D&D General Plagiarised D&D art

[Deset Gled]

I violate myself frequently…. Wait…. What were we talking about?

At one point we were talking about Dorling Kindersley, but the threat got hijacked before it even got to the second page.

 

[Oofta]

The only constant is change. Sometimes change is widely beneficial, sometimes not. We can either rail against the inevitable or accept it, adjust, and make the most out of the new opportunities that arise.

A hundred years ago, roughly 1/3 of the population of the US were farmers. Now? It's less than 2%. Were some people displaced? Did some areas like the town I grew up in suffer? Yes. Good? Bad? Who am I to say. All I know is that unlike my grandfather, I don't work on the farm I grew up on and I had opportunities opened up to me that he could not have dreamed of.

 

[Clint_L]

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.

No, she didn’t own the recording masters for those albums. She still owned the compositions, but not the recordings that were used to make those albums. By re-recording them, she did not regain the rights to the original masters and can’t stop them from being sold by their current owner. She has effectively supplanted them with new versions that she owns and markets as superior versions.

Edit: I love that she did this, but note that only Taylor Swift and maybe a few other artists have the fan muscle and financial resources to pull something like this off at an appreciable scale. But yeah, she didn't violate earlier copyright agreements regarding her masters (not the rights to the compositions themselves), she just did an incredible end run around a crappy contract.

So you can still go on, say, iTunes and buy "Shake It Off" (the original version which is not owned by Swift but for which she presumably receives a royalty), OR you can buy "Shake It Off (Taylor's Version)", which she/her business owns, and is the one that she wants you to buy. The point is that she still can't stop the original from being sold; she has not recovered those rights.

Edit 2: But her move did effectively recover her right to perform her music publicly, since now she can say that she is performing the versions that she owns, and not ones that Big Machine Records owns. Kudos!

Edit 3: now I am wondering if she has to do some sort of disclaimer before her live shows, to the effect that everything she performs from those first albums is based on the "Taylor's Versions" re-recordings.

(Taylor’s Version): Explaining Taylor Swift’s Re-Recordings Under the Copyright Law | Fitzpatrick Lentz & Bubba, P.C.

It is crucial always to consult an attorney before you sign any contract, so that if you have “Bad Blood” with your prior record label...

www.flblaw.com

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.

Plagiarizing yourself and committing copyright infringement against work that you sold are different things. It definitely would not, and should not, be legally acceptable for you to turn around and sell the exact same poem, or substantial pieces of it, to another publisher if you signed an exclusive deal with the first or sold it to them outright.

If you wrote another poem that was similar because that’s the way you write poems, you’re probably fine, as the Fogerty case illustrates.

For example, as a grad student, I was hired to design an educational board game. I signed a contract essentially ceding all my rights to it to the publisher. I cannot now republish it or substantial parts of it for profit, or I would be infringing their copyright. But I can design and publish other games that reuse or expand my ideas, as long as I’m not crossing that line.


Edit: Plagiarizing yourself and committing copyright infringement can be connected, however, which is why students are warned that copyright infringement is one potential consequence of self-plagiarism (if you are doing it with published work). But mostly self-plagiarism is wrong because it is seen as dishonest, not legally actionable. Almost 100% of the time it consists of students reusing work that has already been used for another assessment, without acknowledging it as such (trying to hand in the same term paper twice, for example).

 

[Hussar]

Yeah and now its 24/7/365 panic, doom, and anxiety, oh, and monetized. What a vast improvement that has been on our society.

It wasn’t monetized before? lol. Check out how sponsorship affected how your news used to be presented.

See this whole “doom and gloom” thing is so much labour people losing perspective. The world really, really isn’t worse now than it was in the past.

 

[Umbran]

You appear unaware of a series of legal battles underway right now, which yes does involve ethical (and legal) issues and the failure of Disney to pay artists royalties for derivative uses. See for example. It's not all work-for-hire

I am well aware of these issues. This is a very basic failure to comply with contract terms, and has nothing to do with AI, specifically.

If the first breach of contract between, say, Mr. Foster and Disney had been in use of a generative AI, you might have a point. But, since his issues started over a decade ago, before anyone was using generative AI, that is a red herring. When Disney was screwing artists a decade before AI was really a thing, the AI isn't adding significantly to the risk.

I feel this is an excellent example of associating issues with the new buzzword, rather than the root cause - AI isn't the real problem. Large corporations not being held to their agreements is the real problem. Having an agreement to control the use of AI is worthless if the company cannot be held to that agreement.

 

[Scribe]

It wasn’t monetized before? lol. Check out how sponsorship affected how your news used to be presented.

Oh I'm sure it was, but when it was an hour a night, or you had to chase down a paper, its obviously wildly different from how news is presented, bombarded really, on people today.

See this whole “doom and gloom” thing is so much labour people losing perspective. The world really, really isn’t worse now than it was in the past.

As a whole? Probably correct. Some areas will improve, others have clearly regressed and will continue to.

 

[Mistwell]

I am well aware of these issues. This is a very basic failure to comply with contract terms, and has nothing to do with AI, specifically.

If the first breach of contract between, say, Mr. Foster and Disney had been in use of a generative AI, you might have a point. But, since his issues started over a decade ago, before anyone was using generative AI, that is a red herring. When Disney was screwing artists a decade before AI was really a thing, the AI isn't adding significantly to the risk.

I feel this is an excellent example of associating issues with the new buzzword, rather than the root cause - AI isn't the real problem. Large corporations not being held to their agreements is the real problem. Having an agreement to control the use of AI is worthless if the company cannot be held to that agreement.

You said the contracts for Disney artists make them work for hire and therefore there could be no issue with using that art to build AI art. I refuted that - a large portion of the Disney database of artwork they've acquired over the years is not work for hire but was instead either directly royalty based or partially royalty based depending on whether it was the initial purpose of an ancillary purpose.

That goes for the Marvel artwork they own, the Lucasfilm artwork they own, Fox, Muppets, Saban, and even some of the Pixar artwork they acquired, along with some other companies they bought. It's not just people who were Disney employees at the time.

The ongoing dispute is Disney claiming they don't have to pay royalties because they bought the properties rather than were the original contractors. Which they claim gives them royalty-free rights to do what they want with the artworks, and that would follow to their using it in their AI database as well as other purposes they put it to. It goes for ANY ancillary purpose, not just the narrow ones you oddly just tried to redefine it as based on the age of the issue as if the age of the artwork would impact whether it would be used in their artwork database they are feeding to AI.

Once you put art into an AI database, it's pretty difficult to pull it back out given it grows and grows and other AI use it too as it is popularized. Which is somewhat unique to this topic. If Disney tried to make a movie or show with art owned by someone else, they can be forced to stop it or immediately pay royalties on it or at least try and estimate the damages later.

That issue isn't really solved by dealing with "large corporate not being held to their contracts" with this AI issue because once it's in AI it's so hard to estimate it or control it thereafter. It shouldn't be done at all without a royalty measuring tool in place before you put it into the AI. Doing it the way they're doing it essentially guarantees the artists get screwed. Yes, that's an ethical issue. Yes, it's a real issue. No, you can't get around it being a real and ethical issue because "those contracts are older" given that's the very kind of artwork fed into the AI databases.

 

[General_Tangent]

No, she didn’t own the recording masters for those albums. By re-recording them, she did not regain the rights to the original masters and can’t stop them from being sold by their current owner. She has effectively supplanted them with new versions that she owns and markets as superior versions.

Also:

"Further, because Swift has written every single song released in her six albums and therefore owns the Musical Composition copyright, she retains the “sync rights” of her music. This is important: it means that she holds the right to determine whether her songs can be used in projects which require a synchronization license (such as in advertisements, movies, and games). She thus has a way of neatly barring anyone else from profiting off her original Masters in that way."

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

 

[briggart]

I wouldn't employ a horse and buggy or steam ship to take me from Miami to New York when I could fly or drive a car cheaper, quicker and safer.



If their skill has little intrinsic value it will be hard to earn a living doing it. This has been true for artists in general for centuries, long before AI came on the scene.

Life is full of choices and following ones dreams or talents when it can not support one's lifestyle is such a choice. There is demand for all sorts of employment across the US and talented artists can certainly find gainful employment that would earn them a living wage. Heck, in today's market they could help train the AI machines that will ultimately replace them.

If skills had intrinsic value, why do prices for services depend on demand and offer?

 

[Lanefan]

The limits are the bounds of the medium it is using. To use a common saying - if you type millions of letters in a random sequence over and over again eventually you will write the novel "War and Peice" if use AI with a machine learning feedback loop you will get there much, much faster.

And in either case, if that's the title, you're still left with but a parody of the original "War and Peace".