Adobe Scolded For Selling 'Ansel Adams-Style' Images Generated By AI (theverge.com) 89
The Ansel Adams estate said it was "officially on our last nerve" after Adobe was caught selling AI-generated images imitating the late photographer's work. The Verge reports: While Adobe permits AI-generated images to be hosted and sold on its stock image platform, users are required to hold the appropriate rights or ownership over the content they upload. Adobe Stock's Contributor Terms specifically prohibits content "created using prompts containing other artist names, or created using prompts otherwise intended to copy another artist." Adobe responded to the callout, saying it had removed the offending content and had privately messaged the Adams estate to get in touch directly in the future. The Adams estate, however, said it had contacted Adobe directly multiple times since August 2023.
"Assuming you want to be taken seriously re: your purported commitment to ethical, responsible AI, while demonstrating respect for the creative community, we invite you to become proactive about complaints like ours, & to stop putting the onus on individual artists/artists' estates to continuously police our IP on your platform, on your terms," said the Adams estate on Threads. "It's past time to stop wasting resources that don't belong to you."
Adobe Stock Vice President Matthew Smith previously told The Verge that the company generally moderates all "crowdsourced" Adobe Stock assets before they are made available to customers, employing a "variety" of methods that include "an experienced team of moderators who review submissions." As of January 2024, Smith said the strongest action the company can take to enforce its platform rules is to block Adobe Stock users who violate them. Bassil Elkadi, Adobe's Director of Communications and Public Relations, told The Verge that Adobe is "actively in touch with Ansel Adams on this matter," and that "appropriate steps were taken given the user violated Stock terms." The Adams estate has since thanked Adobe for removing the images, and said that it expects "it will stick this time." "We don't have a problem with anyone taking inspiration from Ansel's photography," said the Adams estate. "But we strenuously object to the unauthorized use of his name to sell products of any kind, including digital products, and this includes AI-generated output -- regardless of whether his name has been used on the input side, or whether a given model has been trained on his work."
"Assuming you want to be taken seriously re: your purported commitment to ethical, responsible AI, while demonstrating respect for the creative community, we invite you to become proactive about complaints like ours, & to stop putting the onus on individual artists/artists' estates to continuously police our IP on your platform, on your terms," said the Adams estate on Threads. "It's past time to stop wasting resources that don't belong to you."
Adobe Stock Vice President Matthew Smith previously told The Verge that the company generally moderates all "crowdsourced" Adobe Stock assets before they are made available to customers, employing a "variety" of methods that include "an experienced team of moderators who review submissions." As of January 2024, Smith said the strongest action the company can take to enforce its platform rules is to block Adobe Stock users who violate them. Bassil Elkadi, Adobe's Director of Communications and Public Relations, told The Verge that Adobe is "actively in touch with Ansel Adams on this matter," and that "appropriate steps were taken given the user violated Stock terms." The Adams estate has since thanked Adobe for removing the images, and said that it expects "it will stick this time." "We don't have a problem with anyone taking inspiration from Ansel's photography," said the Adams estate. "But we strenuously object to the unauthorized use of his name to sell products of any kind, including digital products, and this includes AI-generated output -- regardless of whether his name has been used on the input side, or whether a given model has been trained on his work."
Ansel Adams died in 1984 ffs (Score:2)
A lot of Adams' Yosemite work is going to enter the public domain--finally--in a few years, so maybe they will have to go get jobs or something.
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Didn't read the article, did you?
“We don’t have a problem with anyone taking inspiration from Ansel’s photography,” said the Adams estate. “But we strenuously object to the unauthorized use of his name to sell products of any kind, including digital products, and this includes AI-generated output — regardless of whether his name has been used on the input side, or whether a given model has been trained on his work.”
In other words, they have the same complaint as all those authors do: AI is wholesale scarfing up someone else's work and passing it off as something akin to the original.
Re:Ansel Adams died in 1984 ffs (Score:5, Insightful)
Or put another way: "They're scarfing up someone else's work and profiting off it"
Which is ironic coming from "the Adams estate." His descendants didn't do the work either. Maybe they're just upset this is cutting into their potential profits.
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Copyright is a state enforced unnatural protection. It has as much to do with capitalism as it does with communism, assholes, and the great ball of fire in the sky.
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Read these 180+ year old speeches on the subject if you want to understand the topic: https://www.thepublicdomain.or... [thepublicdomain.org]
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Patents, yes, copyright, no. Copyright was carved out as a form of benevolent socialism, basically the idea was to protect small artists but as always, regulation protects only large entities with sufficient power to enforce their copyright. Linux and most open source projects cannot enforce copyright, small authors cannot enforce their copyrights because copyright is so broad and nebulous, it protects thoughts and speech from duplication, moreover the abuser of the copyright often does not have a big profi
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In other words, they have the same complaint as all those authors do: AI is wholesale scarfing up someone else's work and passing it off as something akin to the original.
Styles are not copyrightable.
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Indeed. This seems to be a trademark claim.
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Indeed. This seems to be a trademark claim.
Yes, but the trademark is not the style, but that Adobe used Ansel Adam's name to sell the images.
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They wrote, and I quote, "Ansel Adams-style". How can saying, in effect, "This work looks like the style of X artist but isn't from him" be a trademark violation?
Where's the infringement? They're not using Ansel Adams' name as a trademark to identify their own work. They're referencing Adams' style, which is a descriptive phrase that accurately describes the work's aesthetic. Since there is no likelihood of confusion between the two, there is no trademark infringement.
There's also first amendment i
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Saying it isn't. Advertising it with his name is.
Latter was the case in this instance.
You can refer to the style all you want. Just not to sell works that compete with his. Just like you can say that your burger shop has mcdonalds style burgers in reference, but the moment you advertise them as such, mcdonalds will go to a local court and that court will shut your ad campaign down and have you pay damages.
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Seriously, stop writing until you've read at least one article about comparative advertising and nominative fair use in trademark law.
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Seriously, stop writing until you're read the actual case law (really not hard as trademark as a topic has been discussed quite a bit here on slashdot, and you're not a new user), and then read what this case is actually about.
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The entire point of legal reviews is to review the case law on the topic.
Companies compare themselves to their competitors all the bloody time, and it's perfectly legal. Comparative advertising is legal. Period. How have you grown up without seeing comparative advertising? Like, to pick a random example out of millions: did you never see a "Pepsi Challenge" ad growing up, where Pepsi challenges people to taste their product vs. Coke, refers to Coke by name, shows a Coke (including its logo), etc etc, le
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And now you're inverting the point to sell your narrative.
Honestly, I don't have enough of a dog in this fight to care. We all know what happened here, and we have seen quite a few examples on slashdot of brands getting fucked on this point. So invert the point away until it's a perpetual motion engine.
Use of Name, not Images (Score:5, Informative)
AI is wholesale scarfing up someone else's work and passing it off as something akin to the original.
That is not what is happening here. There is no accusation that the AI is copying original Ansel Adams' images. Instead they are objecting to the fact that Adobe is selling the images as "Ansel Adams-style" images i.e. they are objecting to the use of Ansel Adams' name in selling the images.
Given that they seem fine with anyone being inspired by him perhaps re-label the images as "Ansel Adams-inspired" AI images? As long as you are clearly not representing the images as coming from Ansel Adams I do not see the harm in indicating the style (or "inspiration") for the images but of course what seems reasonable and what the law allows always seem to be miles apart when it comes to intellectual property today.
Re:Ansel Adams died in 1984 ffs (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't read the article, did you?
“We don’t have a problem with anyone taking inspiration from Ansel’s photography,” said the Adams estate. “But we strenuously object to the unauthorized use of his name to sell products of any kind, including digital products, and this includes AI-generated output — regardless of whether his name has been used on the input side, or whether a given model has been trained on his work.”
In other words, they have the same complaint as all those authors do: AI is wholesale scarfing up someone else's work and passing it off as something akin to the original.
I read the complaint from the Adams estate as something entirely different. They are not talking about copyright but about trademark. They don't want Adobe trying to profit off the Ansel Adams name, i.e., "the unauthorized use of his name to sell products of any kind." If they relabeled the pictures as "old-fashioned" or something else, then they wouldn't have a problem.
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Now, a purchaser who was defrauded by counterfeit works would have a leg to stand on.
Re:Ansel Adams died in 1984 ffs (Score:4, Informative)
Trademark a dead guy, yeah that's great.
Trademarks don't expire. As long as you keep using them, they can last for centuries.
There are trademarks in use that date to the 1800s.
I hate US IP law so much.
Trademark law is not US-specific. The oldest trademarks are in the UK and Scandinavia.
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https://www.theiplawblog.com/2... [theiplawblog.com]
The SCO of the art world.
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That's not a similar case. In that case they were using Ansel Adam's name to sell something that was Ansel Adam's putting the trademark itself under fair use. Using the name for work that Ansel Adams did *not* create would not have the same outcome. In fact the test applied to the case is on the last part of the linked article and it would fail on 2 accounts definitely and likely on the 3rd as well.
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And they were claiming that they were Ansel Adams prints, which was (assumed for the purpose of the article) a factual statement.
Here they're not claiming they're Ansel Adams prints. They explicitly state that they're Ansel Adams style prints. Comparative advertising is perfectly legal. As the article notes, The fair use defense is available to one
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The Ansel Adams Trust has already lost a similar case, of course:
And they'd lose a case against Adobe for similar reasons. AI is just doing what untold numbers of human photographers have done over the years: look at Adams photographs and then go out and take similar images of their own. I live within driving distance of Yosemite National Park, and when I go to art shows in the area many of the photographers are selling photos they took at Yosemite, probably in exactly the same place Adams took his, and they look very similar to Adams photos. Are these human photograph
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Your comment would have been better if you had included some details:
The first trademark legislation was passed in England in 1266.
1875 - The Bass red triangle logo was the first registered trademark in the UK.
Lowenbrau claims to have the oldest continuously used trademark in the world - 1383
Stella Artois - claims continuous use of its mark since 1366.
Source: https://www.dossey.com/blog/20... [dossey.com]
Source: Further searches for better information.
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No, their complaint is that some photos were labeled as "Ansel Adams style". It's right in your quote. "But we strenuously object to the unauthorized use of his name."
Ansel Adams' style was impressive and new when cameras and film were pretty shitty. Today, less so. The US parks service describes it:
Ansel Ad
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" cameras and film were pretty shitty."
So, please tell us how much work you've done with large-format cameras and film.
From wiki:
"In the case of large format, 4 x 5 inch films can record approximately 298.7 million pixels, and 1,200 million pixels in the case of 8 x 10 inch film"
Adams worked extensively with large-format.
Why TF do digital simps assume that analogue technology is inferior in *every* way? I'll tell you - because they're feeling insecure and have to denigrate the alternatives. They're frighten
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Ansel Adams first started publishing photos in 1921. It may surprise you to learn that "large format" photography, even restricting the comparison to film, has changed a bit since then. You may also be surprised to learn that photography is more than one statistic on one piece of one apparatus.
Early lenses had a lot of aberration, especially large ones, exposure meters hadn't been invented yet, the film had large grain and was not very sensitive, etc. The blurriness, especially if the subject moved, gave ea
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So what? Are his great^10 grandkids gonna come cry to me about it?
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Didn't read the article, did you? {...}
In other words, they have the same complaint as all those authors do: AI is wholesale scarfing up someone else's work and passing it off as something akin to the original.
Can't speak for him, but I read it:
On Friday, Adams’ estate posted a screenshot to Threads showing AI-generated images available on Adobe Stock that were labeled as “Ansel Adams-style,” telling Adobe it was “officially on our last nerve with this behavior.”
So no, their complaint was not "wholesale scarfing up someone else's work and passing it off as something akin to the original"; it was the use of the term “Ansel Adams-style”.
Anyway, copyright at the time of the founding fathers was 7 years, renewable to 14. If we had stuck with that, this story wouldn't exist at all.
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This doesn't seem to be about copyright, but about trademark. They're objecting to usage of his name. They cannot object to copying style, because styles are outside copyright protections (at least in more sane jurisdictions).
Attempt to link this to copyright is fiction pulled out of the ass of the The Verge's clickbait professional.
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You didn't read the whole article, did you?
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It'd also allow societies to move on a lot faster instead of being locked into franchises like the Disney empire for all eternity. Imagine if Michael the rodent-like creature had gone public domain in 196
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Yep. "The Ansel Adams estate" pretty much says everything that's wrong with copyright. Perpetual copyright hurts creativity because it enables thousands of lawyer-parasites to feed off of societies' creativity & need for self-expression. Once the authors/creators are dead, it should be public domain.
This has nothing to do with copyright. It's about trademark rights to his name.
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AI is a virus (Score:3)
Re: AI is a virus (Score:2)
You've entirely missed the point, which is selling art "In the style of xack from Slashdot" is wrong regardless of it being in the style of xack from Slashdot or AI generated.
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You've entirely missed the point, which is selling art "In the style of xack from Slashdot" is wrong regardless of it being in the style of xack from Slashdot or AI generated.
Why is it wrong? What law(s) do you believe are being violated?
Illegal perhaps, but not wrong (Score:2)
selling art "In the style of xack from Slashdot" is wrong regardless of it being in the style of xack from Slashdot
That might make it illegal but it does not make it wrong. That's the serious problem with today's IP laws - they are utterly out of tune with what people think of as morally fine because where the pre-internet IP laws align with the interests of money they have been frozen in place but where they go against those same interests they have been modernized.
The result are laws that are completely out of balance and that favour companies over the public interest. They also often go directly against the publi
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[BzZzzZzZoOOT!!!!]
Current Slashdot User: "Oh my god, a time-traveling Slashdot user from the year 2004!!!"
Past Slashdot User: "Wow, my time machine worked, amazing! Hey, I want to catch up on technology - how are things like over on Slashdot? Are we still fighting the good fight against overreaching copyright law?"
Current Slashdot User: "Oh no, no no no, now we're advocating for governments to make it illegal to even have a style that resembles the style of anyone else."
Past Slashdot User: "Wait, what?"
Cur
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If an image exists on the internet, it has been trained into an AI model somewhere. Yes even Goatse.
I was sooo worried when Copilot started rendering an image, and so releved that it took the result to mean a misspelling of cutesy. Ended up with a picture of a baby panda under a rainbow and never have I been so relieved that AI misread the brief.
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Training does not involve a blind dump. There's various metrics used like aesthetic scoring to consider inclusion (did you really think that like 90% of training datasets was website filler images like "blank.png" and whatnot?), and as a general rule, major trainers are more than happy to honour opt-out requests.
Most trainers actively filter out porn.
Who TF is Ansel Adams? (Score:1)
Was he related to any of the founding fathers?
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I like that colleges and universities are turning out such well-rounded and well-spoken individuals.
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He starred in the 1987 film Ishtar.
Adobe's response (Score:2)
Nuh-uh, the image we call "Moonrise, Duerte, New Mexico" is totally not a rip-off of Ansel Adams' work! It's completely 100% original!
Also, all our generated pictures from Yosemite are original too!
Style (Score:3)
You can't copyright a style. Therefore no infringement.
Re: Style (Score:3)
From TFS: "But we strenuously object to the unauthorized use of his name to sell products of any kind"
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The question is whether Adobe copied Ansel Adams photographs onto the hard drive, into RAM, and ultimately into the nodes of the network.
The issue at hand is merely the mention of the name of a style.
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Yes, but that in itself is not illegal, because you need to do the same whenever you visit the Ansel Adams website. It is only when you copy it back to someone verbatim without qualifying for fair use that it becomes 'illegal'.
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It doesn't need to be verbatim, it just needs to be a derivative work.
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Derivative has a specific meaning. This is not derivative. A collage containing the original picture MAY be derivative.
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This is not derivative.
Oh yeah? Why do you think that?
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Because I know how these so-called AI work, you can make them yourself and inspect their insides to see what happens. This is a composition of noise that ends up looking somewhat in the style of.
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How about these principles:
- You can only copyright things that a human created (jurisdiction dependent for now, but that seems to be the overall direction the courts are going)
- The computer created white noise which is not copyrightable and then through thousands of iterations distilled something that resembles a style.
- Copyright does not extend to something like styles or genre (per the attorneys at Creative Commons)
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- Copyright does not extend to something like styles or genre (per the attorneys at Creative Commons)
True, but irrelevant, since the computer (by your own argument) did not create something new and copyrightable.
Btw, we've seen that these large AI models do actually retain original pieces of the works they consume, although it's easier to
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The argument here is that the style is copyrighted by Ansel Adams, styles cannot be copyrighted.
The AI creates these images by starting with a noise generator, it is well documented how the process works. It's just filtering out a signal from the noise.
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ChatGPT straight up refuses to generate anything at all in the style of anything else saying it's a copyright violation - how they could know what it is is because they already violated that copyright to make ChatGPT.
But they have billions from mickeysoft and probably soon apple too, so they're safe forever since the justice system is based on money.
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You can in some jurisdictions. There was a case in the UK a few years back where a photographer won a copyright infringement case against a company that got one of their own people to take a very similar photograph, with the same composition and overall style.
Beyond art, Apple won against Samsung for "look and feel", and in that case there was a lot of prior art (if you will excuse the pun), including from Samsung themselves.
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The end of photography and digital art (Score:3)
AI generated images are getting good enough such that it represents an end to photography and digital art as an art form or business. The only reason to take a picture anymore is for personal documentation (family, etc). Even worse, anyone which actually does any novel photograph or digital art will immediately get copied a million times over by AI generated like images and everyone gets bored of looking at it immediately.
I especially hate when I go to some social media site and get overwhelmed by endless AI generated copies of Monet and the poster slaps a "Monet - [some random date during his painting era]" on the label. I don't even understand why waste the electrons and everyone's time having to see these.
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I especially hate when I go to some social media site and get overwhelmed by endless AI generated copies of Monet and the poster slaps a "Monet - [some random date during his painting era]" on the label.
Wow, how often does that actually happen to you?
What if a person does it (Score:2)
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We now have post-scarcity Ansel Adams: anyone can produce a picture in his style, in seconds, for pennies.
And you can go where he never traveled: African lion pride on savannah in the style of Ansel Adams
Fight post-scarcity every step of the way and guess what?
YOU WON'T GET POST-SCARCITY
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Nope, no court has made any such rulings.
Is that what you read on the Internet?
How about this, try filing a lawsuit against a computer in court and see what happens. How do you plan on serving the computer? Is the computer going to respond and hire a lawyer, or do you think it will represent itself?
Read the internet, but don't turn your brain off.
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How about this, try filing a lawsuit against a computer in court and see what happens. How do you plan on serving the computer? Is the computer going to respond and hire a lawyer, or do you think it will represent itself?
Styles are not subject to copyright, it doesn't matter whether a person or a computer produced a work. It only matters if the work is deemed to be a derivative of a copyrighted work (by a court of law) which is not even something being argued in this case.
Computers don't have agency. Whether a derivative work is produced by a computer or a person only speaks to the issue of who is liable not the legality of underlying act such as an unauthorized preparation of a derivative work.
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"And you can go where he never traveled: African lion pride on savannah"
Nah I'm going with an amazing mars vista, with the prerequisite grey alien in the background.
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I. have a coffee mug with an image in the style of Salvador Dali. The picture is convincing and you have to take a second look to realize it is not one of Dali's works. A person, not AI, made the image. Is this a violation of copyright?
No, because the image wasn't copied, but this isn't about copyright either. This is about trademark rights. If someone sold the mug saying "here's a mug with a picture by Salvador Dali", that would arguably infringe his estate's trademark rights on his name (as well as being fraudulent).
This isn't trademark infringement though, because they're not saying "here's an Ansel Adams picture," but rather "here's an Ansel Adams-style picture". That falls under nominative fair use, and the fact that it was made by
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Obviously not, as nothing got copied.
Horseshit (Score:2)
How can Ansel Adams' estate own the rights to any black and white nature photography. Buzz off.
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I'll get a bunch of free accounts under the name jsepeta and put out a bunch of evil crap and people might think it's from you because anybody should be able to anybody's name any old time they feel like it.
Thank you for approving of my plan ahead of time.
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Kopyright Kraziness (Score:2)
1) So if I use the same kind of film Ansel Adams used and manually recreated his "style" with real film, can I be sued? Nope.
2) How about if I take my own images and use Photoshop to manually make them have the same "look and feel" as his, can I be sued? Nope.
3) Okay, so what if I take my own images and run some canned Photoshop scripts to transform the images to have the same "look and feel" as his, can I be sued? Again, nope.
So what's the substantive difference between #3 and using AI to do the tedious wo
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1) So if I use the same kind of film Ansel Adams used and manually recreated his "style" with real film, can I be sued? Nope.
2) How about if I take my own images and use Photoshop to manually make them have the same "look and feel" as his, can I be sued? Nope.
3) Okay, so what if I take my own images and run some canned Photoshop scripts to transform the images to have the same "look and feel" as his, can I be sued? Again, nope.
So what's the substantive difference between #3 and using AI to do the tedious work to achieve the same "look and feel"? Virtually none in my humble opinion.
Sorry, but you can't copyright a photographic style any more than you can copyright a hair style or a music style or a cooking style.
It's the same as "cultural appropriation". It's a load of shit; there is no such thing. No one "owns" or has the rights to the idea of cornrows or Cajun cooking or Polynesian tattoos.
But you can get sued when you attach the name "Ansel Adams" to your work.
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If someone was fraudulently sold a counterfeit work, that's something else again.
Here's a rant about copyright in the style of Ogden Nash (d. 1971). Sue me.
In the realm of ink and page,
Copyright's a tyrant sage.
"Mine!" it shouts with greedy glee,
Chaining thoughts that should be free.
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I could explain it to you.
But it is probably simpler if you just would read the summary?
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After watching your blather for a quite a while, it's painfully obvious that you couldn't explain anything to anyone.
Rembrandt (Score:2)
So, if I take some portrait photography, use Rembrandt lighting [wikipedia.org] and sell them on a stock website with a description mentioning the lighting system I do something wrong? No, I don't, so mentioning the Ansel Adams style is not wrong either.
Do the same as all the other cheap knock-offs (Score:2)
One good thing that's gonna take place soon (Score:2)
But the nuance will be that most of this content will not be sold by gatekeepers like Adobe or other stock photo libraries, it'll probably all be free. And because it will b