In the world of tattooing, it’s frowned upon for a tattoo artist to take another tattoo artist’s original work and replicate it without permission, yet it’s common practice to take well known IP (Pokémon, Studio Ghibli, etc) and tattoo that on a client. The ethical boundary seems to be between whether the source artwork was created by an individual vs. a corporation.
In the tattoo case, tattooing pikachu on a person does not harm Nintendo’s business, but copying another tattoo artist’s work or style directly takes their business. Tattoo art is an industry where your art style largely defines your career.
I can see the argument LLMs are transformative, but when you set up specific evaluation of copying a company/artist and then advertise that you clone that specific studio’s work, that’s harming them and in my opinion crossing a line.
This isn’t an individual vs corporation thing, (though people are very selfish).
There’s so much more here than just corporate vs individual. There’s the sheer scale of it, the enforcement double standards, questions of consent, and taking advantage of the commons (artists public work) etc. To characterize it as people not liking business is plain wrong.
Very well put. It boggles my mind that some people cannot separate individual from corporations. As if their mind are not able to comprehend how corporations can cause harm at scale.
I'd argue that if an art piece is famous enough, then it ought to become "public". In the sense that, yes, the artist made it and it became famous, but once it reaches a certain scale of fame, it means that the public itself made the work famous. So it's a kind of co-creation (eg for instance the fact that people were writing fan-fiction about Harry Potter or whatever, contributing to the fame of the book, etc). So in this case, after it has reached a sufficient level of fame, it should become public work
I am still torn on this issue. On the one hand, it feels like a copyright violation when other people's works are used to train an ML model. On the other hand, it is not a copyright infringement if I paint a picture in the Studio Ghibli style myself. The question is whether removing a ‘skill requirement’ for replication is sufficient grounds to determine a violation.
I believe the case is that you're welcome to paint a picture perfectly copying Studio Ghibli, but you cannot sell it. You're welcome to even take the style and add enough personal creativity that it becomes a different work and sell that, but only if a random on the street doesn't look at it and say "wow, what Studio Ghibli film is that from?".
That's the problem here, there's no creative input apart from the prompt, so obviously the source is blatant (and often in the prompt).
> I believe the case is that you're welcome to paint a picture perfectly copying Studio Ghibli, but you cannot sell it.
Technically, you can't, but there's no way to enforce copyright infringement on private work.
You can paint a Studio Ghibli-style painting -- the style isn't protected.
These rules assume that copying the style is labor intensive, and righteously rewards the worker.
When an LLM can reproduce thousands and thousands of Ghibli-style paintings effortlessly, not protecting the style seems less fair, because the work of establishing the Ghibli-style was harder than copying it large-scale.
I'm in the "don't fight a roaring ocean, go with the flow" boat:
If your entire livelihood depends on having the right to distribute something anyone can copy, get a stronger business.
A lot of people will need to stop identifying as 'someone who makes art with enough value to trade it for the decent wage'. Millions of egos destroyed, not a dollar of GDP lost.
So I guess you don't read books/comics, watch TV/Movies/plays, play video games or listen to music? People aren't born skilled artists, that takes time and effort. Being able to prompt GenAI well just makes you a skilled prompter, not a skilled artist. Over time, we will lose a lot of skilled artists and that is something worth thinking more deeply about, instead of giving a callous hot take. Artists are trained to view the world critically, and I want more critical thinkers - not less.
My wife and I went for wall decoration. There’s an art gallery and a poster shop right next to each other. The price difference is a factor 100 for an average art piece.
You can choose between a bunch of classics, or you can upload your own AI-generated picture and have that printed as a poster.
Art was always expensive, and posters as an alternative to paintings existed way before AI.
The main difference seems to be that we can’t clearly pay royalties to anyone for AI artwork, because it’s not obvious exactly where it came from.
There was a YouTube channel dedicated to Warhammer lore narrated by an AI David Attenborough. It got taken down, but its replacement came up, starting out with a generic old man’s voice and over time gradually more Attenborough-like. When should the Attenborough estate start to get royalties? At 60% Attenborough? Or at 80% Attenborough?
Not a dollar lost, and yet all of society is poorer. Less social commentary via art. Less beauty. Less novelty and less new forms invented. Less entertrainment (entertainment that has some human values imbued into it, but there will be more 'entertainment', just now devoid of intentionality/humanity/novelty, a firehose of images/noises/colors with nothing behind it, a firehouse of slop). Less personal discipline trying to master something. Less seeing through the eyes of another person, so less relation, less empathy, less humanity. Less, less, less. AI is an inertia machine.
No dollars burned, just huge huge amounts of cultural capital. Just a reduction to a more primitive, less cultured/developed version of what it means to be human. Less thinking out loud, sharing of thoughts, exposure to new thoughts. More retreating into (a now lesser developed, now culturally atrophied) self.
Two of the four core tests for fair use hinge on this.
1. Purpose and character of the use. With emphasis on whether the copy was made for commercial use.
4. Effect on the work's value, and the creator's ability to exploit their work.
---
Both can be dramatically impacted by the intent of the copy, usually with enforcement and punishment also being considerably stronger if the copy is being made for commercial gain and not private use.
This for the actual work, definitely not for transformative works like llm output. So a ghibli style image of me is fine legally, whether I sell it or not.
The language used to describe LLM behaviour such as "training" and "reasoning" has led people to treat them the same as humans, instead of a new and different entity that requires us to update our set of rules.
If I was the first person to invent a car, for example, and I named its method of locomotion "walking", would you treat it the same as a human and let it "walk" in all the same places humans walk? After all, it's simply using kinetic energy and friction to propel itself along the ground, as we do.
Because a car is so obviously different to a human, we intuitively understand it requires an alteration to our rules in order for us to coexist peacefully. Since LLMs are so abstract, we don't intuitively understand this distinction, and so continue to treat them as if they should be bound by the same rules and laws as us.
It's less about paint a picture yourself, arguably there is little to no value there. OpenAI et al, sell the product of creating pictures in the style of their material. I see this as a direct competition to Studio Ghibli's right to produce their own material with their own IP.
I agree with this. I don't know how to create artistic styles by hand or using any creative software for that matter. All the LLM tools out there gave me the "ability" and "talent" to create something "good enough" and, in some cases, pretty close to the original art.
I rarely use these tools (I'm not in marketing, game design, or any related field), but I can see the problem these tools are causing to artists, etc.
Any LLM company offering these services needs to pay the piper.
I am mostly ok with these copyright crackdowns in AI in the spirit of - if a human were to do it commercially, it would be illegal.
We can argue if that should be the case or not, which is a different issue.
However, it should not be legal to automate something at scale that is illegal when done by an individual human. Allowing it just tips the scale against labor even more.
Is it not a copyright infringement if you pain it yourself? Why is that the case? I thought it would be just that studios wouldn't care for the most part. Hasn't Disney gone after this type of personal projects in the past?
It is a tough issue, but legalese will probably start from where and on what and how did this thing train on in order to be able to produce such results. It's similar to (guitar) amp modeling. Eventually they will either have to remove it or license it. I don't see other way. What makes it challenging is that vast majority of things that it was trained on can make a similar claim and it opens the floodgate. Outcome is either youtube-like thing where things exist in certain capacity, but not full or alternative is Napster like destiny where it gets banned altogether. Stakes are now a bit too high for Napster scenario. OpenAI might have a youtube-like angle for licensing with its Sora thing which seems to be turning into its own social network of sorts.
You are not a for profit software product. You are a human. If you make a drawing, that drawing MIGHT be a for profit product.
If I make a for profit AI, that AI is a product. And if that product required others' copyrighted works to derive it's deliverable, it is by definition creating derivative works. Again, creating a small human, not creating a product. Creating a for profit AI, creating a product.
If my product couldn't produce the same output without having at some point consumed the other works, I've triggered copyright concerns.
If I make and train a small human, I am not creating a for profit product so it doesn't come in to play at all. The two are not similar in any way. The human is not the product. If THEY create a product later (a drawing in this case) then THAT is where copyright comes in.
It is absolutely infringement if you paint a picture in Ghibli style. You just have fair use to infringe in a personal, noncommercial, educational, etc. purpose.
Fair use is a defense to infringement, like self defense is a defense to homicide. If you infringe but are noncommercial, it is more likely to be ruled fair use. If Disney did a Ghibli style ripoff for their next movie, that is clearly not fair use.
OpenAI is clearly gaining significant material benefits from their models being able to infringe Ghibli style.
> It is absolutely infringement if you paint a picture in Ghibli style.
Of course not because by this twisted logic every piece of art is inspired by what comes before and you could claim Ghibli is just a derivative of what came before and nobody has any copyright then...
it's a form of slavery when someone is profiting off the looong and hard, concentrated work of others without reimbursing them adequately.
that's why piracy Robin Hood Style is fine, but corporate piracy is not. I downloaded a Ghibli movie because I could't afford the DVD. I didn't copy it on VHS then to sell it via e-commerce to 1000 people.
AI companies grabbed IP and pull hundreds of thousands of customers with it, then collect their interactions either way and profit exponentially while Ghibli, Square Enix et al. don't profit from users using more and more AI ...
and most people are not "training" ML models ... people are using copy machines that already learned to compensate for their lack of will to put effort into stuff.
a lot of us been there and enough decided to move beyond and get/become better at being human aka evolve vs get cozy in some sub-singularity. some didn't and won't, and they are easiest to profit from.
Human learning is transformative. It takes time. Time, not money, is the criteria for value to human life. Humans can re-draw in styles they see and the law sees it as transformative work. Humans draw conclusions from learning and apply it to other fields - that’s natural intelligence. If AI helps humans make more new, transformative work, not the same characters as the studios, not the same plots, then the studio should not try to rent-extract. Otherwise someone will try to do it to stick figures and any other style and you’d have to teach toddlers rules for any stile before you give them a crayon. The only real impact will be that hype and styles “in fashion” will just play out faster and in the mean time the Studios get their name sealed in human minds for anything done in their style - which is more immortality than abuse.
There’s certainly a difference with AI. Not only can it reproduce exactly the same characters - in fact I doubt you can train the style without this ability - it puts those characters in reach of crayon-age children at a professional capacity. This crosses the line between copying and enabling IP theft in my mind. While I don’t agree with our current IP laws, the ease and rapidity of this seems like a real problem. How long before some kid in a third world country can produce a feature length Ghibli-esque movie and distribute it online? And how much will this dilute their brand etc? Is it really so much to ask the AI companies to filter their training sets?
Exploring the scenarios and corner cases is how rules should be written, just like any code.
In this case producing anything commercial and anything with AI period should always be disclosed.
Since at this stage we can often tell when something is AI (though not everyone and not always), especially food images at a restaurant, for me that immediately downgrades the quality or value of a product That’s going to be the natural human response. And users of the tech will likely be lumped in with very poor attempts, downgrading the value of anyone who uses it. That is natural payback for trying to go commercial.
However in the hobbyist space - the space where humans learn what AI attempts will also do is expand the creative space massively - people will get to iterate much faster with their own styles and new styles will emerge. Just like the invention of writing and publishing - the original writers were people with tremendous time and resource privilege on their hands, but the art of writing would have never ever bloomed if it didn’t become available to anyone over time. Humans then draw higher order conclusions and insights from the abundance, even if it takes energy for filtering.
That said, abuse in the form of pretending something generated is real or taking credit for generated work as real should be illegal. If you teach the moral compass along with the book or you built the identification along with the work you will get a lot more authentic novelty even with AI tools.
Is it possible that the primary liability for OpenAI is trade dress? If you can produce things in (for example) the style of a Studio Ghibli film, such that an ordinary consumer can’t tell if the source is Studio Ghibli or AI, is that actionable? I feel like I see copyright concerns all the time with AI but rarely is trademark discussed.
(not a lawyer) This is the exact opposite of how it works, at least in the US.
Copyright: covers works on publication. Registering it allows for seeking of statutory damages.
Trademark: covers defining characteristics. This can be muddy since defining characteristics are not necessarily the same as style.
It can be especially confusing when certain things become characteristic of a genre. This is mostly what transformer and diffusion models cover: the strongest weights will be what's most common in the training data. You get a lot of em dashes and heroes in colorful outfits, but they don't constitute a violation on their own in any modern model unless the operator of the model goes out of their way to violate.
You wouldn't steal a handbag.
You wouldn't steal a television.
You wouldn't steal a DVD.
Downloading someone's content for AI training is stealing.
Stealing is a crime.
really, really happy that someone is calling out data-harvesting for what it really is.
Hah, hilarious this is being unironically used, this was a lame ad old people they put out against piracy, and widely mocked by Millenials in the early 2000s.
We've have always known we should harvest the internet for absolutely everything. If we don't, it's fine, we can squabble about our IP and China will just ingest the entire Internet, make a model out of it, then release the Ghiblifier and we'll all download it or run it on Openrouter. You can already download Hunyuan Image 3.0 and it's just as good as OpenAI's image create, if not better. What's Japan going to do about that?
Also, for the record, I would absolutely download a handbag, or a television, or a DVD, or a car, if I could. I'd be pumping out Louis Vuittons and iPhones for my kids all day long, and driving a Lambo because why not?
Probably not as much a generational thing ("old people", versus "Millennials" or really, Gen X at that time), as just a tone-deaf shaming attempt by our corporate overlords.
Reefer Madness. Satan in vinyl. DnD panic. Downloading as piracy.
I was once accused of being a pirate back then because I was talking about downloading in a chatroom.
What was I downloading? Linux. Probably Debian. It's the same kind of nonsense as people going around accusing everyone whose process they don't understand of using AI. I'm surprised no one has come after me for making flame fractals.
Why not go straight for the goal and just download the Lambo?
Copyright/Patent/Intellectual Property for more than 25 years is illogical in my personal weird opinion. I think it grinds innovation to a halt and only serves to generate money. In other news i would glady recieve a lot of money forever just because i invented some thing ages ago. I'm only a humble capitalist human. :)
OpenAI will just fork out a bunch of money and settle everything, because that is how money works.
The difference is: You're making copies of something:
Scenario 1: I take your baguette. Your hand is empty. You starve.
Scenario 2: I take your baguette recipe. You still have a baguette recipe. You continue to live.
Scenario 3: I take your baguette recipe and publish it. Your customers leave you. You starve.
Copying someone's IP can also impact you economically if your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something.
Should we enforce the protection of people's right to have monopoly of distribution of intellectual property?
Or should we accept that in reality, copies are free and distribution monopolies only exist in inefficient markets?
It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property.
But information wants to be free.
It's a dilemma. Do we side what feels right, or what's real?
I don’t get it. Did you men that “It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property” follow from “your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something”?
It is accepted, within limits, for humans do transformative work, but it's not been yet established which the limits for AIs are, primarily (IMO): 1. whether the work is transformative or not 2. whether the scale of transformation/distribution changes the nature of the work.
Embedding other people's work in a vector space, then sampling from the distribution at a different point in the vector space, is not a central member of the "transformative" category. The justifications for allowing transformative uses do not apply to it.
Critiques like this dismissis AI as a bunch of multiplications, while in reality it is backed by extensive research, implementation, and data preparation. There's an enormous complexity behind, making it difficult to categorize as simply transformative or not.
The Pirate Bay is also backed by extensive research, implementation, and data preparation. I'm not dismissising [sic] anything as "a bunch of multiplications" – you'll note I talked about embedding in vector spaces, not matrix multiplication. (I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about: if you want to dismiss [sic] my criticism, please actually engage with it like the other commenters have.)
That does seem to be the plurality opinion yes. But you are responding to someone saying that what counts as transformative hasn't been decided by saying that you have decided. We don't know how human brains do it. What if we found that humans actually do it in the same way? Would that alter the dialog, or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we?
> or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we?
Because of the scaling abilities of a human brain, you cannot plug more brains into a building to pump out massive amounts of transformative work, it requires a lot for humans to be able to do it which creates a natural limit to the scale it's possible.
Scale and degree matter even if the process is 100% analogous to how humans do it, the natural limitation for computers to do it is only compute, which requires some physical server space, and electricity, both of which can be minimised with further technological advances. This completely changes the foundation of the concept for "transformative work" which before required a human being.
This is a good observation, and motivates adjusting the legal definition of "transformative" even if the previous definition did include what generative AI systems can now do.
> What if we found that humans actually do it in the same way?
We know that humans don't – or, at least, aren't limited to this approach. A quick perusal of an Organization for Transformative Works project (e.g. AO3, Fanlore) will reveal a lot of ideas which are novel. See the current featured article on Fanlore (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Stormtrooper_Rebellion), or the (after heavy filtering) the Crack Treated Seriously tag on AO3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works?work_search[sort_column]=k...). You can't get stuff like this from a large language model.
Any type of art is inspired by the art of others. Its the simplicity in which you now can generate "art" which is the issue. Stealing artists work while also making it harder than ever for them to make a living is a deeply ethical issue. AI "artists" and "art" disgust me. Its a skill you build over your whole life, taking the shortcut because you're unwilling to learn the craft is deeply insulting to real artists.
Good thing traditional art is still somewhat safe from this.
Thankfully, this is making it easier to leave highly addicting online platforms as I boycott AI content of any form.
> Its a skill you build over your whole life, taking the shortcut because
Doesn't this apply to the printing press?
For me the core issue is not that OpenAI can generate some copies if the art, the issue is that some artists can not earn an honest living and that people do not care about artists generally. I wonder how many of the people commenting here have bought themselves art from an artist.
I personally doubt that AI can do a movie similar to studio Ghibli (of which I seen a lot and I love and paid for) and I also wonder how much of the issue here is some corporate profit rather than some poor artists (do you know who owns studio Ghibli without looking?)
It's fine to boycott AI content, but you could also decide to boycott content produced by large corporations for profit.
This is an example of why analogies make for bad quality reasoning. The first 3 goods have marginal cost, so stealing them causes direct financial harm. Digital goods have zero marginal cost, so there is not any automatic harm. You may still wish for it to classified as stealing. The law may even agree with you that it is stealing. But it doesn't change the fact that this analogy is useless for the purposes of reasoning.
depends, they definitely didn't build "the streets" they plaster with ads but if it's their channel or their website, it's up us to pay for blockers, put effort into doing ourselves or using one of the tools build by generous contributors who crave user-defined spaces instead of 'enforced and conform' ("VC"-)demand-based spaces
"In 1710, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation entitled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. It became known as the Statute of Anne, and it was the world’s first copyright law. Copyright protects and regulates a piece of work - whether that's a book, a painting, a piece of music or a software programme. It emerged as a way of balancing the interests of authors, artists, publishers, and the public in the context of evolving technologies and the rise of mechanical reproduction. Writers and artists such as Alexander Pope, William Hogarth and Charles Dickens became involved in heated debates about ownership and originality that continue to this day - especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence. With:
Lionel Bently, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Cambridge
Will Slauter, Professor of History at Sorbonne University, Paris
Katie McGettigan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.
OpenAI has ridiculous guardrails for illustrations covering any public domain subject that has been covered by Disney or any other major public corporation.
So by that benchmark Japanese companies have a case.
Try generating a 19th century style illustration of Snow White. You can't at least not on OpenAI platform.
Try generating a picture "of flying boy fighting a pirate on a ship".
I think AI seriously breaks down the “transformative work” condition used to determine fair use. The work is clearly being transformed, but it also doesn’t seem fair.
These models critically depend on many hours of artistic effort during training/prompting, but don’t require any additional effort by the new distributors/consumers. On top of that, proper attribution is often impossible.
1) Download Ghibli film material from an arrrr site. Extract frames using ffmpeg. Pay someone $1 per week in Nigeria to add metadata for each (or some) frame(s).
It's possible that they purchased the movies (although definitely without the proper licensing; buying a DVD allows for personal use, not training a commercial model), or maybe they simply pirated them.
It's also possible that models' entire understanding of the aesthetic comes from screenshots of the movie. Even if OpenAI didn't feed in each frame of the movie, they definitely fed in lots of images from the web, some of which were almost certainly movie screenshots.
I don't see why it would not be illegal. I don't see the difference between downloading or copying a movie for watching on a TV or for training AI, from copyright point of view
Laws are not code, they are subject to interpretation by the judiciary. The spirit of the law is that transformative use is fair use, but at the time those laws were written no one had conceived of generative AI.
It seems very reasonable to me that we as a society might stop and reassess. It is not a foregone conclusion that all the treasure of humanity be handed over to @sama for a tuppence.
Not illegal where? If you're in Japan here's a fun thing to try:
1. Ask ChatGPT to generate some Ghibli-likes for you.
2. Find a local photo printing store prepared to print and blockmount them for you (this is actually the hardest part - most will politely tell you to piss off).
3. List them on Mercari or Rakuma.
4. Regularly relist them as they're periodically removed for violating local counterfeiting laws.
5. Eventually explain yourself to a judge and maybe go to prison for a year.
Technically you only need to do 1 and some of 2 to be committing a crime in Japan.
nice opinion. now base it on laws and regulations that apply to these companies and show whether it is actually legal or not... - this is not a realm of feelings.
But there's a related question of what the law ought to be, regardless of whether or not it's currently illegal, which is where feelings do come in. In the case of a new technology colliding with old laws, this is the most important discussion to have.
That's not relavent. You can't sue someone for benefitting from your work. You can sue someone for intellectual property theft, which is what OpenAI did.
It makes wonder what will happen when robots will really take care of everything unpleasant there might be to do in life. All these laws and social systems designed to pretend merit and hard effort is why there are ridiculously disparate of wealth among humans, it's not going to accept that wage slavery is actually not only irrelevant but far more inefficient. It's not going to stop without change resistance for sure.
Interesting to see how people feel about copyright law. If it’s a them the individual downloading IP it’s screw those evil IP holders. If it’s OpenAI we’ll screw OpenAI!!
I for one am interested to see how courts globally figure out what is acceptable or not. The problem imo is the cat is already out of the bag. No government is going to stop progress in LLM. I also have to wonder if we are better off in society to allow this type of IP infringement, not thinking about copying art style but being able to ingest research and other important pieces of information.
This will be litigated and I have a feeling OpenAI/Anthropic/Claude/MistralAI will win, since we've been down similar roads before[1]. With that said, AI slop will never be a replacement for human creativity, and while AI is pretty incredible technology, I'm actually way more bullish on people.
You don’t grasp how anime and IP are underwritten by the state in Japan. It will firewall this and then other creators will follow their lead. The point is to head off slop, not allow it. Litigation isn’t the end, firewalls are.
We’re deving a game AI can’t use. We’ve invented several firewalls.
It's fair use if you do it, it's stealing if someone else does it to you, this is the normal playbook of the likes of Meta, Microsoft, OpenAi and the others.
Did Microsoft say that OpenOffice/Libreoffice's interface was directly copyright infringement? I know people that could not make a distinction 10 years ago (now with the ribbons is simpler to distinguish).
Ofc Microsoft tried to limit the use of OpenOffice/LibreOffice using file format quirks and other strategies, so they are no angel, but still I don't know of a clear parallel.
In the world of tattooing, it’s frowned upon for a tattoo artist to take another tattoo artist’s original work and replicate it without permission, yet it’s common practice to take well known IP (Pokémon, Studio Ghibli, etc) and tattoo that on a client. The ethical boundary seems to be between whether the source artwork was created by an individual vs. a corporation.
That is a huge oversimplification.
In the tattoo case, tattooing pikachu on a person does not harm Nintendo’s business, but copying another tattoo artist’s work or style directly takes their business. Tattoo art is an industry where your art style largely defines your career.
I can see the argument LLMs are transformative, but when you set up specific evaluation of copying a company/artist and then advertise that you clone that specific studio’s work, that’s harming them and in my opinion crossing a line.
This isn’t an individual vs corporation thing, (though people are very selfish).
There’s so much more here than just corporate vs individual. There’s the sheer scale of it, the enforcement double standards, questions of consent, and taking advantage of the commons (artists public work) etc. To characterize it as people not liking business is plain wrong.
Very well put. It boggles my mind that some people cannot separate individual from corporations. As if their mind are not able to comprehend how corporations can cause harm at scale.
I'd argue that if an art piece is famous enough, then it ought to become "public". In the sense that, yes, the artist made it and it became famous, but once it reaches a certain scale of fame, it means that the public itself made the work famous. So it's a kind of co-creation (eg for instance the fact that people were writing fan-fiction about Harry Potter or whatever, contributing to the fame of the book, etc). So in this case, after it has reached a sufficient level of fame, it should become public work
I am still torn on this issue. On the one hand, it feels like a copyright violation when other people's works are used to train an ML model. On the other hand, it is not a copyright infringement if I paint a picture in the Studio Ghibli style myself. The question is whether removing a ‘skill requirement’ for replication is sufficient grounds to determine a violation.
I believe the case is that you're welcome to paint a picture perfectly copying Studio Ghibli, but you cannot sell it. You're welcome to even take the style and add enough personal creativity that it becomes a different work and sell that, but only if a random on the street doesn't look at it and say "wow, what Studio Ghibli film is that from?".
That's the problem here, there's no creative input apart from the prompt, so obviously the source is blatant (and often in the prompt).
> I believe the case is that you're welcome to paint a picture perfectly copying Studio Ghibli, but you cannot sell it.
Technically, you can't, but there's no way to enforce copyright infringement on private work.
You can paint a Studio Ghibli-style painting -- the style isn't protected.
These rules assume that copying the style is labor intensive, and righteously rewards the worker.
When an LLM can reproduce thousands and thousands of Ghibli-style paintings effortlessly, not protecting the style seems less fair, because the work of establishing the Ghibli-style was harder than copying it large-scale.
I'm in the "don't fight a roaring ocean, go with the flow" boat:
If your entire livelihood depends on having the right to distribute something anyone can copy, get a stronger business.
I think we can put your last sentence in a more compact form: If your entire livelihood depends on your art, get a stronger business.
or even better: if you make art, get a stronger business
or maybe simply: stop making art
A lot of people will need to stop identifying as 'someone who makes art with enough value to trade it for the decent wage'. Millions of egos destroyed, not a dollar of GDP lost.
So I guess you don't read books/comics, watch TV/Movies/plays, play video games or listen to music? People aren't born skilled artists, that takes time and effort. Being able to prompt GenAI well just makes you a skilled prompter, not a skilled artist. Over time, we will lose a lot of skilled artists and that is something worth thinking more deeply about, instead of giving a callous hot take. Artists are trained to view the world critically, and I want more critical thinkers - not less.
My wife and I went for wall decoration. There’s an art gallery and a poster shop right next to each other. The price difference is a factor 100 for an average art piece.
You can choose between a bunch of classics, or you can upload your own AI-generated picture and have that printed as a poster.
Art was always expensive, and posters as an alternative to paintings existed way before AI.
The main difference seems to be that we can’t clearly pay royalties to anyone for AI artwork, because it’s not obvious exactly where it came from.
There was a YouTube channel dedicated to Warhammer lore narrated by an AI David Attenborough. It got taken down, but its replacement came up, starting out with a generic old man’s voice and over time gradually more Attenborough-like. When should the Attenborough estate start to get royalties? At 60% Attenborough? Or at 80% Attenborough?
Not a dollar lost, and yet all of society is poorer. Less social commentary via art. Less beauty. Less novelty and less new forms invented. Less entertrainment (entertainment that has some human values imbued into it, but there will be more 'entertainment', just now devoid of intentionality/humanity/novelty, a firehose of images/noises/colors with nothing behind it, a firehouse of slop). Less personal discipline trying to master something. Less seeing through the eyes of another person, so less relation, less empathy, less humanity. Less, less, less. AI is an inertia machine.
No dollars burned, just huge huge amounts of cultural capital. Just a reduction to a more primitive, less cultured/developed version of what it means to be human. Less thinking out loud, sharing of thoughts, exposure to new thoughts. More retreating into (a now lesser developed, now culturally atrophied) self.
Your belief is incorrect. There's no copyright law that is dependent on whether someone is made for selling or not.
This is incorrect.
Two of the four core tests for fair use hinge on this.
1. Purpose and character of the use. With emphasis on whether the copy was made for commercial use.
4. Effect on the work's value, and the creator's ability to exploit their work.
---
Both can be dramatically impacted by the intent of the copy, usually with enforcement and punishment also being considerably stronger if the copy is being made for commercial gain and not private use.
This for the actual work, definitely not for transformative works like llm output. So a ghibli style image of me is fine legally, whether I sell it or not.
The language used to describe LLM behaviour such as "training" and "reasoning" has led people to treat them the same as humans, instead of a new and different entity that requires us to update our set of rules.
If I was the first person to invent a car, for example, and I named its method of locomotion "walking", would you treat it the same as a human and let it "walk" in all the same places humans walk? After all, it's simply using kinetic energy and friction to propel itself along the ground, as we do.
Because a car is so obviously different to a human, we intuitively understand it requires an alteration to our rules in order for us to coexist peacefully. Since LLMs are so abstract, we don't intuitively understand this distinction, and so continue to treat them as if they should be bound by the same rules and laws as us.
It's less about paint a picture yourself, arguably there is little to no value there. OpenAI et al, sell the product of creating pictures in the style of their material. I see this as a direct competition to Studio Ghibli's right to produce their own material with their own IP.
I agree with this. I don't know how to create artistic styles by hand or using any creative software for that matter. All the LLM tools out there gave me the "ability" and "talent" to create something "good enough" and, in some cases, pretty close to the original art.
I rarely use these tools (I'm not in marketing, game design, or any related field), but I can see the problem these tools are causing to artists, etc.
Any LLM company offering these services needs to pay the piper.
I am mostly ok with these copyright crackdowns in AI in the spirit of - if a human were to do it commercially, it would be illegal.
We can argue if that should be the case or not, which is a different issue.
However, it should not be legal to automate something at scale that is illegal when done by an individual human. Allowing it just tips the scale against labor even more.
Is it not a copyright infringement if you pain it yourself? Why is that the case? I thought it would be just that studios wouldn't care for the most part. Hasn't Disney gone after this type of personal projects in the past?
Using character is copyright infrigement. Using style is not.
It is a tough issue, but legalese will probably start from where and on what and how did this thing train on in order to be able to produce such results. It's similar to (guitar) amp modeling. Eventually they will either have to remove it or license it. I don't see other way. What makes it challenging is that vast majority of things that it was trained on can make a similar claim and it opens the floodgate. Outcome is either youtube-like thing where things exist in certain capacity, but not full or alternative is Napster like destiny where it gets banned altogether. Stakes are now a bit too high for Napster scenario. OpenAI might have a youtube-like angle for licensing with its Sora thing which seems to be turning into its own social network of sorts.
You are not a for profit software product. You are a human. If you make a drawing, that drawing MIGHT be a for profit product.
If I make a for profit AI, that AI is a product. And if that product required others' copyrighted works to derive it's deliverable, it is by definition creating derivative works. Again, creating a small human, not creating a product. Creating a for profit AI, creating a product.
If my product couldn't produce the same output without having at some point consumed the other works, I've triggered copyright concerns.
If I make and train a small human, I am not creating a for profit product so it doesn't come in to play at all. The two are not similar in any way. The human is not the product. If THEY create a product later (a drawing in this case) then THAT is where copyright comes in.
Why are you torn on the issue? Its not a secret many original IPs were stolen therefor its a violation.
None of the training data was originally drawn by OpenAI. OpenAI also actively monetizes that work.
It is absolutely infringement if you paint a picture in Ghibli style. You just have fair use to infringe in a personal, noncommercial, educational, etc. purpose.
Fair use is a defense to infringement, like self defense is a defense to homicide. If you infringe but are noncommercial, it is more likely to be ruled fair use. If Disney did a Ghibli style ripoff for their next movie, that is clearly not fair use.
OpenAI is clearly gaining significant material benefits from their models being able to infringe Ghibli style.
> It is absolutely infringement if you paint a picture in Ghibli style.
Only if you copy their characters. If you make your own character and story, and are replicating ghibli style, it is OK. Style is not copyrightable.
You can’t copyright a style, e.g look at the fashion industry.
But do not look at the music industry, because a lot of what people would think of as style is a melody, score, composition and so on.
vanilla ice would like a word
> It is absolutely infringement if you paint a picture in Ghibli style.
Of course not because by this twisted logic every piece of art is inspired by what comes before and you could claim Ghibli is just a derivative of what came before and nobody has any copyright then...
it's a form of slavery when someone is profiting off the looong and hard, concentrated work of others without reimbursing them adequately.
that's why piracy Robin Hood Style is fine, but corporate piracy is not. I downloaded a Ghibli movie because I could't afford the DVD. I didn't copy it on VHS then to sell it via e-commerce to 1000 people.
AI companies grabbed IP and pull hundreds of thousands of customers with it, then collect their interactions either way and profit exponentially while Ghibli, Square Enix et al. don't profit from users using more and more AI ...
and most people are not "training" ML models ... people are using copy machines that already learned to compensate for their lack of will to put effort into stuff.
a lot of us been there and enough decided to move beyond and get/become better at being human aka evolve vs get cozy in some sub-singularity. some didn't and won't, and they are easiest to profit from.
Can we not use loaded words like slavery which just cheapens real slavery?
Human learning is transformative. It takes time. Time, not money, is the criteria for value to human life. Humans can re-draw in styles they see and the law sees it as transformative work. Humans draw conclusions from learning and apply it to other fields - that’s natural intelligence. If AI helps humans make more new, transformative work, not the same characters as the studios, not the same plots, then the studio should not try to rent-extract. Otherwise someone will try to do it to stick figures and any other style and you’d have to teach toddlers rules for any stile before you give them a crayon. The only real impact will be that hype and styles “in fashion” will just play out faster and in the mean time the Studios get their name sealed in human minds for anything done in their style - which is more immortality than abuse.
There’s certainly a difference with AI. Not only can it reproduce exactly the same characters - in fact I doubt you can train the style without this ability - it puts those characters in reach of crayon-age children at a professional capacity. This crosses the line between copying and enabling IP theft in my mind. While I don’t agree with our current IP laws, the ease and rapidity of this seems like a real problem. How long before some kid in a third world country can produce a feature length Ghibli-esque movie and distribute it online? And how much will this dilute their brand etc? Is it really so much to ask the AI companies to filter their training sets?
Exploring the scenarios and corner cases is how rules should be written, just like any code.
In this case producing anything commercial and anything with AI period should always be disclosed.
Since at this stage we can often tell when something is AI (though not everyone and not always), especially food images at a restaurant, for me that immediately downgrades the quality or value of a product That’s going to be the natural human response. And users of the tech will likely be lumped in with very poor attempts, downgrading the value of anyone who uses it. That is natural payback for trying to go commercial.
However in the hobbyist space - the space where humans learn what AI attempts will also do is expand the creative space massively - people will get to iterate much faster with their own styles and new styles will emerge. Just like the invention of writing and publishing - the original writers were people with tremendous time and resource privilege on their hands, but the art of writing would have never ever bloomed if it didn’t become available to anyone over time. Humans then draw higher order conclusions and insights from the abundance, even if it takes energy for filtering.
That said, abuse in the form of pretending something generated is real or taking credit for generated work as real should be illegal. If you teach the moral compass along with the book or you built the identification along with the work you will get a lot more authentic novelty even with AI tools.
Is it possible that the primary liability for OpenAI is trade dress? If you can produce things in (for example) the style of a Studio Ghibli film, such that an ordinary consumer can’t tell if the source is Studio Ghibli or AI, is that actionable? I feel like I see copyright concerns all the time with AI but rarely is trademark discussed.
Can a style be trademarked? I thought that was what copyright was meant to cover.
(not a lawyer) This is the exact opposite of how it works, at least in the US.
Copyright: covers works on publication. Registering it allows for seeking of statutory damages.
Trademark: covers defining characteristics. This can be muddy since defining characteristics are not necessarily the same as style.
It can be especially confusing when certain things become characteristic of a genre. This is mostly what transformer and diffusion models cover: the strongest weights will be what's most common in the training data. You get a lot of em dashes and heroes in colorful outfits, but they don't constitute a violation on their own in any modern model unless the operator of the model goes out of their way to violate.
to paraphrase:
really, really happy that someone is calling out data-harvesting for what it really is.Hah, hilarious this is being unironically used, this was a lame ad old people they put out against piracy, and widely mocked by Millenials in the early 2000s.
We've have always known we should harvest the internet for absolutely everything. If we don't, it's fine, we can squabble about our IP and China will just ingest the entire Internet, make a model out of it, then release the Ghiblifier and we'll all download it or run it on Openrouter. You can already download Hunyuan Image 3.0 and it's just as good as OpenAI's image create, if not better. What's Japan going to do about that?
Also, for the record, I would absolutely download a handbag, or a television, or a DVD, or a car, if I could. I'd be pumping out Louis Vuittons and iPhones for my kids all day long, and driving a Lambo because why not?
Totally agree!
Probably not as much a generational thing ("old people", versus "Millennials" or really, Gen X at that time), as just a tone-deaf shaming attempt by our corporate overlords.
Reefer Madness. Satan in vinyl. DnD panic. Downloading as piracy.
I was once accused of being a pirate back then because I was talking about downloading in a chatroom.
What was I downloading? Linux. Probably Debian. It's the same kind of nonsense as people going around accusing everyone whose process they don't understand of using AI. I'm surprised no one has come after me for making flame fractals.
Why not go straight for the goal and just download the Lambo?
Copyright/Patent/Intellectual Property for more than 25 years is illogical in my personal weird opinion. I think it grinds innovation to a halt and only serves to generate money. In other news i would glady recieve a lot of money forever just because i invented some thing ages ago. I'm only a humble capitalist human. :)
OpenAI will just fork out a bunch of money and settle everything, because that is how money works.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/you-wouldnt-steal-a-...
The difference is: You're making copies of something:
Copying someone's IP can also impact you economically if your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something.Should we enforce the protection of people's right to have monopoly of distribution of intellectual property?
Or should we accept that in reality, copies are free and distribution monopolies only exist in inefficient markets?
It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property.
But information wants to be free.
It's a dilemma. Do we side what feels right, or what's real?
I don’t get it. Did you men that “It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property” follow from “your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something”?
This issue is not black and white.
It is accepted, within limits, for humans do transformative work, but it's not been yet established which the limits for AIs are, primarily (IMO): 1. whether the work is transformative or not 2. whether the scale of transformation/distribution changes the nature of the work.
Embedding other people's work in a vector space, then sampling from the distribution at a different point in the vector space, is not a central member of the "transformative" category. The justifications for allowing transformative uses do not apply to it.
Critiques like this dismissis AI as a bunch of multiplications, while in reality it is backed by extensive research, implementation, and data preparation. There's an enormous complexity behind, making it difficult to categorize as simply transformative or not.
The Pirate Bay is also backed by extensive research, implementation, and data preparation. I'm not dismissising [sic] anything as "a bunch of multiplications" – you'll note I talked about embedding in vector spaces, not matrix multiplication. (I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about: if you want to dismiss [sic] my criticism, please actually engage with it like the other commenters have.)
That does seem to be the plurality opinion yes. But you are responding to someone saying that what counts as transformative hasn't been decided by saying that you have decided. We don't know how human brains do it. What if we found that humans actually do it in the same way? Would that alter the dialog, or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we?
> or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we?
Because of the scaling abilities of a human brain, you cannot plug more brains into a building to pump out massive amounts of transformative work, it requires a lot for humans to be able to do it which creates a natural limit to the scale it's possible.
Scale and degree matter even if the process is 100% analogous to how humans do it, the natural limitation for computers to do it is only compute, which requires some physical server space, and electricity, both of which can be minimised with further technological advances. This completely changes the foundation of the concept for "transformative work" which before required a human being.
This is a good observation, and motivates adjusting the legal definition of "transformative" even if the previous definition did include what generative AI systems can now do.
> What if we found that humans actually do it in the same way?
We know that humans don't – or, at least, aren't limited to this approach. A quick perusal of an Organization for Transformative Works project (e.g. AO3, Fanlore) will reveal a lot of ideas which are novel. See the current featured article on Fanlore (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Stormtrooper_Rebellion), or the (after heavy filtering) the Crack Treated Seriously tag on AO3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works?work_search[sort_column]=k...). You can't get stuff like this from a large language model.
People could be doing their own transformative works, and then posting them to tumblr or whatever with a “Ghibli style” tag or something.
Any type of art is inspired by the art of others. Its the simplicity in which you now can generate "art" which is the issue. Stealing artists work while also making it harder than ever for them to make a living is a deeply ethical issue. AI "artists" and "art" disgust me. Its a skill you build over your whole life, taking the shortcut because you're unwilling to learn the craft is deeply insulting to real artists. Good thing traditional art is still somewhat safe from this. Thankfully, this is making it easier to leave highly addicting online platforms as I boycott AI content of any form.
> Its a skill you build over your whole life, taking the shortcut because
Doesn't this apply to the printing press?
For me the core issue is not that OpenAI can generate some copies if the art, the issue is that some artists can not earn an honest living and that people do not care about artists generally. I wonder how many of the people commenting here have bought themselves art from an artist.
I personally doubt that AI can do a movie similar to studio Ghibli (of which I seen a lot and I love and paid for) and I also wonder how much of the issue here is some corporate profit rather than some poor artists (do you know who owns studio Ghibli without looking?)
It's fine to boycott AI content, but you could also decide to boycott content produced by large corporations for profit.
This is an example of why analogies make for bad quality reasoning. The first 3 goods have marginal cost, so stealing them causes direct financial harm. Digital goods have zero marginal cost, so there is not any automatic harm. You may still wish for it to classified as stealing. The law may even agree with you that it is stealing. But it doesn't change the fact that this analogy is useless for the purposes of reasoning.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPEeaxI0OPU
Showing me ads is stealing too, by the way.
depends, they definitely didn't build "the streets" they plaster with ads but if it's their channel or their website, it's up us to pay for blockers, put effort into doing ourselves or using one of the tools build by generous contributors who crave user-defined spaces instead of 'enforced and conform' ("VC"-)demand-based spaces
No. bad analogy.
Stealing my time and attention. Much more bothered about advertising in my face than IP infringement.
In exchange for a service. It is the way you pay it. You can simply refuse to transact.
and my energy (CPU, etc)
And mental health.
Then why do companies claim I am stealing from them when I use an adblocker?
Because the implicit contract for you to consume their content is that you pay it either by subscribing or by seeing ads.
It is not that difficult to understand.
But if viewing ads is a payment method, then you must also understand that showing me ads (without giving me anything in return) is stealing.
> You wouldn't steal a baby
Also counts as "downloading someone's content" - at least partially
We will eventually need that policeman's helmet as a retaliation means /s
End fair-use protection for harvesting. Otherwise creators will be forced to use new forms of anti-piracy.
Google has been harvesting for a quarter of a century, imo that cat has been out of the bag for quite a while now.
Irrelevant. Different end state. Different revenue. A claim to unique enough result to monetize.
The podcast 'in our time' (bbc) has an episode on 'copyright': https://pca.st/episode/928a7b98-18c0-4c70-8558-8ef982ce08de
From its title
"In 1710, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation entitled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. It became known as the Statute of Anne, and it was the world’s first copyright law. Copyright protects and regulates a piece of work - whether that's a book, a painting, a piece of music or a software programme. It emerged as a way of balancing the interests of authors, artists, publishers, and the public in the context of evolving technologies and the rise of mechanical reproduction. Writers and artists such as Alexander Pope, William Hogarth and Charles Dickens became involved in heated debates about ownership and originality that continue to this day - especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence. With:
Lionel Bently, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Cambridge
Will Slauter, Professor of History at Sorbonne University, Paris
Katie McGettigan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.
OpenAI has ridiculous guardrails for illustrations covering any public domain subject that has been covered by Disney or any other major public corporation.
So by that benchmark Japanese companies have a case.
Try generating a 19th century style illustration of Snow White. You can't at least not on OpenAI platform.
Try generating a picture "of flying boy fighting a pirate on a ship".
I think AI seriously breaks down the “transformative work” condition used to determine fair use. The work is clearly being transformed, but it also doesn’t seem fair.
These models critically depend on many hours of artistic effort during training/prompting, but don’t require any additional effort by the new distributors/consumers. On top of that, proper attribution is often impossible.
How have they gotten the "Studio Ghibli" look into the training data? Have they actually bought all the movies, or how does it work?
I guess it’s like
1) Download Ghibli film material from an arrrr site. Extract frames using ffmpeg. Pay someone $1 per week in Nigeria to add metadata for each (or some) frame(s).
2) ???
3) Profit
It's possible that they purchased the movies (although definitely without the proper licensing; buying a DVD allows for personal use, not training a commercial model), or maybe they simply pirated them.
It's also possible that models' entire understanding of the aesthetic comes from screenshots of the movie. Even if OpenAI didn't feed in each frame of the movie, they definitely fed in lots of images from the web, some of which were almost certainly movie screenshots.
there are probably millions of stills from their movies on the web.
There is a huge amount of artists copying that look.
To me, it was a tasteless and awful act, but not illegal. Anyone else see that distinction?
I don't see why it would not be illegal. I don't see the difference between downloading or copying a movie for watching on a TV or for training AI, from copyright point of view
I'd say it violated the spirit the law but not the letter.
HOW? - why say such a thing and not _show_ it. show the letter that was not violated and where this spirit lives.
so many people giving their feelings about laws, about 1s and 0s. -_- what is this stack overflow?
Laws are not code, they are subject to interpretation by the judiciary. The spirit of the law is that transformative use is fair use, but at the time those laws were written no one had conceived of generative AI.
It seems very reasonable to me that we as a society might stop and reassess. It is not a foregone conclusion that all the treasure of humanity be handed over to @sama for a tuppence.
Not illegal where? If you're in Japan here's a fun thing to try:
1. Ask ChatGPT to generate some Ghibli-likes for you.
2. Find a local photo printing store prepared to print and blockmount them for you (this is actually the hardest part - most will politely tell you to piss off).
3. List them on Mercari or Rakuma.
4. Regularly relist them as they're periodically removed for violating local counterfeiting laws.
5. Eventually explain yourself to a judge and maybe go to prison for a year.
Technically you only need to do 1 and some of 2 to be committing a crime in Japan.
willful commercial copyright infringement at scale is a felony
Traiñing models is not copyright infrigement
Generating obviously infringing material is, though, even if there are lots of intermediate steps to do so.
What is obviously infringing? If this was the case then why don't they sue OpenAI directly if it's so "obvious".
that remains to be seen
and especially outside of the united states
most countries have no concept of "fair use" whatsoever
Even fan art manga in Japan is a thing so fair use is more widespread than you may think
nice opinion. now base it on laws and regulations that apply to these companies and show whether it is actually legal or not... - this is not a realm of feelings.
But there's a related question of what the law ought to be, regardless of whether or not it's currently illegal, which is where feelings do come in. In the case of a new technology colliding with old laws, this is the most important discussion to have.
It's quite obvious that OpenAI benefited from training on Ghibli material.
That's not relavent. You can't sue someone for benefitting from your work. You can sue someone for intellectual property theft, which is what OpenAI did.
It makes wonder what will happen when robots will really take care of everything unpleasant there might be to do in life. All these laws and social systems designed to pretend merit and hard effort is why there are ridiculously disparate of wealth among humans, it's not going to accept that wage slavery is actually not only irrelevant but far more inefficient. It's not going to stop without change resistance for sure.
These robots will be used to eliminate the working class.
I thought all this was already solved when some US court ruled AI to be "transformative" and hence ok?
I wish robots.txt were forced to be followed by AI parser...
Interesting to see how people feel about copyright law. If it’s a them the individual downloading IP it’s screw those evil IP holders. If it’s OpenAI we’ll screw OpenAI!!
I for one am interested to see how courts globally figure out what is acceptable or not. The problem imo is the cat is already out of the bag. No government is going to stop progress in LLM. I also have to wonder if we are better off in society to allow this type of IP infringement, not thinking about copying art style but being able to ingest research and other important pieces of information.
This will be litigated and I have a feeling OpenAI/Anthropic/Claude/MistralAI will win, since we've been down similar roads before[1]. With that said, AI slop will never be a replacement for human creativity, and while AI is pretty incredible technology, I'm actually way more bullish on people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
You don’t grasp how anime and IP are underwritten by the state in Japan. It will firewall this and then other creators will follow their lead. The point is to head off slop, not allow it. Litigation isn’t the end, firewalls are.
We’re deving a game AI can’t use. We’ve invented several firewalls.
This is the future.
as much as I hate the AI companies, I think I hate copyright more.
Counter point from the wider creative industry:
https://youtu.be/X9RYuvPCQUA?si=XXJ9l7O4Y3lxfEci
[video]
It's fair use if you do it, it's stealing if someone else does it to you, this is the normal playbook of the likes of Meta, Microsoft, OpenAi and the others.
Right. When can I run Microsoft Office through a “transformation” and then claim it magically isn’t covered by copyright laws?
Did Microsoft say that OpenOffice/Libreoffice's interface was directly copyright infringement? I know people that could not make a distinction 10 years ago (now with the ribbons is simpler to distinguish).
Ofc Microsoft tried to limit the use of OpenOffice/LibreOffice using file format quirks and other strategies, so they are no angel, but still I don't know of a clear parallel.