Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Supreme Court saves artists from AI; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap/
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> [..] all seek to establish that training an AI model is a copyright infringement. This is wrong [..]
This is such a strange hill to die on. Of course "training" infringes - it's compression.
Framing it as "mathematical analysis" or collecting "facts" is disingenuous.
Fourier transform could be easily described the exact same way, except it's fully reversible.
"Facts" wrt copyright are not meant to be the building blocks needed to reconstruct a work to some degree.
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> "Facts" wrt copyright are not meant to be the building blocks needed to reconstruct a work to some degree.
Literally you could write a book describing each brushstroke needed to reconstruct a copyrighted painting without violating that painting's copyright.
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@pluralistic That doesn't make sense. That's what most computer data effectively is - instructions to reconstruct data in a more accessible format. IDK if you're familiar with art tools but some literally encode the brush strokes (like Substance Painter or Clip Studio Paint vector layers) needed to reconstruct the picture.
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@archo Yes, there's some interesting edge-cases implicit in this new, more explicit rule that copyright inheres only for human (and not machine) work.
While it's unlikely a case regarding the copyrightability of a vector layer (or even a clone brush) would reach a judgment (such cases being likely to founder on the *de minimis* standard that excludes trivialities from legal action), such a judgment might assign a "thin" copyright comparable to a "selection" right.
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@pluralistic Hypothetically, if someone were to extract all the brush strokes from a file, wrote them into a book, retyped that book back into a file and re-rendered them to claim that it's original work, to me that's still a clear-cut infringement, not even de minimis (which could apply if only e.g. less than 0.1% of the brush strokes were used).
At the end of the day, copyright is an economical tool to ensure the author is fairly rewarded for their work, not an obfuscation challenge.
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> retyped that book back into a file and re-rendered them to claim that it's original work
You are describing an infringing *use*, which does not make the machine itself infringing. This is a bedrock of copyright law, established in 1984 with the Supreme Court's ruling in Sony v Universal (the Betamax decision), which I referenced in my thread: "A device capable of sustaining a substantial noninfringing use is not infringing."
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@archo Further: the cases against models are only tangentially related to memorization. It's undeniable that these suits would exist even if models had "guardrails" that *perfectly* prevented them from reproducing their training data verbatim. Memorization is *not* the crux of any of these complaints - *training* is.
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@pluralistic Perfect memorization is also irrelevant - lossy compression is also a thing, doesn't stop copyright from applying (otherwise reencoding videos would remove their copyright).
Ultimately though what matters for infringement is whether the original work was substantially used to produce the new work (regardless of the exact process) - and clearly that's the case.
Not even the AI companies dispute infringement, they argue that it's "fair use" instead.
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> Ultimately though what matters for infringement is whether the original work was substantially used to produce the new work (regardless of the exact process) - and clearly that's the case.
This is completely incorrect.
You could cut a picture into a billion pixels and reconstitute them as a completely different picture without infringing anyone's copyright.
Copyright has nothing to do with whether the constituent components came from a copyrighted work. That's just completely wrong
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@pluralistic In that case you can argue that the particular work was not substantially used in the end result, if all you needed was a pile of pixels (or a palette) without their positional association to each other.
To me, cases like this sit far outside the "substantially used" circle.
AI "models" on the other hand, explicitly consider the positional associations of the pixels of the original images at various scales, not just their color.
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@archo Internationally, the limitations and exceptions to copyright are cabined by the Berne "three step" test which does not mention whether the constituent parts are drawn from a copyrighted work.
In the US, there's Fair Use's "four factors," one of which does interrogate the amount of the taking, but is not in itself sufficient for a finding of infringement.
This post by @pluralistic
(Building upon
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116095352501271369 )
is making me think about what it means to accept genAI code -- esp. in open source where contribution is often governed by an inbound=outbound rule. That means the inbound code must be licensed under the same copyright license as the project .That's not possible if there is no copyright (and neither is assignment under any CLA).
We can infer that any published software (open or proprietary) built with AI is not copyrightable.
Supreme Court saves artists from AI: Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116166654919455515
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@pluralistic uncopyrightable and public domain are not same. For example uncopyrightable means you don't get name right and authorship(?) right.
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@uis I have never heard of a "name" or "authorship" right. I think you're probably referring to "moral rights," which don't exist in the US context.
@pluralistic
Me: sees headline, expects to be disappointed in Cory, expects "more copyright good" bullshit.
Cory: "less copyright"
Me: "nice"
Hey look at this
* Preface to Designing Secure Software: A Guide for Developers https://designingsecuresoftware.com/text/ch0-preface/
* Publish Your Threat Models! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08295
* What You Won’t See at the Live Nation–Ticketmaster Trial https://prospect.org/2026/03/02/justice-department-live-nation-ticketmaster-antitrust-trial/
* Union Jill https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/magazine/union-jill-the-story-behind-a-symbol-of-protest-and-alternative-britain/ (h/t Hard Art)
* Why I'm running to be Director General of the BBC https://www.absurdintelligence.com/why-im-running-to-be-director-general-of-the-bbc/ (h/t Hard Art)
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#20yrsago Cornell University harasses maker of Cornell blog https://web.archive.org/web/20060621110535/http://cornell.elliottback.com/archives/2006/03/02/cornell-university-nastygram/
#15yrsago Explaining creativity to a Martian https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-explaining-creativity-to-a-martian/
#15yrsago Scott Walker smuggles ringers into the capital for the legislative session https://www.theawl.com/2011/03/in-madison-scott-walker-packed-his-budget-address-with-ringers/
#15yrsago Measuring radio’s penetration in 1936 https://www.flickr.com/photos/70118259@N00/albums/72157626051208969/with/5490099786
#10yrsago Rube Goldberg musical instrument that runs on 2,000 steel ball-bearings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
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#10yrsago KKK vs D&D: the surprising, high fantasy vocabulary of racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_titles_and_vocabulary
#10yrsago UK minister compares adblocking to piracy, promises action https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/02/adblocking-protection-racket-john-whittingdale
#10yrsago Some ad-blockers are tracking you, shaking down publishers, and showing you ads https://www.wired.com/2016/03/heres-how-that-adblocker-youre-using-makes-money/
#10yrsago ISIS opsec: jihadi tech bureau recommends non-US crypto tools https://web.archive.org/web/20160303095904/http://www.dailydot.com/politics/isis-apple-fbi-congressional-hearing-crypto-international/
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#10yrsago Apple v FBI isn’t about security vs privacy; it’s about America’s security vs FBI surveillance https://www.wired.com/2016/03/feds-let-cyber-world-burn-lets-put-fire/
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@pluralistic oh man, this was 10 years ago? I remember having very uncomfortable conversations with the less informed acquaintances in my life back then. Things have certainly not changed much in that regard...
Yesterday's threads: No one wants to read your AI slop; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116158884861301724
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