I'm just saying that that's what they're currently arguing. See the amended complaint, for example at pp. 71–75 (it may be fastest to simply search the text for instances of "trade dress").
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems extremely obvious that it's an attempt to rope style into IP law.
Opponents of generative AI are already arguing for that. In the recently amended complaint of Andersen et al. v. Stability AI et al. the plaintiffs argue that their artistic styles represent “trade dress” and are therefore protectable as informal trademarks or something roughly to that effect.
These systems aren’t “producing something different”, they’re making slight tweaks to existing work and passing it off as new. Taking two things and cut & pasting them together still means you’re using those two works.
I’m afraid that you must have been misled about how the technology works. It does not “cut and paste things together”. The process for text-to-image latent diffusion starts with an image of coloured static, pseudorandomly generated from the “seed” value, an integer value. As the diffusion process steps forward, it mutates the image to reflect the keywords in its prompt as though it were “seeing shapes in static”, slowly sharpening the image. Check out this example to get a visual idea.
Once you see it pick up on features of a prompt, you can understand that it’s conditioned on words, which we all know are a smaller space than images (perhaps by the colloquial thousand?) and so share vectors with other examples of the same word. The prompt “oil painting” will evoke not only the common understanding of the phrase but many other senses of “oil” and “painting”. Diffusion users are recombining groups of features common to the keywords they use. That sort of “averaging” effect puts the elements used down in complexity, so we have to ask: are the used elements even copyrightable at their level of atomicity? It would clearly be ethical and legal for a human to look at a thousand images of a “dingleblorp” (an object no human has ever seen) and then draw a dingleblorp from memory, averaging a bit across the many they saw, so why should it be unethical or illegal for a machine to do the same? If a human can do it for a dingleblorp, then why can’t a machine, which has never seen a fire hydrant, do it with a million images of a fire hydrant?
I agree that it gets more complicated when the keywords are proper nouns, and are much more likely to reproduce something specific if used in a prompt. Prompting an artist’s name to evoke the style and techniques they use, or prompting a work title specifically, are techniques that are ethically dubious on their face, inviting cheap copying and ripoff. But the options that they represent ought nonetheless to exist: we shouldn’t exclude the sorts of uses that would be fair use or de minimis. We should have Mickey Mouse in the dataset, because someone’s going to make fair-use parody of Mickey Mouse. Techniques ought to be allowed that would evoke an artist or even a specific work but that are fair-use in context. It’s what people do with it that matters.
You may have been misled by examples where someone used diffusion software to do something that they shouldn’t have. There’s an important difference between Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. and prompting “Mona Lisa Leonardo da Vinci”, and in practice some people will use diffusion in image-to-image mode, mutating an existing image just a bit or reinterpreting a provided image, in ways that are cheap ripoffs of the original. There are valid ways to use image-to-image diffusion too, but it’s user conduct that makes the difference, just as a user of a pencil can trivially infringe on copyright.
Yes, it might reduce taxable business as a direct effect. However, by fostering competition and making internet access cheaper, you're effectively giving everyone who pays for internet a bit of extra income, which could then go into different parts of the economy.
There's an even more dangerous assumption hidden there that I've been seeing in comments and such around the web, which is that photos and other such copyrightable works are automatically worth money and that this photographer deserves to "get rich".
If news outlets are licensing the photo(s) for reporting on this controversy itself, I wouldn't be surprised if the photographer has made more money on the controversy than otherwise.
Watch out! Requirements like that would place a fair amount of power in the hands of whoever designed the tests?? possibly enough to influence decisions. As usual, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Once they've "replaced" the old guard, they are the old guard. I'm sure that there will still be a place for 100 million dollar movies as long as there's profit in it?they'll merely have to learn to compete with the 10 million, the 1 million, the 1 thousand, or even, occasionally, the 5 dollar movies.
The irony is that organizations as they are developed precisely because they were more efficient than individuals?their hierarchical structures and group power gave them an edge. It's interesting to see the trend take a new direction once you consider the historical context.
Yes! The rise of the "professional amateur" is a big deal, and I'd go as far as to suggest that this article, treating it in the confines of "creative industries", isn't exclaiming this loudly enough. They are not just musicians and artists, but scientists, encyclopedists (read: Wikipedians), historians, genealogists, and a pile of other intellectual categories, and I think it's a great thing that they exist.
I doubt that they'll ever completely overturn the "club", but they need to be there at very least as a tempering force, a pull in a different direction.
Interestingly enough, most of the code that would be required for this is already written. I'm skeptical, however, that this would work well as a social solution to the problem: PR pros would then have to voluntarily submit to tighter inherent restrictions on editing.
Finding better social rules seems like a simpler system than (looser?) social rules plus technical infrastructure and yet another backlog to clear.
I don't think that adding an "OPOV section" would work well.
The main motivation on the part of Wikipedians to add such a thing would be to reduce the motivation of black-hat (i.e. bad faith) PR pros to add their OPOV to the article that ought to be NPOV. If the OPOV is not at least as prominent as the main article, the motivation of black-hat PR pros to tamper with the NPOV article isn't significantly reduced. If the OPOV is as prominent as the NPOV article, then that defeats the point of keeping the "main" article NPOV.
Adding an OPOV section also removes much of the potential benefit to Wikipedia of PR pros editing, since they would presumably add their updates to the "OPOV section" rather than fixing errors or otherwise helpfully updating the NPOV article.
As a longtime Wikipedian, I'm finding this fascinating. There is a case for "PR pros" to edit Wikipedia, but it's limited by the inherent clash of Wikipedia's neutral point of view (NPOV) policy and PR interests.
I'll break down some of the points I've seen in the article:
A disclosure of one?s professional affiliation with a business should not automatically exempt him or her from being allowed to responsibly edit Wikipedia entries.
Yes. This is reasonable. If the user edits responsibly, Wikipedians won't generally have a problem with that user, whether PR pro or not.
[?] But on the whole, we believe that PR professionals, particularly those whose work adheres to the PRSA Code of Ethics, are responsible and respectful of the online communities in which they engage and seek to influence.
Engaging is good, but "seeking to influence"? This is precisely the sort of problem that those opposing PR pros suggest. A PR pro's job is to exert an influence on public discussion in favour of their organization. Correcting errors is one thing, but the moment a PR pro is attempting to "influence" Wikipedia, there's a slippery slope from correcting bias against the company towards introducing bias for the company, and I think that that slope is rather steep. To illustrate this, test yourself: can you tell which of these sentences is most neutral?
1. "Organization X (OX) is a leader in foobar innovation."
2. "OX is noted for its innovations in the foobar field, despite not developing foobars itself."
3. "OX has been praised for its work in foobars by the New York Times, Aperture Science, and Techdirt."
4. "OX has been repeatedly criticized for the environmental impact of their foobar processing despite effective countermeasures against foobar leakage."
(Answer key: 1 is blatantly bad, 2 is nearly as bad, 3 could be neutral, but needs to be referenced and in context, and 4 apologizes for the organization despite its negative tone. These were very simple examples.)
Our position on this matter is simple: it's wrong for the PR profession to think it can run roughshod over the established Wikipedia community. PR professionals must engage with it in a reasonable manner that respects the community?s rules and protocols, while also ensuring they are acting in their clients' best interests. But the engagement should be a two-way street in which Wikipedia is willing to see and accommodate both sides of the issue. At the moment, we do not believe that to be the case.
That's a fair and simple position, but it begs the question: what can Wikipedia do to fairly accommodate fair and ethical editing by PR pros without allowing a free ride for those not acting in good faith? I have seen several comments and now an article by members of the PRSA (Keith Trivitt and Gerard Corbett) that have repeated this statement verbatim.
I realize that Wikipedians are often too quick to judge those in the PR industry: let's not ignore that problem. However, if that problem could be defeated, what are the current barriers to PR pros editing? The current conflict of interest guidelines do not in any way prohibit people from editing with a conflict of interest, so long as those edits follow Wikipedia's NPOV policy. PR pros have an outlet in the form of discussion pages, through which they can already make transparent suggestions for fixes to articles, and if they make a suggestion which is ignored, they can be justified in implementing the suggestion themselves on the basis that no one has objected. If the matter is sensitive, there are contact emails available through which concerns can be raised; these are dealt with confidentially by trusted volunteers authorized to use that email system (I am one). There are also many help channels available as well; I'll personally recommend the #wikipedia-en-help channel on Freenode IRC as a source of instant editing help at any hour.
I'd like to know what the PRSA hopes to achieve, what they precisely mean when they ask for a "two-way street". At present, the primary barriers to PR pro involvement are overzealous Wikipedians and the high level of skill and care required for them to edit ethically and effectively. The former is reasonably a problem, and the latter is the burden of care for the PR pro.
PRSA: is there anything I've missed? While I know that many have knee-jerk reactions to PR involvement, I'd like to extend a hand to anyone who'd like to promote an ethical, transparent involvement in Wikipedia. Feel free to contact me on Gmail: wiki dot nihiltres.
Although surely some people will copy stuff from Wikipedia to Knol, as long as Google doesn't specifically favour Knol, Wikipedia will still rank higher in the search results than equivalent Knol pages. The reason for this is simple: Wikipedia's pages benefit from a huge network effect: each article, on average, links to at least 20 others. With each article ranking well in search results on its own merits, Google's algorithm clearly favours (though perhaps not intentionally) Wikipedia's layout, as each high-ranking page favours other high-ranking pages, pushing them to the top. When articles are copied to Knol, I doubt that they will link to other Knol articles. Without the network effect, Knol's pages aren't likely to rank as high.
What I'm not looking forward to in terms of the copying is that when people copy articles, they're unlikely to obey the few restrictions that the GFDL license used by Wikipedia enforces: I know that I will be annoyed when my work turns up on Knol without any credit to me, and I plan to send DMCA takedown emails to anyone I find is copying an article I've edited and not crediting at very least Wikipedia (which is a violation of the terms of the GFDL, which requires attribution of the work to the author(s)). I may not get anything from editing Wikipedia except pleasure, but no one should be able to claim my work as their own, let alone earn money from doing so.
As for the above comment about Wikipedia's search system: donate enough to Wikipedia and maybe we can devote a new server to the massive amount of indexing this would entail, since content changes so quickly.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Nihiltres.
I'm just saying that that's what they're currently arguing. See the amended complaint, for example at pp. 71–75 (it may be fastest to simply search the text for instances of "trade dress"). I'm not a lawyer, but it seems extremely obvious that it's an attempt to rope style into IP law.
Opponents of generative AI are already arguing for that. In the recently amended complaint of Andersen et al. v. Stability AI et al. the plaintiffs argue that their artistic styles represent “trade dress” and are therefore protectable as informal trademarks or something roughly to that effect.
Re: Re: Re: someone needs to argue the tax base revunue
Yes, it might reduce taxable business as a direct effect. However, by fostering competition and making internet access cheaper, you're effectively giving everyone who pays for internet a bit of extra income, which could then go into different parts of the economy.
Those poor sick pits
Typo to be fixed: "hosting pitcures" in the first paragraph. Too bad this isn't Wikipedia, or I'd fix it myself. :)
The monkey trail
There's an even more dangerous assumption hidden there that I've been seeing in comments and such around the web, which is that photos and other such copyrightable works are automatically worth money and that this photographer deserves to "get rich".
If news outlets are licensing the photo(s) for reporting on this controversy itself, I wouldn't be surprised if the photographer has made more money on the controversy than otherwise.
Re: Re: Making laws for luddites...
Watch out! Requirements like that would place a fair amount of power in the hands of whoever designed the tests?? possibly enough to influence decisions. As usual, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
> This is one of a handful of extremely strong reasons that
> we need to get the government completely out of business.
FTFY?3
Re: Re: Yes!
Once they've "replaced" the old guard, they are the old guard. I'm sure that there will still be a place for 100 million dollar movies as long as there's profit in it?they'll merely have to learn to compete with the 10 million, the 1 million, the 1 thousand, or even, occasionally, the 5 dollar movies.
The irony is that organizations as they are developed precisely because they were more efficient than individuals?their hierarchical structures and group power gave them an edge. It's interesting to see the trend take a new direction once you consider the historical context.
Yes!
Yes! The rise of the "professional amateur" is a big deal, and I'd go as far as to suggest that this article, treating it in the confines of "creative industries", isn't exclaiming this loudly enough. They are not just musicians and artists, but scientists, encyclopedists (read: Wikipedians), historians, genealogists, and a pile of other intellectual categories, and I think it's a great thing that they exist.
I doubt that they'll ever completely overturn the "club", but they need to be there at very least as a tempering force, a pull in a different direction.
Re: Programing solution
Interestingly enough, most of the code that would be required for this is already written. I'm skeptical, however, that this would work well as a social solution to the problem: PR pros would then have to voluntarily submit to tighter inherent restrictions on editing.
Finding better social rules seems like a simpler system than (looser?) social rules plus technical infrastructure and yet another backlog to clear.
Re: NPOV vs OPOV
I don't think that adding an "OPOV section" would work well.
The main motivation on the part of Wikipedians to add such a thing would be to reduce the motivation of black-hat (i.e. bad faith) PR pros to add their OPOV to the article that ought to be NPOV. If the OPOV is not at least as prominent as the main article, the motivation of black-hat PR pros to tamper with the NPOV article isn't significantly reduced. If the OPOV is as prominent as the NPOV article, then that defeats the point of keeping the "main" article NPOV.
Adding an OPOV section also removes much of the potential benefit to Wikipedia of PR pros editing, since they would presumably add their updates to the "OPOV section" rather than fixing errors or otherwise helpfully updating the NPOV article.
More back-and-forth is needed
As a longtime Wikipedian, I'm finding this fascinating. There is a case for "PR pros" to edit Wikipedia, but it's limited by the inherent clash of Wikipedia's neutral point of view (NPOV) policy and PR interests.
I'll break down some of the points I've seen in the article:
Yes. This is reasonable. If the user edits responsibly, Wikipedians won't generally have a problem with that user, whether PR pro or not.
Engaging is good, but "seeking to influence"? This is precisely the sort of problem that those opposing PR pros suggest. A PR pro's job is to exert an influence on public discussion in favour of their organization. Correcting errors is one thing, but the moment a PR pro is attempting to "influence" Wikipedia, there's a slippery slope from correcting bias against the company towards introducing bias for the company, and I think that that slope is rather steep. To illustrate this, test yourself: can you tell which of these sentences is most neutral?
(Answer key: 1 is blatantly bad, 2 is nearly as bad, 3 could be neutral, but needs to be referenced and in context, and 4 apologizes for the organization despite its negative tone. These were very simple examples.)
That's a fair and simple position, but it begs the question: what can Wikipedia do to fairly accommodate fair and ethical editing by PR pros without allowing a free ride for those not acting in good faith? I have seen several comments and now an article by members of the PRSA (Keith Trivitt and Gerard Corbett) that have repeated this statement verbatim.
I realize that Wikipedians are often too quick to judge those in the PR industry: let's not ignore that problem. However, if that problem could be defeated, what are the current barriers to PR pros editing? The current conflict of interest guidelines do not in any way prohibit people from editing with a conflict of interest, so long as those edits follow Wikipedia's NPOV policy. PR pros have an outlet in the form of discussion pages, through which they can already make transparent suggestions for fixes to articles, and if they make a suggestion which is ignored, they can be justified in implementing the suggestion themselves on the basis that no one has objected. If the matter is sensitive, there are contact emails available through which concerns can be raised; these are dealt with confidentially by trusted volunteers authorized to use that email system (I am one). There are also many help channels available as well; I'll personally recommend the #wikipedia-en-help channel on Freenode IRC as a source of instant editing help at any hour.
I'd like to know what the PRSA hopes to achieve, what they precisely mean when they ask for a "two-way street". At present, the primary barriers to PR pro involvement are overzealous Wikipedians and the high level of skill and care required for them to edit ethically and effectively. The former is reasonably a problem, and the latter is the burden of care for the PR pro.
PRSA: is there anything I've missed? While I know that many have knee-jerk reactions to PR involvement, I'd like to extend a hand to anyone who'd like to promote an ethical, transparent involvement in Wikipedia. Feel free to contact me on Gmail: wiki dot nihiltres.
Wikipedia's secret, Copycats suck, and addressing
Although surely some people will copy stuff from Wikipedia to Knol, as long as Google doesn't specifically favour Knol, Wikipedia will still rank higher in the search results than equivalent Knol pages. The reason for this is simple: Wikipedia's pages benefit from a huge network effect: each article, on average, links to at least 20 others. With each article ranking well in search results on its own merits, Google's algorithm clearly favours (though perhaps not intentionally) Wikipedia's layout, as each high-ranking page favours other high-ranking pages, pushing them to the top. When articles are copied to Knol, I doubt that they will link to other Knol articles. Without the network effect, Knol's pages aren't likely to rank as high.
What I'm not looking forward to in terms of the copying is that when people copy articles, they're unlikely to obey the few restrictions that the GFDL license used by Wikipedia enforces: I know that I will be annoyed when my work turns up on Knol without any credit to me, and I plan to send DMCA takedown emails to anyone I find is copying an article I've edited and not crediting at very least Wikipedia (which is a violation of the terms of the GFDL, which requires attribution of the work to the author(s)). I may not get anything from editing Wikipedia except pleasure, but no one should be able to claim my work as their own, let alone earn money from doing so.
As for the above comment about Wikipedia's search system: donate enough to Wikipedia and maybe we can devote a new server to the massive amount of indexing this would entail, since content changes so quickly.