Digital copyright is a thorny and complex issue, and has become increasingly relevant as artists now grapple with the implications of neural networks being trained on their art. When it comes to issues of piracy, theft, reproduction, etc, I am firmly of the Neil Gaiman Philosophy:
“I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question.
Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author.
Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”
This flies completely in the face of conventional ideas of artistic compensation, whereby creative works belong zealously within the clutches of their creators, and all engagement with their art is inherently transactional in nature. I think this is not only very silly, but also dangerously outdated, as it fails to account for technology as simple as radio piracy via cassette dubbing, let alone the future of infinite, free information we now belong to.
At the very sum of it, all digital information is infinitely, freely reproducible. Every picture, song, video, etc that we create via digital means is just a collection of 1s and 0s that can be identically reproduced anywhere else. This is a feature, not a bug, and has granted us absolutely innumerable advantages; such that an entire thesis could be dedicated to the subject.
However, for artists, it has introduced a fundamental obstacle that we’ve only just begun to solve. If all digital information is free and infinitely reproducible, how do we assign value to it? In our capitalist society, we’re largely incapable of divorcing art from the commercial means through which it is published and distributed. Entire industries sprang up, making many people incredibly wealthy, dedicated solely to this purpose.
They became obsolete the second it became viable to transfer bits and bytes perfectly from one machine to another. Their entire purpose had just become automated, by the very nature of computation: infinite digital publishing, and with the internet, truly infinite distribution.
How do we reconcile the two? Well, you might notice we’ve already begun to, via the return to the Patronage Model. Patreon was the answer that content creators came up with in direct response to the issues of YouTube’s monetization system. But it has always served as a larger, philosophical beacon for a return to better ways.
In a digital world where any creative work is almost instantly reproducible in bit-perfect recreation, we can no longer assign monetary value to art in the traditional, transactional sense that we are used to. We are simply fooling ourselves by trying to do so. All information is now free, and it yearns to be so, and there are many among us (such as myself) who will stop at nothing to ensure that freedom. We’ve been given a tremendous gift, and we can’t squander it.
But we can and absolutely should still compensate artists for their work, and fairly, via the patronage system. Allowing artists to earn a livelihood via their art is one of the most important things a society can do. But by supporting artists themselves, and not their content, we remove the barriers to the free flow of information, while still supporting the artists we love.
That all being said, the real issue here with artists finding their work has made it into these machine-learning datasets is that America does not have and laughed off the idea of Right to be Forgotten laws. That's why you have to rely on the benevolence of private corporations to get things deindexed.
Right to be Forgotten/Erased laws must go global, yesterday. They're absolutely critical to preserving data privacy and control over our own personal data, likeness, etc. The fact we don't have them is a far bigger issue than Stable Diffusion unknowingly scraping copyrighted work.
It seems they're working on improving their takedown system- much the same way Google had to after fielding hordes of complaints about their search engine pointing toward illegal, abusive, or downright horrifying material. We already figured this one out, we just need to do it.
It should not take a DMCA Request (the DMCA is actually fucking horrifying if you read about it) for a rights-owner to have control over removing their own material from places they don't want it. Sadly, right now, that is the only option available to Americans.
The whole intellectual property system in America is broken beyond repair and requires wide reevaluation, but good luck with that. In the meantime, the EU has at least allowed ordinary citizens the right to control their private personal data on the internet, without having to resort to copyright.
That's the beautiful thing about their approach. It's a human right. The right to be forgotten. It's not a commercial ownership clause whereby you, the rightsholder, have to be able to preserve it out of hypothetical commercial value. Nope- privacy of your personal data is a human right, period.
It is possible for rigorous data privacy and advances in AI to coexist. Due to the forces of capitalism, it is an inevitably that AI will continue to advance. There are too many corporations throwing unfathomable amounts of money at the subject. This is all the more reason for us to quit fucking around and enshrine data privacy as a human right, yesterday.
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