Retroactive copyright extensions are changing the deal after it has been made, for the benefit of copyright holders and to the detriment of the public. This is unethical.
That's why I get angry when copyright holders try to make ethical arguments against piracy.
> One of the foundations of law that you cannot make retroactive changes.
This is a common misconception, at least regarding laws in the US. While I may not agree with it, the US Supreme Court has for literally centuries (like since 1798) explicitly allowed all types of retroactive laws. Most importantly, the USSC has long held the prohibition against ex post facto laws only applies to criminal, not civil laws. (As an aside, this also shows what bullshit it is when justices say they are just "calling balls and strikes". Justices, of all political stripes, make up laws all the time. The Constitution, as written, very clearly and plainly says "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." At some point - Calder v. Bull in 1798 to be exact - the Supreme Court decided it only applies to criminal law.)
Money fuels politics (especially in the USA) and the media companies had money to spend. The average joe didn't care, so it was a perfect storm. That's less so nowadays, but mostly because even the companies are finding it hard to get bipartisan support for these kinds of things anymore.
In Mexico you cannot have that, as the constitution says that no right that you had can be taken from you retroactively.
The problem is the Mexico is the most strict country (by law) in copyright terms, which is dead of last author plus 150 years and there is no fair use.
You have a deal with a copyright holder? Have you considered taking them to court over it? I'd donate to help get you what their contract owes you, and I'm sure others would, too.
You only have a very weak negotiating power and only during the election campaign while copyright holders have very, very strong negotiation power (money) all the time. So they can change the law whenever and however they want to. Your "contract" with the lawmakers can change at any time regardless of your (or the majority's) wishes, which on the face of it is extremely undemocratic. So the "take them to court" strategy is doomed to fail but people are still correct to point out how unethical and immoral this is.
In the same vein, piracy may be illegal but sometimes it just balances out this immorality and lack of ethics of copyright holders and lawmakers. If we follow the same reasoning, if a pirate is not taken to court then it wasn't illegal.
This is exactly why "democracy" and "capitalism" are impossible to fully exist side by side. Capitalism rules necessarily destroy democracy because its basis is the accumulation of money and power by a few. On the other hand, perfect democracy will give people the power to remove the money privilege of the few through taxes and policies (the founding founders already knew this). The idea that we have democracy in a capitalist system is the peak of stupidity, because people are deceiving themselves about being free, when in fact they're just doing the bidding of the super rich.
So capitalism in practice compared to a perfect democracy where the powerful few handle their power without becoming corrupt? Well obviously the theoretical system wins here, but it sidesteps the biggest problem that people do not handle power well.
Is that true? One's options are limited if all one can do is vote for representatives, instead of directly voting on an issue themselves.
It's helpful to distinguish between the side-effects coming from one's vote and the intention/motivation for that vote. (This is called the doctrine of double effect.)
I would be surprised if many poor people vote with the intention of giving tax cuts for rich people, instead of voting for a candidate who they feel resonates them for other reasons, where it is an incidental fact that this candidate will push tax cuts for rich people.
The electoral college determines who becomes president and the president has the overt power to veto bills and the more subtle ability to influence the government's agenda.
The number of electoral votes a state has is also equal to the number of representatives that they send to congress. So the unbalanced distribution of electors also reflects an unbalanced distribution of representatives.
President can veto laws. President has the bully pulpit and gets things on and off the agenda. Twice in my lifetime has the candidate who won the popular vote lost the presidency, with massive ramifications for the country I live in.
I'm not endorsing GP's point, but the electoral college is massively important to legislation.
> Twice in my lifetime has the candidate who won the popular vote lost the presidency, with massive ramifications for the country I live in.
I see this repeated often, and I need to say it's bullshit.
The rules of presidential elections are known to the general public, which affects voters behavior, i.e. Republican voters in California might not even bother voting, since they stand no chance of affecting the results. Similar thing can be said about Democrats in Florida. There are even names for this: "blue states", "red states", "swing states".
Until you actually hold the elections with different rules the claim of "winning the popular vote" is meaningless.
EDIT: to clarify - the current system means that some votes matter more than others: a single Republican vote in a swing state matters more than a single Republican vote in blue state. People behave accordingly, i.e. voter turnout is higher in swing states.
I believe op is referring to the deal between the copyright holder and the public - the public grants exclusive use of the content to encourage creativity, in exchange, the work will eventually become public. In extending the duration a work is protected, the deal is being modified.
I'm interested in how this would work in New Zealand. Could I publish a version of The Hobbit on amazon.co.nz? Would this be perfectly legal? If I instead published it on my own New Zealand based blog, maybe even hosted on a data center in NZ, but with no attempt to geo-fence it would that cause issues?
That is indeed an interesting question. Presumably if you reimagined those things, without reference to the imagery in the movies, that would be completely legitimate right?
Countries that block pirate sites, like the UK, could block your site. They might also put political pressure on New Zealand to force you to manage the geofencing yourself.
If you just post it to a NZ Gutenberg branch I doubt anyone would come for you. The Canadian Gutenberg project has lots of stuff that is only public domain there, and in places like NZ. It is not geofenced.
I mean - it's the whole point isn't it? To allow things to become part of the public consciousness. To borrow from that and extend upon it, to embellished and exaggerate it. Seems fine to me.
Presumably you can't then sell that into countries where the inspiration isn't yet public domain?
Disney has modern Mickey wrapped up in trademarks. It will be very interesting watching what Disney does when inevitably derivative works stray from steamboat Willie and approach the appearance of modern mickey.
I suspect that is why Disney has been using Steamboat Willy as its production logo in recent years. Let's wait to see how it shakes out in the courts - but perhaps the threats will be enough.
They might have a harder time fighting the use of Steamboat Willy considering that a trademark has less restrictions on its use than a copyrighted work.
The legal metagame around intellectual property has little to do with law as written and much to do with burying your opponent in spurious motions until they run out of money to defend. Odds are good Disney wins that fight against most comers.
Isn't that the point? Disney counts on having more $$$ and more lawyers than some random artist who might or might not have intruded on the remaining copyrights? So they can bully the artist into submission regardless of whether they are right or not.
The estimated value of $20K seems low, unless it's in poor condition and/or there are many other copies around. Google says the same auction house sold one for $100K in 2012:
Is this really in the same year? Wiki shows a black/white poster with the mouse wearing light gloves, then later in the article a color version from 1978.
The Mickey Mouse head is literally the logo of the Disney corporation, it is and it will remain their trademark in perpetuity(or for as long as Disney exists).
Trademarks are different than copyright - you can't start a company and use Mickey mouse as your logo for instance, because then the trademark law would kick in. But you can still make your own story/cartoon/film with Mickey Mouse the character and it should be fine.
I don't really have a problem with Disney Corporation using Mickey Mouse as their logo, Trademark, and otherwise as an identifying characteristic - So long as I can distribute the works that have fallen out of their exclusive use period, and create new works that don't pretend to be related in authorship. Mickey Mouse as a trademark makes sense - Mickey Mouse as a weird exclusively distributed hole in public consciousness, where most anyone who's paying attention can point to the nearly-century-old origin but not offer it up for critical discussion - That's where it got weird.
Everyone should know Mickey Mouse. Everyone should be able to see the original Mickey Mouse cartoons, as authored by Walt and Ub. Everyone should also be able to comment on and redistribute their commentary on such, original cartoon included in full. Now they can.
Came here to mention this. That poster is a full color Mickcy with gloves from 1928, and I would love to hear from a copyright lawyer if this Mickcy is also in the public domain.
Mickey's so high profile that I bet someone out there would be more than happy to go to court with Disney over this. I mean if you have money and lawyers, then this is a sure way to turn them into publicity, especially if you win.
However if you advertise it in any way using Disney’s trademark expect to be sued and spend millions defending, even if you wouldn’t eventually be found to be infringing (which you won’t because you’ll run out of money long before that question gets in front of a judge or jury).
>>which you won’t because you’ll run out of money long before that question gets in front of a judge or jury
Isn't that what would happen if you literally spent zero money on the case? If Disney sends you threatening letters, then finally sues, then maybe even gets an induction to block whatever your product is in the meantime......if you refuse to engage with them, never hire any lawyers to reply to anything or communicate.....you will end up in a court room by default where you can present your case, with zero money being spent until that point(I'm not counting any business losses).
I'm just saying that people lose millions before they get to court by building massive legal defences, hiring law firms and spending years arguing, instead of not engaging at all and going to court(which I understand is not preferable for many many many different reasons, but if you really believe the case is solid then forcing Disney to go to court might work)
Trademark law only stops someone else using the character to represent themselves as Disney, or where is might cause confusion around that. A simple prominent disclaimer can fix that.
That's assuming Disney could ever register the trademark, which is not a given, no matter how often they use it.
Disney can and will allege that the disclaimer fails to prevent confusion and take you to court regardless. And then you have a legal battle to prove that it does “fix that.” A legal battle that will cost you millions of dollars and years of your life, neither of which you will get back even if you win.
The question would be, do you want to fight Disney lawyers to make the argument that your use was not as a trademark, represented as Disney, or that it might cause confusion? With or without a disclaimer.
I'm picking up on a lot of undertones in these comments and elsewhere something like an argument that while it may not technically be copyright infringement in 2024 onward, it will remain de facto off-limits simply from the threat of having to deal with lawsuits from Disney, no matter whether they're actually well-founded. What's missing from that argument is an acknowledgement that there are organizations for the public good that are more than willing to litigate over this (and happen to be bigger targets, too). Wikimedia, for example.
There is no DMCA analogue for trademarks, so, for example, YouTube has no obligation to automate trademark complaints or to resolve disputes between trademark owners and video creators, so almost every case will go through the court, and overloading courts with bogus cases can have consequences for them.
YouTube technically has no obligation to comply with DMCA takedown notices either; there is no direct financial penalty for failing to do so. Rather, the DMCA provides a "safe harbor" exempting YouTube from liability for infringement, then removes that safe harbor if they fail to comply with a takedown notice.
For trademarks, there simply is no safe harbor, and thus no conditions under which it can be removed. That means there isn't a codified process for YouTube to follow; but the stick they can be beaten with at the end of the day -- infringement litigation -- is the same in either case. You can bet they'll do what they can do avoid it.
Probably, at least for cases where ‘the public’ won’t see it as them being aggressive if they go after use of the image.
FTA: “He believes Disney's active use of the trademarked versions in Steamboat Willie merchandise, new animated shorts, and even a studios theatrical logo, is "Disney's way of safeguarding the characters if they want to go the legal route in any egregious use of the characters".”
“US copyright law says the rights to characters can be held for 95 years.”
95 years ago was also about when the cinema and recording industries began.
Since then, I’ll argue, all recorded entertainment and theatrical performances have become “fixed” into our culture similar to how Plato, the Bible, and Shakespeare became cultural touchstones due to literacy and the printing press.
And now, as they enter the public domain, Mickey and others are becoming, for better or worse, an inescapable part of our common heritage.
Is Mickey content good enough that we'll see continued interest? My encounters with Mickey (35 year old American) have been only through the movie Fantasia and I know he is a prominent mascot of Disney World. But the pull to Disney world is probably what, Star Wars or Pixar these days? I was recently thinking Star Wars and the Friends TV series could reach that permanent status. Mickey seems unlikely to me.
This, to me, is a good reason for things to lose copyright sooner.
There are few people alive today who would remember when steamboat Willy was released. Culture is currently tied up in copyright long enough that things will mostly be forgotten long before they enter the public domain. Effectively lost. This is surely not desirable.
Stay away if possible, especially clubhouse which does the "the characters talk to the child and ask them questions" thing that I personally hate. But yes, at least in the US they're all on plus.
Mickey Mouse is quite literally Disney’s mascot. The same Disney with global theme park locations. It’s clear that Disney has far more prominence than Star Wars and friends combined. Hell they even own Star Wars now.
If you asked any random person on the street, chances are they know who Mickey Mouse is. It doesn’t really matter what “content” is made with him. Disney can just keep pumping out cheap CGI kids shows for brand recognition alone and Mickey would last for at least another generation.
In the past few months I personally haven given Disney hundreds of dollars for Mickey branded merchandise due to my 3 year old's love of Mickey. Mickey stuffed toys, bed sheets, water bottles, clothes, pull ups, etc. In fact, I just turned off the TV, which was just playing Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on Disney+.
I was never into Mickey as a child. I saw him as out of date even back in the 80s and 90s.
I think Disney stopped developing a lot of new content using Mickey because they knew he was going into the public domain and the ROI would not be as good as using new characters.
I’m assuming you don’t have kids? Little kids love Mickey Mouse and there’s lots of old and new content featuring him. Little kids still dream of going to Disney World to meet Mickey Mouse and the other characters.
> Plato, the Bible, and Shakespeare
> inescapable part of our common heritage
Indeed, but how?
The three circles of Mickey Mouse is the semiotic emblem for
everything that is shallow, plastic, maudlin and sentimental,
self-obsessed, cynically capitalistic and exploitative.
In British (army and construction worker culture) the phrase "Mickey
Mouse" is used for anything that's an ineffectual toy or poorly
manufactured.
There are almost no positive connotations of Disney I can think of
outside the cohort of 5 - 10 yo girls. To call something "Disney" is
to mock it. YMMV in the USA.
> There are almost no positive connotations of Disney I can think of outside the cohort of 5 - 10 yo girls. To call something "Disney" is to mock it. YMMV in the USA.
Disney stuff isn't my cup of tea either, but that doesn't mean it isn't very popular around the world.
When we look at the financials of Disney Theme Parks and Experiences, for example, they report strong booking worldwide with reported revenue for the fourth quarter at $8.2 billion, up 13% from last year. Operating Income at $1.8 billion, up 31% from the previous year. Source: https://skift.com/2023/11/08/disney-theme-parks-focused-on-t...
Many adults of a certain age will have very happy childhood memories of watching classic disney movies such as jungle book, cinderella, toy story, Lion King. Most creative companies would love to have the kind of love that disneys back catalog has. Alas this love does mean the easy ability to sell plastic toys for every film.
My own partner and daughter are huge on Disney. Wow, I think I might
actually be a bit too mulling over my top 100 films. So yeah, my own
comment stings a bit and I appreciate the love out there.
Guess my point is, sure and there's also this really massive negative
sentiment out there attached to the corporate symbol - namely "Micky
Mouse" who is semantically fused with Disney. Corporate symbols seem
ripe for psychological splitting.
I believe it was Larry Lessig who pointed out Disney's double standard: their enthusiasm in adapting stories in public domain vs being highly protective of their own works.
Another way to frame this is - Disney has decided to not extend the copyright laws for all Americans and let this happen.
The damage of the multiple extensions the company has already forced on all of us are devastating.
Multiple times Disney has changed the law to extend copyright provisions and allow it and other corporations to take without giving back, siphoning value out of the public domain for decades upon decades.
We have paid a hefty price for their profits, over and over again.
There's WebM, VP9 in various resolutions, and... MJPEG ?
Setting aside the oddity of serving a 95-year-old cartoon in full HD, that's still an odd selection of codecs. Everything up to MPEG-4 ASP (XviD etc.) has already been patent-expired. There's also MP3 there, so why not an MPEG-2 (H.262), MPEG-1, or even H.261 encode?
Because despite Wikipedia and sister projects being one of the largest web property, it is running on a thin budget and has starved engineering resources. As far as I know, the transcode code is maintained by a single employee (possibly as a side gig / on top of everything else) and the assistance of a volunteer.
The problem is not resources. It is an ideological choice. Wikimedia Commons only supports non-proprietary file formats. That means either open formats or formats whose patents have expired. (MPEG-4 Part 2 patents only expired in the US a few weeks ago.)
Why though ? They spend $160M a year [1] and grew their cash reserves by 50% year on year in 2023, so not particularly running in an operating deficit environment.
Transcoding is expensive but not that much, if my company doesn’t make 1/20 of Wikipedia and we can afford to do 1000s of hours a day of transcoding surely they can too.
The decision to not supply H.264 is ideological for sure, and I can understand that from the patent perspective, but then they have MP3 (patent-expired in 2017) but not MPEG-2/H.262 (patent-expired in 2018).
Also note that VP8/VP9 is still patented, but just licensed freely. IMHO that's less free than patent-expired (public domain).
My understanding was H264 is kind is licensed freely too after Cisco made their agreement usable for everyone ?
Firefox can support mp4 over h264 despite their clear FOSS aligned goals , I am surprised that Wikipedia whose goals more align to open information rather than open source directly has challenges .
Wikipedia has one of the best SRE teams, they were pretty transparent too, a lot of the communication was on IRC channels you could see, at least that was the case few years back.
Running the top 5 website in the world is no joke especially as a non-profit and they do it well. They haven’t had any down time or major incident in the last decade which is pretty impressive.
I would think their SRE team is not just good but also very motivated in the mission otherwise they would leave for much higher paying jobs, infra jobs are very lucrative if you have prior experience at more scale not much more scale than Wikipedia .
I agree that their SRE team is good, well motivated, and transparent. That does not mean that they are the first priority for resources, or that it's the easiest line item to spend on.
People often think that old video must be stuck to standard definition (or worse), because they're used to seeing it on NTSC/PAL broadcasts, VHS, or DVD.
The reality is, these things were captured on film, and there's no reason you can't scan the film in high definition resolutions. Film is an analogue medium whose upper bound for resolution is dictated by the film stock and grain; 35mm film is sufficient to produce modern 4K scans and was one of the most common stocks in analogue video production.
If anything, modern 1080p/2160p scans of old film bring the material much closer to how people with projectors originally saw the media, instead of a blurry scaled down version made for old television.
If I may provide my favorite example, check out Wizard of Oz in 4K. It's from 1939, in full color, and holds up wonderfully well. The 4K transfer allows you to really appreciate the set design and makeup especially.
A particular bugbear of mine is when black and white films get scanned and the process somehow introduces a bunch of moiré colour fringes into the digital copy. This feels like something that shouldn't be hard to get right.
Really cool seeing some old music videos that were originally shot in film get the rescan update. I watched Beat It on YouTube the other day and was amazed by the quality.
This means Minnie Mouse enters the public domain as well, and if some of the promotional material for the animation is included as well, could also include the red-and-yellow colour version of Mickey.
Doing a side by side. MM doesn't have visible front teeth, his ears are smaller and fully black, the silhouette is different. But the shape of the face and features, including where the shape of the black fur decends (at the widows peak?), the eyebrows, the eyes with white, all look quite similar. To me it's much closer to a modern Mickey than the original flat black and white.
On whatever local time where you are (at least for US). The "at least in US" is important since that most people who didn't clarify that "Steamboat Willie" is in the public domain specifically in reference to US laws - in other countries it is either already PD, or in a handful countries like Mexico (which has author+100, technically no concept of corporate copyright except for the government) is still not PD.
The BBC has Disney as the owners of the snapshot they use. It's a nice thing to do. But is it still correct? Are Disney still the owner's but the image is now public domain?
It's a credit to the image's source, which is unrelated to ownership. They credit Getty Images for some public domain imagery as well: that is where they got the image from.
The Wonderful thing about Tiggers
Is Tiggers are wonderful things
Tops are made out of rubber
Their bottoms are made out of springs
Their bouncey, trouncey, ouncey, pouncey
Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun
But the most wonderful thing about Tiggers
Is I'm the only one!
The last line is especially ironic considering the copyright monopoly situation.
> It's ironic that a cartoon that depicts musical improvisation is such a symbol of passively consumed culture.
I don't know that I would describe it as ironic. Throughout the ages, the entertainment that people enjoyed in their various cultures depicted all sorts of active things (including playing music, painting, killing the bad guy, etc.) while the audience sat back and enjoyed it passively (mostly; they laughed, got frightened, talked to each other, etc.).
Before people cheer too much, surprisingly works can retroactively be snatched back from the public domain and go back into
copyrighted state.
The prime example is the movie Metropolis. It became public domain in 1953 but copyright was restored in 1996 only to re-enter the public domain a year ago today.
> Before people cheer too much, surprisingly works can retroactively be snatched back from the public domain and go back into copyrighted state.
The United States is decidedly not going to extend copyright terms. The US only very reluctantly pulled works out of the public domain after it joined the Berne Convention in 1989. The reason ''Metropolis'' was in the public domain was because it failed to comply with renewal formalities, which are prohibited by Berne. Essentially, other countries threatened trade deals if the US made terms dependent on formalities for non-US works. So the law was changed and copyrights were restored.
As someone who works in the field (and who isn't a fan of the URAA), I can tell you that isn't going to happen again.
The USA often ignores the international community in many things, if the right domestic interest groups are behind it. It's just that currently the USA has powerful domestic companies/interests that are against copyright term extensions, which are more powerful than the (also quite powerful) companies in favour of term extensions.
In the past decade, the USA also has tried to spread the new extended period over the world via trade treaties, of life plus 70 years, going beyond Berne's life plus 50 years.
Ignoring the international community is one thing, trade deals are another thing entirely. That's taken very seriously by all involved because it's about money.
What are the powerful domestic companies/interests who are against the copyright terms? I always viewed copyright extensions as being good for the masses but bad for corporations (the copyright holders)
Companies like Google for example. Their business model revolves around accessing websites of other people, downloading them, keeping that copy around and then presenting snippets to people who.
Here is them arguing against retroactively applying a 70 year old copyright term in Canada to works published before 1978:
> For instance, if an author created a work at 30 -- the average age for a first childbirth in Canada -- and died at the average age of 82, with a copyright term of life of the author plus 50 years, and if the average of 25 years for a generation, we are into the fifth generation after creation of the work. Adding on another 20 years only compounds the capacity of heirs of authors to leverage extended copyright to prevent Canadians from accessing valuable cultural (and by that time historical) works. We have seen numerous examples of distantly removed heirs leveraging old copyright to prevent commentators from quoting extensively from well established works, or preventing historical pictures, news-clipping and other primary sources from being
used without payment.
What's your read on what's going to happen with AI?
Will companies be allowed to train on copyrighted works? Seems like we'll fall behind international competition or supercharge monopolies if we don't allow it.
Japan and China permit training on copyrighted works. China goes a step further and allows AI outputs to be copyrighted.
Really interested in what insiders think or know about this.
Well, to be clear, I am mainly a public domain and copyright theory guy. I do keep up to date with everything here. But I also don't write laws; if I did, they would look different.
Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works - or, to be more precise, there is no prohibition in copyright law on them doing so. On the other hand, there are no particular protections.
The real question is to what extent an AI generator can return its copyrighted training data as a non-de minimis output. In other words, can I get one of the existing copyrighted works by putting in a prompt? This is something that AI developers are trying to avoid, but it's actuallg a pretty tricky problem.
Allowing AI output to be copyrighted is one of the worst ideas in copyright. Thankfully, the US Constitution as interpreted by the courts only allows for copyright to inhere in works of human creativity.
By the way, while I'm very excited about certain "AI" things, I have a very poor opinion of the merit of generative AI — and I mean in theory we well as how it stands today.
Mine would be different than what we have now, it'd be 20 years or artists lifetime, whichever is shorter - then 10 year long renewals are possible after that, but the cost of the renewal would ratchet up with each renewal.
I've also considered using a percentage of revenue for the work - basically a tax on the revenue from that work, as a condition for the right of monopoly on it - which would also ratchet upwards with each renewal.
I'd also consider a use it or lose it strategy for copyright like trademark, meaning if you are not making the work available for purchase/license within the copyright renewal period, for reasonable terms, you lose the ability to renew it.
Mine is mostly designed to deal with orphaned works, ensuring they enter public domain in a predictable way, I think the biggest issue with our existing copyright system isn't enriching Disney - they're still putting those works out there, making them available - its all the works being lost to the sands of time.
Disney regularly censors or modifies classic films in its catalog, and also simply pulls things out of production. If you want to read more, look up the Disney Vault strategy.
I'm well aware of Disney's business strategy. I don't care if they make their millions still.
I care much more about all the works that cannot find an audience because of uncertain copyright status, and not enough commercial demand to justify figuring out who 'owns' it.
AI models have an amazing ability to approximately memorize any training data. It's just that that memorization is useless unless it memorizes something real as opposed to random (randomized ImageNet labels as a simple example).
So as much as I want there to be a fair use case here, the artists have a real point. If someone can break the memorization without losing significant validation/test set performance, that might go a long way.
But even then, artists don't want their style copied either, and that's problematic to me in that if a human does it, that's OK, but if an AI does it, it's not? Yes I get the ease of asking an AI to do it vs a 10K+ hours artist, but, well, more or less the same to me on a geological time scale.
In the next year, I'm hoping to Patreon/Kickstart project that offers two major funding tiers. Hitting the lowest tier means it will use AI to create assets, and hitting the higher tier will use humans instead. My response to this brouhaha is to throw the controversy right back at the people creating it in the first place and ask if they're willing to walk their fancy talk on this subject with their wallets.
> Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works
I’m curious what you mean by this. If I’m not allowed under copyright law to make a personal copy of the latest Pixar movie or watch it without permission or payment, even if I’m not sharing it with anyone else, what under the law allows a company to make a copy and train on it? I thought I understood copyright law to not only prohibit redistribution of copyrighted works without permission, but also to prohibit consumption of copyrighted works without permission? Is that accurate? In that sense, I would have thought copyright law does prohibit companies from training on copyrighted works.
You’re hitting on the distinction between duplication and training.
I own hundreds of paperback books. Copyright law does not limit what I can learn from them.
It may be that assembling a corpus for training is illegal, but if so, that would be true even if it was never used for training. The act of training an AI is orthogonal to the collection of the corpus.
I think I’m not necessarily talking about training. It’s the duplication before training, and maybe just the fact that training is consuming the entire work, which I think under copyright law requires permission (which typically means payment).
> It may be that assembling a corpus for training is illegal, but if so, that would be true even if it was never used for training.
Yeah, exactly! You’re right that copyright law doesn’t limit what you can learn at all, and doesn’t copyright ideas. But it does, I think, limit whether you’re allowed to read the copyrighted work in it’s entirety the first place, if you haven’t paid for it or legally borrowed a copy or whatever. Gaining access to the material is covered under the law, right? This does mean, I suspect, that assembling a corpus of copyrighted training material is not allowed under copyright law, unless it was all paid for or licensed with permission.
If the AI companies have paid for all the material they used to train, then my question might be moot, I’m assuming they didn’t pay for it. This is murky when there’s a lot of copyrighted material that’s available online, maybe with the intent that it would be consumed in small parts and not copied wholesale by machines for the sole purpose of making software that can replicate the content and style of what it learned.
> I’m not allowed under copyright law to make a personal copy of the latest Pixar movie or watch it without permission or payment, even if I’m not sharing it with anyone else.
You aren't, but in many cases it doesn't matter because, even for USians, you're protected by the fair use exception. And even in some other cases like for educators and archivists where it extends further.
When we get new laws for the training of neural networks, I would expect their spirit to be based on the state of this exception.
“Find me a prompt to generate this image,” seems like an interesting problem to toss at an AI, I wonder if anyone knows of work in that direction?
Hypothetically if such a system existed where you passed in a copyright image, and then got a prompt to generate it, would that be sufficient to show some kind infringement?
> Essentially, other countries threatened trade deals if the US made terms dependent on formalities for non-US works. So the law was changed and copyrights were restored.
Congress should have grown a spine and called their bluff rather than sell out the American public like that.
You’re talking about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act aka the Mickey Mouse Protection Act?
Claiming that was due to foreign pressure was just scapegoating / misdirection from its supporters.
The US forced all sorts of copyright extensions on the international community back then (including DMCA-style DRM protections).
The support section of the Wikipedia page lists the main lobbyists for the bill. They are all US based, and Disney started lobbying for it in 1990 (the year after the US was brought into compliance with the Berne convention).
No, they're talking about the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (1994), which is 100% about foreign works and formalities (copyright notice and renewal requirements). Disney was ''against'' that change because they benefited from foreign works (such as Prokofiev's ''Peter and the Wolf'') which were in the public domain in the US due to national ineligibility at the time.
If a future Congress cannot secure the votes to pass the necessary laws to implement a treaty their predecessors [or the House refuses to implement a treaty the Senate] ratified, who is at fault?
This intrigues me as I had no idea, at one time, that the US didn't have the most restrictive copyright laws in the world. It looks like the US had to restore/extend copyrights to foreign works as part of the agreement that established the WTO?
That being said, copyright is a product of laws and laws can always change. Your comment made me believe that the copyright owner somehow extended their rights; not a literal act of Congress.
Initially (19th century) the US did not recognise copyright of foreign works.
This is all about interests: when you are a net importer you want to make it easy and cheap to reproduce and use works. Buy once you start being an exporter you want your works protected, and that's a quid pro quo.
> It looks like the US had to restore/extend copyrights to foreign works as part of the agreement that established the WTO?
What happens is that lobbyists for the same (copyright) interest groups instructs their governments that extended copyright is in their interest, and that whoever have the longest should “win” and become the norm.
WTOs are basically big business “negotiating” with itself through nation states.
It's not about Mickey specifically, but rather about what it represents.
The entry of new works into the commons was shut down for a long time, with Disney keeping Mickey under copyright being viewed as the main driver for the lobbying that's kept it closed. We're coming off of two sequential 20-year extensions, and got our first works entering the public domain in the US in 2019, at which point there was a clear deadline for Disney to either get copyright extended again or cede the point.
So Mickey starting to creep into the public domain means the commons probably won't be closed again, since nobody else has as much interest in pushing that as Disney did.
Because culture is built on itself. Almost everything is built, remixed, rewritten at some level. A good chunk of the Disney classics are taken from older stories, fairy tales, etc that were by then public domain.
CS Lewis’ last novel was inspired by an ancient myth, and it wasn’t a quick rehash. It was reworked and retold with a new voice. Perhaps Steamboat Willie will be the same!
Would have entered into the public domain in Canada had the government not signed a last-minute 20 year copyright extension act last year.