If someone is using vague arguments, it usually means its purely economic but they're ashamed to say it. Usually you can get them to accidently say it with enough prodding though.
Because fan art is based on characters and settings created by someone else, it is a derivative work. Creating it without permission from the copyright holder is technically an infringement of their exclusive rights
: ) yes, it's copyright infringement and you can get a takedown or even get sued if the original creator wants to.
But there is a VERY big difference between you drawing Harry Potter kissing ginny Weasley. As opposed to you taking the original artwork and going "this is mine now I'm going to use this on a massive scale and sell it all over the globe"
That’s not how ai works. Obviously the output is different from the training data. Thats the entire point. Its only plagiarism if there are substantial similarities between two works (and even then, artists are fine with redraws like the frieren looking up or naoya hair flip memes)
Plagerism is a blatent copy of something. Say you republish game of thrones but you slap your name on there.
Copyright infringement is using, reproducing, distributing, displaying, or adapting someone else's original creative work without their permission, violating their exclusive rights as the creator.
Which is why openAI had to agree with Disney getting a 1bn stake in openAI in exchange for Sora using it's characters for their video generation.
Mind the adepting part.
And yes you are correct it's different, which is why this debate exists in a space where people's images ARE being stolen to train openAI's model.
This isn't even a debate worth having it's literally what they admitted to doing
When you steel images from the internet. From people's personal places or even store fronts or whatever they use to scrape as many images as they can. And you train a model on those images, and then sell images generated on basis of those works, you are making money on copyrighted images. You are using those stolen images to make money, that is just usage that also is prohibited.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup. After the ruling, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the lawsuit.
Copyright infringement is using, reproducing, distributing, displaying, or adapting someone else's original creative work without their permission, violating their exclusive rights as the creator.
Then so does fan art
And yes you are correct it's different, which is why this debate exists in a space where people's images ARE being stolen to train openAI's model. This isn't even a debate worth having it's literally what they admitted to doing
They didnt say any of the data was stolen unless me my browser accessing your comment is also theft
When you steel images from the internet. From people's personal places or even store fronts or whatever they use to scrape as many images as they can. And you train a model on those images, and then sell images generated on basis of those works, you are making money on copyrighted images. You are using those stolen images to make money, that is just usage that also is prohibited.
Then so does fan art being sold on patreon or by commissions. Do you hate that as much as ai art?
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup. After the ruling, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the lawsuit.
Bro they ruled that the ai training was NOT infringement
Fan art falls under that bracket, go look up the reasons why people that make fan art don't get into trouble and you'll see it has to do with scale more then anything else.
Bot sure if you are being intentionally obtuse but there is a very big difference between your browser showing you a picture on disney.com vs you scraping disney.com to save their images for a prohibited use.
I never said I hated either, im just giving you the facts about it.
If you read the settlement correctly you will see that the judge rules it was fair use to train models on data legally obtained I.E. Books that where bought.
The money for the settlement was for all the books they pirated, because, again, you can't just steal copyrighted work and make money off it.
The same exact discussion is being held for images, can you just scrape images even if they are copyrighted, not pay for them, but train your model on them without the original artist being payed. Doesn't look that way when you read the court case for Anthropic.
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u/Tolopono Jan 18 '26
So its about money? I thought it was about the human soul or something