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I don't really understand, I'd think that complete reproduction of her photo should be prohibited under copyright. No one should be able to take copies of her photo and paste it onto whatever product they want to sell for example. If her exact photo has been denied copyright protections I'd agree that's a problem.

That said, the pose is not unique and her example of someone who "copied" her work (https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FFjY3coxaYAImURa.jpg) wasn't identical and should be allowed. It's clearly directly influenced by the original, but if someone else wants to create something similar that's just art. It's what all artists do and always have done.

If artists couldn't create their own versions of things captured in works by other artists, new art could not exist.

No one should be able to copyright a "style" or a pose just like no one should be able to copyright a genre or a camera angle.

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How is it only "inspired" when it's not only the same pose, but the same person and the same clothes, up to its individual folds. "Inspired" would be inviting a model to wear the same thing and take the pose, and painting that. Here, it's a reproduction of the mirrored picture, with different colors and trivial changes (like the earings). Calling this inspiration is utterly ridiculous.

> but the same person and the same clothes, up to its individual folds.

It's not the same person. The face is very different, as is the hair. not the same folds either, look at the white cloth near the flower. It's also a painting and not a photograph. If a painter creates a painting of Grand Central Station has he violated the copyright of the architect? Artists must be able to create, by their own hand, their own versions of things depicted in other works of art or even of other artistic works themselves. (see for example https://publicdelivery.org/fernando-botero-mona-lisa/)

Counter example:

THE TOWER ILLUMINATED Controlled use

The various illuminations of the Eiffel Tower (golden illumination, twinkling, beacon and events lighting) are protected. The use of the image of the Eiffel Tower at night is therefore subject to prior authorisation by the SETE. This use is subject to payment of rights, the amount of which is determined by the intended use, the media plan, etc.

https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel...

This sort of copyright absurdity warrants flouting the rules as often as is realistically possible. It may be an overreach backed by law, but that makes it no less of an overreach.

Note, I don't have a strong opinion wrt copyright infringement in the case OP is about, but words are important. Let's not pretend it's "inspired".

True, I do feel that some cases take copyright protection way too far and we're all worse off for it. Here's another example of that from the US: https://rpjlaw.com/blurred-lines-copying-songs-musical-style...

Overbroad copyright protections are often granted, but it's never a good thing for anyone except the shortsighted artists who stand to directly benefit from censoring their peers and preventing the rest of us from having a richer culture.

This is a "freedom of panorama" thing, one of the few aspects of copyright which varies extensively across the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama

The flowers are arranged identically in the painting to the photograph. The differences between the two are trivial. The hair is certainly not "very different" and the face is similar enough to be a copying by an imprecise hand. This isn't a painting of Grand Central Station, it's a photo of the Mona Lisa.

https://imgur.com/8OoQFr8 the image is composite of 50% the photo, 50% the painting. (with re-alignment, the flowers are also a perfect match, same for the clothes, etc.)

Just because you are using your hand, doesn't mean that you magically are no longer copying

> Just because you are using your hand, doesn't mean that you magically are no longer copying

All art is copying. A painter selected a set of colors, choosing some over others, and then used their own skill and a brush to put those colors to canvas in order to create something based on how they saw an object in the world around them. Their subject was filtered by the eyes and perspective of the artist. The artist chose what to keep identical, what to emphasize, what to remove, or when to add something that the subject they were painting never had. The result is something unique that represents the artist's viewpoint.

The photo was clearly the artist's subject, and so it is very similar, but what resulted was not a reproduction of the original. Personally, I like the original photo much better, but I might like another artist's take on it even more than the original photo. That's why we should be careful when granting copyright protections. When artists can freely create new works by reinterpreting the subjects, ideas, and output of other artists we get a more rich and thriving culture filled with different artistic works to choose from according to our own preferences. It's important to police reproductions so that artists can continue to be rewarded for their works, but over-apply copyright and you not only censor artists, you can prevent yourself from having or experiencing something that would have deeply touched you, or even changed you.

> The artist chooses what to keep identical [All of it], what to emphasize [None of it], what to remove [None of it], or what to add [Nothing]

There are clear differences between the painting and the photo, multiple things were added and removed. You might not place much value in them, but that's purely subjective. I must place more importance on those changes than you do because I have a preference for the photo over the painting. Objectively, those changes do exist regardless of how we feel about them.

It's clear that one is a mirror image of the other with minor Photoshop edits. I think it's clear to just about everybody. I don't believe you are arguing in good faith.

IANAPS, but I don’t think these are minor ps edits (or that it’s even ps) after overlaying the two and sliding the opacity. That’s a grey area no doubt, and the source of “inspiration” is clear, but you’re probably overtrivializing it.

I don't think the claim is that it's literally Photoshopped. It's a painting. It could be a painting of a Photoshopped version of the photo, or the changes could have been made while painting. There isn't any legal basis for distinguishing between digital and physical works here -- a copy is a copy, and a physical copy with alterations is as much a derivative work as a digital copy with alterations.

> It's clear that one is a mirror image of the other with minor Photoshop edits.

You're wrong. I'd agree that minor photoshop edits would be a different story, but this is a painting. Oil on wood.

Would you consider an oil painting that exactly duplicated the photograph to be sufficiently different to not be covered by the original artist's copyright?

I think if the painting were perfectly identical than it'd be just a reproduction and it should violate the photo's copyright, but even if such a thing were possible for a very skilled artist to pull off, I don't think that'd be something that happens very often. I'd guess that most artists would have a hard time not making changes.

We want artists to be protected from outright reproductions of their work, so that'd include minor low effort changes in photoshop made just to get around copyright. Artists should be free to create their own versions of existing works though. Copyright is supposed to encourage the creation of art after all.

OK. You should make it clearer that you're arguing for a weaker system of author's rights, not just making claims about the current system. I favor copyright reform but what you're suggesting would destroy the ability for artists to commercially exploit their work.

If I take the Lord of the Rings book, type it all again by hand but change a few sentences here and there, would you consider that ok?

The difference is between crafting something transformative and a reproduction. If you simply typed up the same story (even with minor changes) you haven't created anything. Turning a typed work into a typed work isn't really meaningful. A better analogy might be if you retold the story yourself aloud, from memory, making changes by adding characters and omitting scenes that you didn't think were as exciting and adding new ones.

That's how stories were shared before copyright. Someone would tell a story, and someone else would hear it and later share it with others and each time it was told by someone new changes would be made. Each storyteller would tell their own version, including the best parts from other versions and trying new changes on each audience and gradually the story would evolve as the most popular changes would be included more often and propagate farther.

It's not a carbon copy and the changes aren't minimal - thus it's inspired, not copied.

After all, copyright works for whole thing, not spare parts (technique, style or "idea" aren't copyrightable)...

> copyright works for whole thing

No, this is wrong. Here's a counterexample [0].

[0] Structure, sequence and organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...

Essentially any movie adaptation of a book can't be copyright infringement based on this being the bar; even cases that keep many lines of dialog verbatim end up just being detail similar to keeping the exact same folds of fabric at the bottom.

> Essentially any movie adaptation of a book can't be copyright infringement based on this being the bar;

I'd agree with that. A movie adaptation (with changes) should be allowed under copyright because it's clearly transformative and creative. Copyright should protect against reproduction without compensation, it shouldn't be used to prevent new artistic works from being created even when they are based on existing works. That's how I feel about it anyway, although sadly the law we have today in the US would disagree.

I agree, it is far beyond "inspiration". Next to zero changes: same type of flowers, identical thinness of straps, hair up in a loose bun with strands spraying in very similar locations, folds in the fabric carbon-copy identical. Even the eyebrow, with its slight heaviness on the straight part, is the same. Dude made her eye a bit more slanted, wow. This is saying anyone can flip, photocopy, and color someone else's work, making the most nominal changes, and it's suddenly an "original."

Tbh, what I perceive as “art” in the original work is still unique and wasn’t copied into the reproduction. It’s a copy of hair, face and clothing configuration, which is non-unique and a strange subject for copyright. I mean this is obviously borderline, but still a subjective issue.

If you like analogies, it’s like some pro photographer found a place, angle and hundreds of other parameters to shoot in the nature, copyrighted the image, and then someone geoguess’d that exact place next day and took a pic with their iphone or google maps street view.

I agree. I am part of the local art community and there is this meme idea floating around that the artist owns everything about a work they make, even the idea. At present people are using this to bash on AI art and decry it as stolen. But this is mistaken, both from a legal sense (many aspects of a work are not copyrightable), and in a physics sense (you cannot control an idea in the minds of others, information wants to be free, and so on).

I don't want to deny that AI artwork is potentially a threat, much in the way that a printing press was to scribes of the time or a camera to painters. And I understand the need to put food on the table. But the only form of protection available is limited at best, by design, and I think many of these people fail to see how they might be infringing on others' copyright under such a harsh and draconian interpretation of it.

As both an artist and an AI person for my dayjob, this is spot on. People are losing their minds (esp. on twitter ) but really it’s exactly identical to the painting to photography transition.

I had an acquaintance tell me to either learn how to draw or commission work, when I expressed that Stable Diffusion was neat for people who might want to create visual art based on their text ideas - still requires human interaction, still art in my book. It was kind of a sad lack of reflection given that their own art reproduced trademarked media from certain spicy chili sauce brands.

>"and in a physics sense (you cannot control an idea in the minds of other,"

I think we should add the caveat "yet", to your quote. I imagine it's physiological to control ideas in people's brains if you could accurately and correctly map neurons to people's thoughts.

Isn't the information stored in the EM-field the neurons create, not the neurons themselves?

> It's clearly directly influenced by the original, but if someone else wants to create something similar that's just art. It's what all artists do and always have done.

Copyrights can on some occasions preclude someone from independently creating a very similar work. In the UK, a photographer was found to have infringed the copyrights of another photographer, by creating very similar works. [0][1]

I don't know if this has ever happened in US law.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Island_Collections_Ltd_...

[1] https://www.copyrightuser.org/educate/the-game-is-on/episode...

> if her exact photo has been denied copyright protections I'd agree that's a problem

That is my reading of the translations of the ruling, at the end of the thread. It's not "original" enough, and so it's completely unprotected.

The case law in the US is favorable to the newer artist in many cases, the four factors of fair use would be in the newer artists favor for a one off piece of art based on a reference.

Like with http://www.artistrights.info/cariou-v-prince the works consisting of collages, with a guitar pasted over the original work was found to be fair use. In this case the transformative use was a bigger factor, but part of the work was exactly copied, not just derivative.

Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corp is more similar to this case. But in Leibovitz while the poses were the same there were several other factors that were changed to heighten the comedic effect.

It’s not just “influenced by the original”. They clearly just mirror-flipped the original image and photoshopped it a bit.

> They clearly just mirror-flipped the original image and photoshopped it a bit.

it's an oil panting on wood. Not a photoshop. Someone painted it.

Because what they did wasn't original. I've seen this pose, this "look", this everything thousands of times over before this person was even alive. To claim this whole thing is copy-writable is ludicrous.

Now, the image in and of itself is unique and the other people taking it and just flipping it and saying suddenly "it's mine" is just as ludicrous.

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