> The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would think streaming a song from spotify is technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it.
But the law would probably be DMCA 1201 for circumventing the DRM rather than normal copyright for making the copy, which is much more ambiguous. Also, record companies like to sue people, that doesn't mean they're right and provides no indication of what the law should be. You could just as easily pick some other example, like whether you can rip a music CD or vinyl you bought to put it on your iPod, which the record companies might not like to be allowed, but that doesn't mean that it isn't.
> It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they?
To which the answer is that they do. A lot of models are trained on arbitrary content from the internet.
As to why Adobe in particular is doing this, think about it. It's because that interpretation benefits them rather than the artists, by creating a moat where companies who already have licenses to bulk stock images etc. are the only ones who can create a model, rather than having lots of competitors because anyone can create one and many of them are free and can be run locally.
> I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term.
Publishing companies don't like public libraries. So anybody can go there and borrow a copy of any book for free? That doesn't mean that libraries are bad or are or should be illegal.
Also, laws are created through the political process, which is not always great. The outcome "individual artists somehow benefit from this" isn't even in the room there. The two most plausible outcomes are that "tech companies" win and anybody can train a model on anything they can get their hands on, and that "content conglomerates" win and then this technology gets locked up as a service from only megacorps and the artists still don't get anything meaningful, but now the world has another abusive cartel imposing arbitrary censorship and using control over this to cement control over adjacent markets etc. Of these, the second is clearly worse.
But the law would probably be DMCA 1201 for circumventing the DRM rather than normal copyright for making the copy, which is much more ambiguous. Also, record companies like to sue people, that doesn't mean they're right and provides no indication of what the law should be. You could just as easily pick some other example, like whether you can rip a music CD or vinyl you bought to put it on your iPod, which the record companies might not like to be allowed, but that doesn't mean that it isn't.
> It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they?
To which the answer is that they do. A lot of models are trained on arbitrary content from the internet.
As to why Adobe in particular is doing this, think about it. It's because that interpretation benefits them rather than the artists, by creating a moat where companies who already have licenses to bulk stock images etc. are the only ones who can create a model, rather than having lots of competitors because anyone can create one and many of them are free and can be run locally.
> I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term.
Publishing companies don't like public libraries. So anybody can go there and borrow a copy of any book for free? That doesn't mean that libraries are bad or are or should be illegal.
Also, laws are created through the political process, which is not always great. The outcome "individual artists somehow benefit from this" isn't even in the room there. The two most plausible outcomes are that "tech companies" win and anybody can train a model on anything they can get their hands on, and that "content conglomerates" win and then this technology gets locked up as a service from only megacorps and the artists still don't get anything meaningful, but now the world has another abusive cartel imposing arbitrary censorship and using control over this to cement control over adjacent markets etc. Of these, the second is clearly worse.