#intellectual property (IP)

[tiredlawyer]

A DMCA take down is illegal when abused like this.

If this stands and isn’t taken to court are we allowing this company to:

* take entire control of Luigi’s likeness

* profit of off Luigi’s likeness

* control the use of his face and likeness

* are they claiming IP on the CCTV footage and images released by the NYPD? Gov owned cameras but they are claiming the right to profit off it?

* the question of ownership after this person redrew the image in her own style, it is a definitive enough step to usually invoke its own protections to the artist.

* and so much many more projections this idea could spiral off into - it’s wild

Them stepping in is insane on all counts but holy shit this is insane if not dealt with.

[thoughtportal]

patenting does not equal invention. patenting is the colonization of intellectual property. invention requires the collective efforts of a diverse group of people over time.

[ot3]

Hey! The link to your FAQ wasn't working for me so I don't know if this question has been asked before. I really appreciate your perspectives on AI art. Do you happen to have any resources that you read/listened to on intellectual property rights and the issues with it? I just don't really know where to start with it.

[heres where i cut out a big paragraph of me, once again, bitching about how blog pages don't work on the tumblr app and i think that's fucking stupid]

anyway i dont have any generalized sources on the subject but the tl;dr of it is: intellectual property rights exclusively benefit people who have the resources to pursue sustained litigation. 99% of the time, what IP law is being used for is to reinforce corporate ownership of work that was done by their employees.

the whole disco elysium debacle is a great case study.

The shareholders of ZA/UM accused the trio of, among other things, intending to steal intellectual property (IP) from the company — a curious accusation, considering that the world of the game is based off of a novel written by Kurvitz himself. The case of Disco Elysium illustrates the shortcomings of IP rights as protection for artists. Consequently, it contains a lot of lessons for the labor movement when it comes to the arts, and serves as a reminder that creative workers are, at the end of the day, workers. But this is not just an academic exercise. It’s a human story about the intimate consequences of capitalist exploitation. “I got my soul ripped out of me,” Kurvitz told me over Zoom in April of 2023. “I got my skull cracked open and my brain lifted out of it by a fifty-five-year-old financial criminal.”

another example: alex norris of webcomic name, which you will probably recognize when you see it, has been raising hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past several years to try and keep up with the protracted legal battle over maintaining ownership of his own work.

I have been fighting this case since 2019. It arose out of an agreement to make a boardgame based on my webcomic in 2017 but the publishing company has used this as an opportunity to take all of my intellectual property, and has even claimed ownership of Webcomic Name as a whole. I can't go into more detail here, but the details of the case are publicly available to read online.

Then, in a 2024 update:

I have essentially won the main case based on the decisions made last summer. The Judge has clearly stated that I own my comics, and that the other party has infringed on my copyright. It is not over yet, as there are still a few things that need to happen. Hopefully things will all be wrapped up this year. After 6 years of legal battling, I can’t wait to be free of all of this. Hopefully, this second case will backfire, and they will be sanctioned for filing it. But to get to that point requires a frustratingly large amount of work, time and money.

An interesting thing about both of these two specific instances is that they involve creators who had entire bodies of work produced around the specific IPs that were stolen from them before they even began partnering with corporate entities to produce works. which is insane! you can spend years writing novels, drawing comics, and if a company comes in with enough lawyers they can own those ideas.

this is pretty distinctly different to me than instances of work you do while being employed by a corporate entity being owned by that corporate entity, because at least you know what you're getting into there to some degree, but i still think that's bad too. consider stuff like the owl house and gravity falls, two disney shows made by people who very very clearly did not like working for disney. disney owns their ideas, their characters, their worlds, because that's the price you pay for having an animated show produced.

essentially it's very very clear upon even the slightest examination that intellectual property in no way exists to codify who the creator responsible for specific creative concepts or works is. it exists to turn nebulous things like 'ideas' into market commodities, and to funnel the profits made by the labor of individual artists and writers into corporate bank accounts.

the only person who has ever really benefited from IP law as an individual trying to lay claim to their own work is ken penders, who notoriously won his suit to have ownership of characters and storylines he created. heartbreaking: Worst Person You Know Gets An Unequivocally Deserved Legal W.

The comics continued under Flynn’s direction as if nothing happened, but things started looking grim in late 2012, when Archie suddenly fired its entire legal team. The company had been unable to produce Penders’ work-for-hire contract, which would have given control of his creations to Sega. Penders claimed the contract had never existed. A heavily circulated Tumblr post outlining the case (which has been corroborated as a reliable source by Penders) explains that while Archie did provide a photocopy of a contract allegedly signed by Penders in 1996, Penders claimed that the document was a forgery. That it was neither an original copy nor a contract from the beginning of the writer’s tenure at Archie meant that its validity was questionable. Making things worse, Archie couldn’t produce an original copy of any previous contributor’s contract, meaning that any writer or artist who had worked on the Archie Sonic line could potentially follow in Penders’s footsteps and reclaim their work. “So are you saying prior counsel blew it?” the presiding judge asked Archie counsel Joshua Paul in a May 2013 court session. His reply was unequivocal: “Absolutely, your Honor.”

So yeah. Owning the work you do as an artist is only something that happens when the people trying to profit off of it show unprecedented and staggering level of incompetence in their legal teams.

Then, alongside not owning the concepts and ideas you produce while working with corporate entities, there's the issue of NDA regarding specific pieces you've produced. This causes a LOT of trouble for freelance illustrators/character designers/concept artists, etc. Looking for work is very hard when the past three years of pieces you've drawn can't be added to your portfolio. Some people have password protected pages on their portfolios that they use for NDA work, but I believe the right to do this varies depending on your contract. I'm not 100% sure. In cases where the project you worked on eventually comes out, that's one thing, but there will be instances where the entire project gets canned after all the work is done, but is still under NDA so essentially all of your work has been taken from you, crumpled up into a ball by a studio executive, thrown in the trash can, and legally you are not allowed to go pick it out of the bin and try and flatten it out again.

This has all been pretty art-focused because that's the kind of circles I run in and where a lot of my interests lie but the truth is none of this is even remotely close to as evil IP law gets. I've saved the most egregious for last: The Lakota Language Consortium

The Lakota Language Consortium had promised to preserve the tribe’s native language and had spent years gathering recordings of elders, including Taken Alive’s grandmother, to create a new, standardized Lakota dictionary and textbooks.  But when Taken Alive, 35, asked for copies, he was shocked to learn that the consortium, run by a white man, had copyrighted the language materials, which were based on generations of Lakota tradition. The traditional knowledge gathered from the tribe was now being sold back to it in the form of textbooks.

When you're in defense of IP law, this is what you're siding with. This is the rational endpoint of IP and it is neither a fluke nor an example of the concept being twisted against its original design. Art, culture, language, it belongs to whoever is most capable of turning it into a product. The economic incentives of producing and distributing arts and culture demand this is how things be.

Meya says his work is a vital tool in preserving the Lakota language, which did not previously have a standardized written form. He estimated that there are fewer than 1,500 fluent Lakota speakers left and that over the last decade and a half, the organization has helped add 50 to 100 more. “Just because money is involved in it does not inherently make it an evil thing,” Meya said in a recent interview with NBC News. Most of the products his organizations make are free, he said, but the cost of printing textbooks has to come from somewhere. “That tends to be sometimes part of the rhetoric, ‘Oh, there’s money involved. It must be, you know, part of the overall colonization effort.’ Well, you know, that’s just not realistic.”

Artists looking to force their way into the class of people who gets protected by these laws are not looking out for their community. They are not protecting anything but their own perceived financial interests. Intellectual property will never, ever benefit the most marginalized members of creative communities and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is huffing some serious copium.

Frankly, I don't believe anyone can or should 'own' things like Ideas or Specific Aesthetic Flairs. But even if you do believe in that, IP law isn't the framework for handling it.

[merry-and-gayla]

he so baby girl

[deepdreamnights]

Terms and Conditions Do Not Overrule the USTPO

Originally from reddit. I am not a lawyer, but this hardly needs one.

I use Suno, but it being a useful tool doesn't mean they're off the hook for trying to be sneaky. Also, this isn't just about them. Pretty much every Generative AI tool has some similar such claim or clause in place.

Any so-called controlling rights on public domain works are entirely unenforceable.

This is a long post, so enjoy this public domain song which you can use for whatever purpose you like.

Terms and conditions do not override the determinations of the USTPO, which is that without significant human modification, generative AI generations do not qualify for copyright protections and thus are in the public domain.

So for Suno, you own your lyrics if you wrote them. You own any modifications you make to the song in post. You might own the tune if it was prompted directly using Suno's weird symbols/tabulature stuff, but at this point there's been no judgement on whether a significantly complex prompt makes a resulting generation have "significant human expression".

Not to say Suno can't pull DMCA BS or issue takedowns, but it wouldn't be hard to prove they lack the standing. You'd probably have to go to court to do it, so if you're not willing to roll the dice on having to do that sending an email is easier, and that's what the company is counting on.

The important part, is to remember that human authorship is required for copyright. If you want those rights, you gotta make sure you're putting in the authorship (lyrics, editing, remixing, etc.)

Or, you can be cool with the commons and be open about the copyleft nature of AI generations.

I tend to approach my own work in a "making parts" sense because I've been doing multimedia collage for far longer than there's been generative AI. The final work is the faux trailer, fake commercial, music video or the comic or the mini-episode or whatnot.

But everyone's process is going to be different.

Part of countering misinformation around generative AI is breaking the hype side of things as much as the doom.

The corporate dream of an endless IP machine is a paper tiger, because all they've made is an infinite public domain machine. A century of trying to control and hoard the "rights" to our culture have drained the commons dry and this new tech just pumps solely into it's parched reservoir.

On the other end, the idea that one is going to get rich just because they've got some generative tools is just mist and vapor awaiting a light breeze. It's a great force multiplier, but anyone can get access to the same tools. The things the robot can't bring to the table are the things that matter, and they're going to matter even more now.

I like to compare most AI to toys (an object's use defines its function) and a way of making parts of a whole, so Lego is a good metaphor here. The creations that get attention are the ones that aren't out-of-the-box and made from the instructions.

I don't say this to discourage anyone from trying to use the tech to fulfill their expressive vision, but to emphasize that it's not a push-button-get-end-result situation.

Everyone has access to the same bricks. Everyone can use your bricks if they find them in an out of the box state. This is a feature, not a bug.

[toastedpopsicle]

Imagine believing there's anything just about imprisoning someone over fucking video game clips. IP law is such flagrant violence and so fucking counterethical to the natural act of creation.

Remember that if you think ideas and images can be owned, you agree that violations of that ownership deserve the full violence of imperial carcecal systems.

[miochimochi]

Made 2 new lino cuts. The fabric here isn't the best for stamping it seems but it's enough to show off.

[theanarchistscookbook]

[brainwashed-parxie]

Anyways FAI2 is good especially when you understand that IP and IP2 have characters and lore!!

Also it just sounds cool

[ecrivainsolitaire]

Open Art Guild – Testing the boundaries of collective IP ownership

Experimental release: Dr. T’chem’s Office (authorised for personal and commercial use)

I’ll try to keep this brief (you can read the full thesis statement here) but as we all know, intellectual property law is broken. It’s being exploited from every side and art workers are more vulnerable than ever to automation, copyright theft and myriad other unforeseeable forms of theft from the proletariat. We as a collective need to come together and work towards the creation of a better future.

The Open Art Guild is my proposal for the first of many steps towards a far away but necessary goal: the eradication of intellectual property as it pertains to the arts. It’s based on the open source standard and the creative commons, and the goal is for us to start creating a future where we stop thinking of artworks as private property to hoard, and start sharing the responsibilities and the benefits of their creation with the collective. And as I am proposing the idea, I should give the first step.

Which is why I am announcing the release of my short story series, Dr. T’chem’s Office, into the Open Art Guild license. This is an episodic HFY comedy series about the office hours of a sleazy yet well intentioned xenoanthropologist in charge of human integration into the crew of a spaceship, who happens to find them fascinating. You can read the first few instalments here:

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |

The basics of the license go as follows: I’m giving any artist permission to use the assets of my artwork (in this case, settings, characters, plot lines and other unique concepts) both for personal use and for commercial use, provided they commit to crediting the original artist, giving away 30% of any profit back to the hands of the collective in the breakdown the guidelines specify, and giving the same license to any works they create derivative from this series. Any artist can join the Guild by remixing existing artworks in its database or voluntarily submitting their own works. For the time being this prototype model will have to rely on the honour system, but I have outlined the basic guidelines for a platform dedicated to facilitating the Guild’s business and income redistribution.

The purpose of this experiment is to test whether this system is financially viable, what modifications it needs, and how to enforce it. It’s also a way to study what the community thinks of this model. To summarise the implications, here are the pros and cons as I see them.

Pros:

- All fan art, spin-offs, third-party merchandise and other forms of adaptation become automatically authorised and monetisable, provided both the original artist and the remixer are active members of the Guild.

- All adaptations are automatically non-exclusive and must give away the same rights as the original, diminishing the incentive for massive corporations to try and scam an artist out of their intellectual property.

- It effectively unionises freelance artists of all fields to balance out negotiations with non Guild entities.

- It encourages artists to continue their output in order to reap the benefits of the Guild, by using the redistribution system as an incentive, instead of the current status quo where artists are actively fighting market forces all by themselves in order to make enough time and resources to work on their craft.

- It provides a safety net where everyone is invested in the continuous welfare of everyone else, giving a sense of class solidarity and facilitating donations and shared resources.

- It motivates artists to invest in each other, as the growth of one means the growth of the whole Guild.

- Eventually, if the project succeeds and the proposed platform comes to exist, it would effectively create a universal basic income for all Guild members, as well as a self sustained legal fund to protect their assets from IP theft by non Guild entities.

- It will give you complete control over whether your art can be used for AI dataset training, on an opt-in, post-by-post basis, so you don’t have to wonder who might be stealing it. If the platform is created, all works whose creators have not authorised to be used for this will have data scrambling features to make sure thieves can’t use them.

Cons:

- It will require all Guild members to permanently renounce to 30% of their profit, in order to build up the funds and distribution system.

- It will have to be built entirely on trust of the collective, at least until a platform can be established, which may take weeks or may take decades depending on lots of unpredictable factors.

- Leaving the Guild will require all artworks shared with the collective to become Creative Commons; once you renounce your right to monopoly of your IP, it’s permanent, no way to go back. This is necessary in order to prevent asset flippers and other forms of IP scabs to join the Guild, extract other people’s assets and then scram.

- Due to banking regulations entirely out of our hands, some artists will have participating in the redistribution. If the platform ever becomes a reality, one of its main goals will be to remedy this immediately.

This proposal requires a high cost, but it provides an invaluable reward. If the system works, it will empower all artists to profit from their work and protect it as a collective. If it doesn’t, all that will have happened is that you will have created a lot of Creative Commons art, which financially isn’t ideal, but artistically is extremely commendable. Even in the worst case scenario, corporations will not be able to hold your art hostage with exclusivity deals. To me, the benefits vastly outweigh the costs, but I do want to emphasise: there will be costs. This is an effort to subvert the entire way art has been monetised since the 1700s. It will require a lot of work, a lot of people, and a lot of time, to make it work. But I believe it can work. If you believe it too, you are welcome to join the Open Art Guild.

Please do read the guidelines for the Guild and the guidelines for the platform before you start creating, and give me whatever feedback you have. If it’s good, if it’s lacking, if I’m overstepping legal boundaries, if you can find loopholes, anything. I tried to make it airtight but I’m not a legal expert. This is not my project, it is a project for the proletariat. Everyone should have a say on what they’re signing on for. And regardless of what you think, share it with all artists you can. This will only work if as many people as possible participate.

Doctor T’chem’s Office’s license

This work has been released under the Open Art Guild license, and has been approved for reuse and adaptation under the following conditions:

For personal, educational and archival use, provided any derivative works also fall under a publicly open license, to all Guild members and non members.

For commercial use, provided redistribution guidelines of the Guild be followed, to all active Guild members.

For commercial use to non Guild members, provided any derivative works also fall under a publicly open license, with the explicit approval of the artist and proper redistribution of profit following the guidelines of the Guild.

For non commercial dataset training of open source generative art technologies, provided the explicit consent of the artist, proper credit and redistribution of profit in its entirety to the Guild.

Shall this work be appropriated by non Guild members without proper authorisation, credit and redistribution of profit, the non Guild entity waives their right to intellectual property over any derivative works, copyrights, trademarks or patents of any sort and cedes it to the Creative Commons, under the 4.0 license, irrevocably and unconditionally, in perpetuity, throughout time and space in the known multiverse. The Guild reserves the right to withhold trade relations with any known infractors for the duration its members deem appropriate, including the reversal of any currently standing contracts and agreements.

[realmenmoanloud]

yall clearly weren’t listening when he said “if i’m already dead i can’t be killed”

[intellectualpropertydaily]

soul-sucker

song: ST*RFUCKER | line: 15 | word: 80

[postcum]

Okay guys something about copyright y'all should know, using an existing IP for any work which does not bring monetary gain almost always gets upheld in court. I am not a lawyer. Think about it, there is fanfiction for almost every IP in existence, the laws don't change very much just because you drew the IP instead of writing the IP, cmon guys, anyways intellectual property is a mechanism of withholding technology from the underdeveloped regions of the world as well as a means of censorship, so its a moral imperative to violate these laws anyways. Don't treat any IP as if it were a sacred law bestowed on high which we can never violate

[cinema-hallucinations]

Prompt: Create a movie concept set in an post-apocalyptic world the fall of human civilization was (somehow!) caused by overzealous copyright enforcement.

Secondary prompt: Adjust to fit into this background: The copyright enforcement system was designed to be impossible to shutdown. When the first corporation fell in the economic collapse, enforcers could no longer confirm whether the work or patent it supposedly owned could be reused (either via legit license or because of being in the public domain) and they just started destroying or erasing everything, including, for example, the people whose likeness was present in their own licensed portraits. Things rapidly escalated into total civilization collapse. Now the survivors must find a way to register all culture as public domain or be ruthlessly erased.

IPocalypse Now: Remnants of Culture

Logline: In a post-apocalyptic world where copyright enforcement has run amok, a lone survivor must navigate a landscape of intellectual property disputes and copyright trolls while searching for a way to register all culture as public domain and prevent further destruction.

Logline: DMCA was just the beginning.

Setting: The world has been ravaged by a series of "copyright purges," where automated enforcement systems, designed to be indestructible, seized control and began ruthlessly destroying any content deemed to be infringing on intellectual property rights. Cities have been reduced to rubble, libraries and museums have been emptied, and the once vibrant human culture is on the brink of extinction.

Characters:

Elias (30s): A passionate bibliophile and historian, Elias is one of the few survivors of the copyright purges. He carries a hidden database of cultural knowledge, determined to preserve it for future generations.

The Enforcers (various ages and appearances): A faceless army of drones and robots, armed with laser cannons and copyright infringement scanners. They continue to patrol the wasteland, relentlessly seeking out and destroying any unauthorized content.

The Resistance (various ages and backgrounds): A group of survivors who have banded together to fight the copyright enforcers and preserve what remains of human culture.

Plot:

Elias discovers that the copyright enforcement system has become corrupted. With the collapse of major corporations, the system can no longer verify ownership of intellectual property. As a result, it has gone haywire, destroying everything from art and music to historical records and even the likenesses of individuals.

Elias joins the Resistance, a group of survivors fighting to protect the remnants of human culture. Together, they devise a plan to register all existing cultural works as public domain, making them immune to copyright enforcement.

The journey is fraught with danger. The enforcers are relentless, and the Resistance must constantly evade their patrols and find hidden safe havens. Along the way, Elias encounters other survivors, each with their own unique skills and knowledge.

Themes:

The dangers of unchecked technology: The film explores the consequences of allowing technology to run rampant, particularly when it comes to enforcing laws.

The importance of intellectual freedom: The characters fight for the right to access and share information, emphasizing the value of human creativity and expression.

The resilience of the human spirit: In the face of adversity, the survivors demonstrate the power of hope and determination to rebuild a shattered world.

Ending:

Through a series of daring missions and strategic planning, Elias and the Resistance manage to register a significant portion of human culture as public domain. The enforcers, unable to distinguish between protected and unprotected content, are forced to retreat. The film ends with Elias and his companions standing amidst a newly established cultural archive, a symbol of humanity's resilience and the enduring power of ideas.

[thanatika]

low-coherency rambling in the tags

[wowitsverycool]

I HATE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY I HATE CAPITALISM I HATE NFTS I HATE PATENTS I HATE AI DISCOURSE I LOVE PIRACY AND COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT AND ILLEGAL COPIES OF GAMES AND MOVIES AND ART IN GENERAL I LOVE IDEAS AS A PUBLIC RESOURCE