Because artists generally own thier material (with exceptions at the very high end) whereas professional coders have generally abandoned ownership by seeding it as "work product" to thier employers. Copy my drawings and you steal from me, a person. Copy a bit of code or a texture pack from a game and you steal from whatever private equity owns that game studio. Private equity doesnt have feelings to hurt.
> Because artists generally own thier material (with exceptions at the very high end)
This has not been generally true IME. It follows the same pattern as code quite often.
When you pay an artist for their work, many times you also acquire copyright for it. For example if you hire someone to build you a company logo, or art for your website, etc the paying company owns it, not the artist.
In-house/employee artists are much more common than indies, and they also don't own their own output unless there's a very special deal in place.
That is a rarified high end, commissioned artists hired for a paticular task. The vast majority of artists do art without tasking and sell copies, a situation where no copyright moves. I have a Bateman print on my wall. I own the print, not the image. Bateman has not licensed anything to anyone, just selling a physical copy. So scraping his work into AI land is more damaging to him than to a coder who has already signed away most copy/use rights via a FOSS license.
> The vast majority of artists do art without tasking and sell copies, a situation where no copyright moves.
I suspect we may have different definitions of what constitutes an "artist". I include digital art in my definition, and your statement above definitely isn't true for that. Are you just talking about painters/sketchers/etc who are doing it by hand?
If so, limiting the definition to that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, especially given that AI isn't replacing those gigs. If somebody already creates analog art, I don't see AI as being that much of a change for them
Artist is everyone who creates copyrighted works. You, me, everyone with a camera. Everyone with a guitar who records. Digital art or paintbrushes, lines of code or lines in the next harry potter novel, it is legally all the same. The artist/creator gets total copyright, then either licenses those rights away or sells copies.
I even have rights over that pervious paragraph. It aint worth much but if someone wanted to monitize it i would have rights i could assert.
Heh, nice, your definition is even more broad than mine! Ok going by your definition (which I think is quite reasonable), I think we're close to agreement. Appreciate the discussion
Arent't the models trained on open source code though? In which case OpenAI et al should be following the licenses of the code on which they are trained.
Yup, but contributors to OSS have generally given away thier rights by contributing to the project per the license. So stealing from OS isnt as bad as stealing material still totally owned by an individual, such as a drawing scraped from a personal website.
From a common FOSS contributor license...
>>permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions...
... As opposed to a visual artist who has signed away zero rights prior to thier work being scraped for AI training. FOSS contributors can quibble about conditions but they have agreed to bulk sharing whereas visual artists have not.
No, contributors to FOSS generally do not give away their rights. They contribute to the project with the expectation that their contributions will be distributed under its license, yes, but individual contributors still hold copyright over their contributions. That's why relicensing an existing FOSS project is such a headache (widely held to require every major contributor to sign off on it), and why many major corporate-backed “FOSS” projects require contributors to sign a “contributor license agreement” (CLA) which typically reassigns copyright to the corporate project owner so they can rugpull the license whenever they want.
Stealing from FOSS is awful, because it completely violates the social contract under which that code was shared.
You're still mixing up contributor license agreements with the kind of arrangements where the copyright is actually transferred and assigned "away" from the creator to another copyright holder (generally a copyright assignment agreement). This is far less common than CLAs.
I don't know what you mean by a rugpull exactly, but of course in theory you can grant/obtain very extensive rights under a CLA as well, including eg the permission to relicense your contributions under whatever terms the licensee prefers. CLAs are a great way to centralize the IPR in an open source project for practical purposes like license enforcement, but in case the CLA terms allow it, the central governing entity could also obtain the right to switch the license even to a, say, commercial one. (Such terms would usually be a red flag for contributors though.) And in any case, that kind of CLA wouldn't still close off the code already released under the previous open-source license, and neither would it prevent you from licensing your own contributions under terms of your choice.
The whole point of software licenses is that the copyright holder DOESN'T change. The author retains the rights, and LICENSES them. So, in fact, no rights are given away, they are licensed.
It is still that person creation.
Not sure about American law, but AFAIR in my country you can't remove the author from creative work (like source code), you can move the financial beneficiary of that code, but that's it.
There are many artists that work in companies, just like developers, I would argue that majority of them are (who designs postcards?)
