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."
@pluralistic I don't think anyone's arguing in court that a genAI model training script is infringement by itself?
The issue is with the data set the companies collected and fed into the script.
If they had the rights to every single image they used, there would be no lawsuit.
Sorry if I was initially unclear, that was what I was referring to, not the general act of "training".
No, you're still wrong.
The act of making a transient copy of a work in order to examine it and publish facts derived from it does not infringe copyright.
You don't need the rights to a work to do these things.
@pluralistic This is the same kind of reductive phrasing I already addressed in my initial post.
Not to mention that the copy on their hard drives isn't even especially "transient" considering that they want to reuse the data for subsequent "training" runs.