Cory DoctorowToday's threads (a thread)
Inside: Supreme Court saves artists from AI; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap/
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Arvīds Kokins> [..] all seek to establish that training an AI model is a copyright infringement. This is wrong [..]
This is such a strange hill to die on. Of course "training" infringes - it's compression.
Framing it as "mathematical analysis" or collecting "facts" is disingenuous.
Fourier transform could be easily described the exact same way, except it's fully reversible.
"Facts" wrt copyright are not meant to be the building blocks needed to reconstruct a work to some degree.
> "Facts" wrt copyright are not meant to be the building blocks needed to reconstruct a work to some degree.
Literally you could write a book describing each brushstroke needed to reconstruct a copyrighted painting without violating that painting's copyright.
@pluralistic That doesn't make sense. That's what most computer data effectively is - instructions to reconstruct data in a more accessible format. IDK if you're familiar with art tools but some literally encode the brush strokes (like Substance Painter or Clip Studio Paint vector layers) needed to reconstruct the picture.
@archo Yes, there's some interesting edge-cases implicit in this new, more explicit rule that copyright inheres only for human (and not machine) work.
While it's unlikely a case regarding the copyrightability of a vector layer (or even a clone brush) would reach a judgment (such cases being likely to founder on the *de minimis* standard that excludes trivialities from legal action), such a judgment might assign a "thin" copyright comparable to a "selection" right.
@pluralistic Hypothetically, if someone were to extract all the brush strokes from a file, wrote them into a book, retyped that book back into a file and re-rendered them to claim that it's original work, to me that's still a clear-cut infringement, not even de minimis (which could apply if only e.g. less than 0.1% of the brush strokes were used).
At the end of the day, copyright is an economical tool to ensure the author is fairly rewarded for their work, not an obfuscation challenge.
> retyped that book back into a file and re-rendered them to claim that it's original work
You are describing an infringing *use*, which does not make the machine itself infringing. This is a bedrock of copyright law, established in 1984 with the Supreme Court's ruling in Sony v Universal (the Betamax decision), which I referenced in my thread: "A device capable of sustaining a substantial noninfringing use is not infringing."
> At the end of the day, copyright is an economical tool to ensure the author is fairly rewarded for their work
Categorically untrue. In the US, copyright is one of two elements of the Constitution that contain a justification. The first is the Second Amendment ("a well-regulated militia").
The second is copyright ("To promote the progress of the useful arts and sciences"). What's more, the "progress clause" is a "may," not a "shall," meaning Congress need not provide *any* copyright
@archo If Copyright is intended to ensure "fair reward," it has failed on its own terms, repeatedly. As I wrote in the thread:
@archo I co-wrote an entire bestselling book of policies that will increase the share of income that goes to creators. None of them involves more alienable exclusive rights:
@pluralistic I don't want to argue in favor of concentration of wealth, power or copyright. :)
Just saying that was the intent of the law. There's definitely plenty of room for improvement and possibly alternatives.
@pluralistic What's untrue?
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-2-2/ALDE_00013062/
it says:
> "encourage, by *proper premiums* and provisions, the advancement of useful knowledge and discoveries";
@archo "to promote the useful arts and sciences" - not to "ensure fair reward."
@archo If the framers had intended this as a compensation scheme, it would have read "shall," not "may" (the majority of the constitution's prescriptions are mandatory, this is one of the few that is optional - that's not an oversight. The framers did not extend *any* copyright to foreign works, for example, because they judged that padding the margins of US printers with the works of foreign authors would promote the useful arts)
@pluralistic Obviously they phrased it differently but it's also clear from the associated text that the "promotion" they had in mind was an incentive using some forms of rewards.
The "proper" to me reads as "fair" but I'm sure some may disagree. Fairness isn't entirely objective anyway.