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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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Capitalism is precisely the problem, because if the end product were never sold nor used in any commercial capacity, the case for "fair use" would be almost impossible to challenge. They're betting on judges siding with them in extending a very specific interpretation of fair use that has been successfully applied to digital copying of content for archival and distribution as in e.g. Google Books or the Internet Archive, which is also not air-tight, just precedent.
Even fair uses of media may not respect the dignity of the creators of works used to create "media synthesizers". In other words, even if a computer science grad student does a bunch of scraping for their machine learning dissertation, unless they ask and get permission from the creators, their research isn't upholding the principle of data dignity, which current law doesn't address at all, but is obviously the real issue upsetting people about "Generative AI".
I'm not sure I follow that first sentence.
Fair use is an affirmative, positive defense to liability under the Copyright Act. It only exists as a concept because there is a marketplace for creative work.
That marketplace, the framers of the Constitution would suggest, only exists because the Constitution allows Congress to grant exclusive licenses to creative Works (i.e., copyright protection). In other words, they viewed creative work as an driven by economics; by securing an exclusive license to the artist, she can make money and create more art.
I am of the belief that even if there was no marketplace for creative work (no exclusive licensing / no copyright laws), people are still inherently creative and will still make creative things. I think the economic model of creativity enshrined in the Constitution is what gives us stuff like one decent movie followed by four shitty sequels. We have tens of thousands of years of original artworks, creative stories, songs, sculptures, etc. The only thing the copyright clause does, in my view, is concentrate the profit from creativity into the hands of a few successful artists or, more likely, a few large employers, such as George Lucas or Walt Disney, Viacom, Comcast, etc.
I think this unjust enrichment claim comes as close to anything as data dignity that I've heard of. It's not a lawsuit to enforce a positive legal right, but rather an plea to the court's equity to correct a manifest injustice and restore the parties to a more just position.
That the AI companies have been enriched at the detriment of the artists seems obvious. What makes it unjust is that the defendants had no permission and did not pay the artist.