Post · bonfire.mavnn.eu

Post

Why I'm running to be Director General of the BBC

Our public broadcaster belongs to us, the people - it's time to bring the BBC back into our hands. A guest post from Love Ssega. #SsegaForDG

Union Jill: the story behind a symbol of protest and alternative Britain | Southbank Centre

Environmental activists Helen B and Heather talk about the creation of the Union Jill, a flag which became a familiar symbol of 1990s road protests.

The American Prospect

What You Won’t See at the Live Nation–Ticketmaster Trial - The American Prospect

A Biden-appointed judge substantially narrowed the government’s bid to break up the music monopoly, and suppressed a few topics we’d really like to see play out on the stand.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08295

Designing Secure Software

Preface

Arvīds Kokins

@[email protected] replied · last week

@pluralistic

> [..] 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.

Cory Doctorow

@[email protected] replied · last week

@archo

> "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.

Arvīds Kokins

@[email protected] replied · last week

@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.

Cory Doctorow

@[email protected] replied · last week

@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.

Arvīds Kokins

@[email protected] replied · last week

@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.

Cory Doctorow

@[email protected] replied · last week

@archo

> 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."

2+ more replies (not shown)

Cory Doctorow

@[email protected] replied · last week

@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.

Arvīds Kokins

@[email protected] replied · last week

@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.

Cory Doctorow

@[email protected] replied · last week

@archo

> 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

Arvīds Kokins

@[email protected] replied · last week

@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.

1 more replies (not shown)

Cory Doctorow

@[email protected] replied · last week

@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.

Tom Marble

@[email protected] replied · last week

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.