Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterBarrett | Hacker News Reader

Pricing? That's a bit rich. Will people who don't want to pay for images pay for this?

There is a lot of watermarked content that you can't buy as a digital file, content on redbubble comes to mind for example (stickers. clothing designs, &c.), harvest watermarked art, clean it up, put it for sale somewhere else.

I don't think this tool targets well intentioned law abiding, copyright respecting people

I’m not sure I understand what you mean… isn’t harvesting watermarked art from redbubble and selling it somewhere else illegal under copyright law, if you don’t own the product or the image? Did I misunderstand your suggestion? How and when is taking a watermark off something you didn’t create well intentioned and law abiding?

You missed a "don't"

i also fail to see a market for this, but 50K installs on android and close to 1200 likes on product hunt suggests that there might be

There’s probably a huge market of people that haven’t kept up with the AI boom, and they don’t know free tools exist for this. HN isn’t that market.

I never used it for watermarks but llama-cleaner is one - it worked pretty well at removing text.

https://github.com/Sanster/lama-cleaner

It is a much different problem to pay for a license for every single image you have scraped from an arbitrary variety of sources and watermarks than to pay for software that removes any watermark.

Seems like a post-scarcity race to the bottom. The question is whether we can encumber post-scarce resources with IP in a meaningful way for much longer.

Bruce Sterling said it best: "Information wants to be worthless"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com