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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

The ethics partly depends on the analogy you choose.

I can write a book about a boy wizard's adventures wizard school and that's legal, but if I call them Harry Potter it isn't.

I can create Harry Potter fanart and distribute it online pretty freely - but slap it on a mug and sell it, and that's illegal.

I can record an audio description of a painting that's as detailed as I like and it's legal to distribute - but take a photograph of the same painting and it's a derivative work, no matter how artistic my choice of camera settings.

We don't really have any prior examples that are precisely like these huge ML models trained on copyrighted data - and depending on which imprecise analogy you choose, you can come to a different conclusion.

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Harry Potter is a trademark. It protects and distinguishes identity and authority. It is much harder to get a trademark, and is also harder to fairly use one. Different issue.

If your fan art is infringing, it was infringing whether or not it was on a mug or on dropbox.

Photograph one is not true. For commentary it can be by audio, or printed on a mug or whatever, commentary is transformative. Go out and take a photo of the world outside, if you live in a city you've captured thousands of copyrighted materials in your image. Maybe it captures someones painting, maybe it doesn't. Whether its fair or not is if it's transformative, the format doesn't matter.

I'm not seeing an ethical difference from any of this. Or did I miss the point?

> Harry Potter is a trademark. It protects and distinguishes identity and authority.

Perhaps I should have said Darth Vader, then - the point is you can copyright a character independent of the copyright on a book's text, and the trademark on the series name, and the fact that broad concepts like "black-clad masked evil overlord" are uncopyrightable. And that copyright can persist even if you transform a book character into an engraved coffee mug.

> I'm not seeing an ethical difference from any of this. Or did I miss the point?

The difference is:

If a person says "Stable diffusion is to its copyrighted training data as an audio description is to a painting" or "Stable diffusion is to its copyrighted training data as the concept of boy wizards is to harry potter" they would probably say it's ethically fine.

If a person says "Stable diffusion is to its copyrighted training data as a photograph of a painting is to the painting" or "Stable diffusion is to its copyrighted training data as video lecture is to a single image in its slides" they might well say it's not ethical.

Is your third example correct? Andy Warhol was famous for using photographs of existing art and transforming them only slightly. Roy Lichenstein literally took panels from DC comic books and magnified them and became celebrated in the art world for it.

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