D&D General Plagiarised D&D art

[Clint_L]

So you're answer is, no, you are not able to cite any US case law where one was successfully sued for plagiarizing one's self that was not subsequently overturned irrespective of any extraneous, speculative, potential instances that you think might occur based solely on your personal opinion of US copyright law?

At this point I think you are just trying to be argumentative, and you don't even understand the terms you are using. No one gets sued for plagiarizing themselves. John Fogerty wasn't sued for plagiarizing himself, as I pointed out. He was sued for committing copyright infringement over work that he previously sold, as a member of CCR. This was represented in the media as a "plagiarism" case, which is perhaps why you are confused, but plagiarism and copyright infringement are not the same thing. Plagiarism is about ethics, not law. If law, then we are talking about intellectual properties law, copyright law, contract law, etc.

You don't get sued for plagiarism. You get sued for copyright infringement. So no, I can't cite any US case law of something that is not a real thing.

You understand that copyright can be sold, yes? And that once creators do so, they lose control over that work, to the extent agreed upon in the contract? Agreed? This is what happened with the work John Fogerty did with Creedence Clearwater Revival. It is also common practice for creatives in many industries to surrender copyright of the work they do for their employer as a work for hire (e.g. animators, etc.). No, a person who animated Elsa can't go and start marketing their own Elsa t-shirts using their art from Frozen. Not without risking a lawsuit, anyway.

Do you agree that you can commit copyright infringement over work that you created but do not hold the copyright for? Yes or no? If yes, then stop arguing, we are in agreement. If no, then you are flat wrong and it isn't some subtle point of law that needs debating. I'm done.

Edit: fun fact: yesterday, the Mickey Mouse cartoon "Steamboat Willie" entered public domain. But do you know why Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created Mickey Mouse? Because they didn't own the rights to their first creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. And Disney basically did the same thing to Iwerks to gain sole control over Mickey.

 

[Lanefan]

Artists having sold the rights to their work but then using it again in other work for profit - thus committing copyright infringement - is obviously not controversial: you 100% can commit copyright infringement against work you created, once you have sold the rights to it. I am sure one of the lawyers here can weigh in, but if, for example, I record a song, sell you the rights to that song, then record another song where I substantially sample the first without your permission and without significantly altering it, then I absolutely will have committed copyright infringement against you, the copyright holder, regardless of the fact that I created both works. That's just not in question, is it? That's the whole point of buying a copyright: to gain control over the commercial use of someone else's creation.

Taylor Swift sold the rights to six albums of her work (or was talked out of those rights, whichever), then went out and recorded four* of those same six albums again specifically in order to recover those rights, with the other two* yet to come.

There's nothing derivative here - she's recording new versions of the exact same songs, putting them on the same albums, and re-releasing them.

So far so good, and good for her!

* - could be five-and-one now, I haven't been keeping close count.

Note that plagiarism is not normally illegal in the US or Canada, copyright infringement is. Plagiarism is the term normally used in academia, and you absolutely can plagiarize yourself.

So if I write a poem (or a D&D module!), and then write another one that's very similar to the first and may or may not even be based on it, I've plagiarized myself. My point is this is (or certainly should be) both legal and acceptable....even if self-defeating in the long run as people get tired of reading the same old stuff.

 

[Lanefan]

You understand that copyright can be sold, yes? And that once creators do so, they lose control over that work, to the extent agreed upon in the contract? Agreed?

Not agreed. Are they selling the copyright, or are they just selling the ability for specific other entities to use that work as if they too had the copyright?

Put another way: even if you sell access, can you ever fully give up your rights to use your own work? Given that in the US it's impossible to sign away your rights in order to release something directly into the public domain - or so I've been told by an IP lawyer - doesn't it follow that it's also impossible to fully sign away your rights to another person or corporation?

Do you agree that you can commit copyright infringement over work that you created but do not hold the copyright for? Yes or no?

No, in that I'm not sure it's possible to completely transfer copyright over what you created even if doing so is your intent.

 

[General_Tangent]

Taylor Swift sold the rights to six albums of her work (or was talked out of those rights, whichever), then went out and recorded four* of those same six albums again specifically in order to recover those rights, with the other two* yet to come.

The situation is explained here :

Look What You Made Taylor Do: Copyright Law Explains Why Taylor Swift Is Re-Recording Her Music - Caesar Rivise, PC.

In a move as legally ingenious as it is sentimental, musical artist Taylor Swift has decided that she would like to own her music.

www.caesar.law

 

[ValamirCleaver]

No one gets sued for plagiarizing themselves.

Then why did you say this earlier in this very thread?

Also, you actually can plagiarize yourself, if you've sold the rights to the work in question.

He was sued for committing copyright infringement over work that he previously sold, as a member of CCR.

Are you able to cite any US case law where one was successfully sued for committing copyright infringement because one publicly released a later work that was supposedly too similar to an earlier work that one previously sold to another entity that was not subsequently overturned on appeal irrespective of any extraneous, speculative, potential instances that you think might occur based solely on your personal opinion of US copyright law?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think that is very debatable, but if it is in fact true then human artists have nothing to fear from AI art and should not put up barriers to companies or individuals using it.

AI can creat entirely new languagees and words all on its own and has already done that in labs with computers advancing a language independently through machine learning algorithms to the point it is no longer even understandable by a human. I see no reason why art is any different and I think most art is evolutionary and to a large degree based on learned techniques.

It is not debatable. It is literally the nature of the computer programming required to achieve the ends they seek. You cannot improve a neural network's output unless it has fresh data to observe. That's how neural networks work. It's (effectively) a gigantic matrix of equations, and the equations can only be tweaked by feeding new, fresh, not-previously-observed data into them. It's a well-known problem in "AI" research right now--particularly because the demand for high-quality real-world data is expected to completely outstrip our supply of it within the next couple of years, and to even outstrip the supply of low-quality data within the next few decades.

An "AI"--a neural network--does not think. It does not decide. It literally can't. It is purely a statistical model--if you will, an extremely, mind-bogglingly advanced set of dice. It takes an input, jiggles it a little (likely through Brownian noise), and then passes that through its numerical matrix, weighting the different inputs in a bazillion different ways to then spit out an output (an image, a text, a piece of music, an analysis, whatever the network was trained to do.) At no point does it ever contain any amount of meaning or symbolism. It simply recognizes that character string "98290dFLsd890DF@#$" relates to character string "^&sdf23r:FPIOF)2q3PNVZ," which then relates to some other set of numbers, which then relates to some other set of numbers, (repeat this process dozens to hundreds of times), which then relates to some final set of numbers that are formatted to be read as the desired file output (image, text, sound, etc.)

The only way to improve a neural network that is based on something artistic--that is, art, music, literature, etc.--is to actually feed it examples that people liked and wanted to see. You can't create synthetic data of that kind. It's like trying to have a 5th grader teach herself algebra solely by having her write new math equations of the kind that she already knows--she'll never generate a variable because she's never been taught to. To say nothing of something like calculus!

Further, all that stuff you said about AIs "inventing a language"? Hogwash, mostly caused by media outlets getting a scoop without understanding. Here is an actually sober explanation of what happened with the AI "inventing its own language." TL;DR: The output was mostly gibberish and resulted from the AIs involved having a faulty reward mechanism, which judged only the negotiation result, not the way the negotiation was done--so if saying "I want" made a negotiation succeed more, then saying "I want" twice would totally make it succeed twice as much, right??? That's exactly the "thinking" that went into these bots' behavior.

You can also read, here on Snopes, an actual statement from one of the researchers who worked on this project:

There was no panic, and the project hasn’t been shut down. Our goal was to build bots that could communicate with people. In some experiments, we found that they weren’t using English words as people do — so we stopped those experiments, and used some additional techniques to get the bots to work as we wanted. Analyzing the reward function and changing the parameters of an experiment is NOT the same as “unplugging” or “shutting down AI.” If that were the case, every AI researcher has been “shutting down AI” every time they stop a job on a machine.

But, as usual, science literacy in journalism is rare to nonexistent, and thus we got ridiculous, alarmist "AI INVENTING NEW LANGUAGES!!!" It isn't. At the absolute most sophisticated, it is developing encodings which map similar structures to similar places in a massive poly-dimensional space.

 

[Andvari]

I'm sure eventually AI will be able to get inspiration through other forms of data, such as by looking at nature, reading books or watching movies, opening it to a similar breadth of input humans use to create art.

Perhaps at some point we as a society may need to draw a line for when a machine is allowed to take a man's job. We've allowed it in many places so far, such as having robots to build our cars. Self-driving cars will begin to replace drivers. That's a big industry. Do we stop? And if so, when? Which professions should be saved?

Ideally, technology is used to improve society, not to take from it. But even if you can objectively prove that's the case for a given technology, companies are going to use them if it gives them an advantage. And even if some countries use the state to ban the technology, that doesn't stop other countries from using it.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I'm sure eventually AI will be able to get inspiration through other forms of data, such as by looking at nature, reading books or watching movies, opening it to a similar breadth of input humans use to create art.

I mean eventually, someone will invent Artificial Intelligence as in an artificial intelligence that can think and learn.

Eventually.

It'll probably take longer now that people are trying to sell generative AI as Artificial Intelligence that can think and learn.

 

[Blue]

Ninja'd!

 

[Blue]

"I don't see the point of employing someone who spent 10+ years developing their skills with a particular task that computers can fake by copying the work produced by other humans with 10+ years of skill. They should just switch to a job with zero intersection with their current skill set, one they may not even be suited for at all. Sure, they'll just be unemployed and unemployable for a decade or more, who cares? Technology marches on, get with the program."

If the alternative is "for the rest of eternity I do not want any progress that could displace people from their jobs", then heck yeah I will sign onto this.

I work in technology. There's been a saying for decades "half of what I know will be obsolete in five years". I've been living this, needing to constantly learn new skills in order to remain valuable. I have a lot more than "10+" years, and the amount that has changed is staggering -- I could not do my job with what I knew when I started. Most of it is not true, and much of it would be actively misleading or harmful.