I can’t see how an image that has never existed before cannot be considered original…
Ok, so I have this little piece of software here, it allows me to extract the notes, durations and volumes of individual notes of a piano piece and then I can re-play those notes using any instrument from an enormous bank of synthesized sounds. Do you feel that this should count as original work because 'it has never existed before' or do you feel that this is a mechanical transformation and that the original creator should be able to sue me for creating a derived work? Does the mechanism of the derivation count?
> it might not have taken much effort, but that’s something else entirely
Agreed, Marc Rebillet comes to mind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vBwRfQbXkg) , but he has 3 decades of experience which allows him to create in a few minutes what would take others weeks (or they might never be able to do anything).
> How is any part of photography even remotely considered original in your theory of art?
Photography is original art when it goes beyond 'just reproduction'. My brother, who is a pretty good photographer has two 'modes' in the first one he is simply registering an event, a wedding or something else that needs to be documented. He most likely would not consider this to be even close to his best work and certainly not in the level of artistry involved. In his other mode he can spend a crazy amount of time arranging the shot, including getting up at odd hours of the night, creating special vantage points, the right time of the year to get an object to catch the light just so. In that mode he is an artist. And I'm sure he has made 1000's (or probably more likely 10's of 1000's) of shots that are somewhere in between.
That’s just silly. If no one can hear the difference then who cares? Why would it even matter what song I was getting tiny snippets from? It’s like asking a specific poet for permission to use a certain word.
> Ok, so I have this little piece of software here, it allows me to extract the notes, durations and volumes of individual notes of a piano piece and then I can re-play those notes using any instrument from an enormous bank of synthesized sounds. Do you feel that this should count as original work because 'it has never existed before' or do you feel that this is a mechanical transformation and that the original creator should be able to sue me for creating a derived work? Does the mechanism of the derivation count?
Does it sound like the same song or not? You know, would someone listen to it and be able to recognize the melody? That’s what matters!
A court, your lawyer, and then finally, you. After all, if there is no audible difference that is exactly what this would hinge on and in the age of digital music it is fairly trivial to prove that something was sampled on snippets as short as a couple of 10's of ms. Whether that amounts to infringement or not is another matter, but to prove it is not all that hard from a technical point of view.
> Does it sound like the same song or not?
No, because the instrument would be changed, the timing could be changed (slowed down, sped up). Even a musician would have a fairly hard time associating a piece manipulated like that with their own work.
> You know, would someone listen to it and be able to recognize the melody?
We could use a melody that is itself in the public domain for this (say, a piece by JS Bach played by some famous pianist). The melody may be PD but the performance definitely is not.
> That’s what matters!
No, what matters is whether or not it crosses the bar for being recognized as an original work, and I don't think it does. But you've got me thinking about this because I've been toying for a long time with the idea to clean up some extremely bad historical recordings of absolute masterpieces and this is one of the reasons I've been holding back from that, the copyright situation around those would be quite murky.
It's 2:20 am here and I really should be getting some Z's, thank you very much for the interesting exchange, much food for thought.
Yes! Always and only! If you are a songwriter then your inputs are a certain ordering of words and sounds. If you dilute those inputs to the point where it indistinguishable you have created a new song!
No, that's not the right criterium. You can create a new song but it may (not will) be classified as a derived work.
Note that in audio it is fairly easy to prove that a part was sampled and unless your samples are pure noise you would most likely not get away with this. Plenty of artists are more than happy to give permission but they are also likely more than happy to sue if you don't ask for it.
And some don't care. But that should not be your assumption.
Using the same words to write a different book is emphatically not the same as using samples of spoken/sung words or played notes or riffs to create another song. These arguments have all been tried in court (see that article linked above) and failed.
And that's where sites like this:
https://www.whosampled.com/Us3/Cantaloop-(Flip-Fantasia)/sam...
come in handy, if you listen to those other songs you'll realize how brilliant this Cantaloop version really is, in spite of being made using a very high fraction of samples from other songs.
But they did credit them, and they did ask for permission.
Finally, it's good form: artists are usually part of the same eco system and you tend to not do to others what you don't want done to you. If you feel that having your artwork sampled for inclusion by SD is the way forward then that should be your right to decide. But not for SD to decide (in my opinion...).
