AI Art: It is criminal to not post your prompt

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biznatchio: Mar 31, 2001; Buglord

# ¿ Jul 27, 2023 18:01

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 23:08

biznatchio: Mar 31, 2001; Buglord

Roman posted:

This is about copyright so I think it's related.
I guess this means you could train models on Fables/Wolf Among Us content now, if you wanted?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...-us/ar-AA1gJvGQ

As noble as his intentions are here, intellectual property doesn't work like that. There is no way to consign something to the public domain other than through time doing it naturally. (This is one of the core reasons why Creative Commons was created.) What you can do is act like it is; namely, freely license it to everyone without conditions or compensation and also choose not to pursue any legal claims to assert your rights over it; but you can't legally, actually move it into the public domain.

That's usually a distinction that doesn't matter (because any public statements/commitments made about said liberal licensing can be binding and effectively neuters your ability to later change your mind and go after anyone who actually took you up on your offer and so it becomes just like public domain as a practical matter); but in this case it's a distinction that very much would matter, because he's already contractually bound to DC comics to not license the property out to anyone else.

So he can't put it in the public domain because it's impossible. He can't just liberally license it to everyone for free, because he's contractually bound to not do that. Which means, no, you can't do anything you want with the Fables IP because he can't give it to you to do so; and if you do, DC can come after him for it and also enjoin you from using it. (And probably make a very strong case in court that you're financially liable to DC for your use of the property too, since you should have done due diligence to discover you don't actually have a valid license.)

And that's not even getting into the complexities of what additional parts of the IP that were created by DC aren't even his to try to give away in the first place and may be so intertwined with the original IP that it'd be a minefield to try to separate them into what he actually owns and what DC owns through their derivative work.

biznatchio fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Sep 15, 2023

# ¿ Sep 15, 2023 18:11

biznatchio: Mar 31, 2001; Buglord

He can sell or give the IP ownership to anyone else, but 1) he didn't do that -- he made a legally meaningless declaration that has absolutely no impact on the ownership of the IP because, as I previously said, it is not legally possible to consign a work into the public domain, and 2) any theoretical actual legal transfer of ownership of the IP does not invalidate contracts that bind the IP granting exclusive use of it to DC.

To #1, his claim is not that he gave the ownership to anyone, it's that he did something that is legally impossible: putting the IP in the public domain. Without an actual transfer of ownership, that means he still owns it whether he wants to believe he does or not.

And to #2, while he can exercise his prerogative to not pursue anyone who infringes on his IP, he went beyond that and is portraying an open offer of usage to everyone else in Earth; and that means DC can take action on him for violating the contract he signed with them that gave them exclusive rights (because he is explicitly offering such license to everyone); and that also means DC can take action against anyone who ends up taking him up on his offer.

He owned (and still owns) the source IP; but that doesn't mean he gets to unilaterally revoke a contract that's bound upon that IP. "All rights reserved" is a term of art of copyright law to indicate that a particular work is protected by copyright and that publication is not a grant of those rights, not the magic words of a "get out of contractual obligations free" spell; and that article you suggested that should be read pretty clearly says that he did indeed sign an exclusive use contract.

biznatchio fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Sep 16, 2023

# ¿ Sep 15, 2023 23:55

biznatchio: Mar 31, 2001; Buglord

The copyright and IP law here is second fiddle to the contract law matter.

edit to add: It depends on the specifics of the contract he signed, of course, but the way he portrayed it makes it sound like he sold all of the usage rights on the IP to DC; and his ownership of the IP itself is thereby limited to basically being the financial beneficiary of whatever royalties for such usage that are owed under the contract. He can sell or give away the IP but effectively all that would be doing is transferring who gets those payments from DC. That's the rub here; he signed a contract that reduced "ownership" from "rights to do whatever I want with it" to "rights to only do with it whatever wasn't signed away".

biznatchio fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Sep 16, 2023

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 00:00

biznatchio: Mar 31, 2001; Buglord

KwegiboHB posted:

You're assuming a lot of a contract you haven't read. He may not have signed away exclusive use to DC.

He literally says he did. In fact, according to his argument, it's the entire driving reason why he felt his only option was to try throw the IP into the public domain; because he isn't allowed to do anything else with it aside from transfer ownership. This, also, was in the article you suggested should be read.

biznatchio fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Sep 16, 2023

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 01:19

biznatchio: Mar 31, 2001; Buglord

KwegiboHB posted:

Everything I've read from this press release lends me to believe I have a right to use Fables material in any way I see fit now.

You shouldn't be taking legal guidance from someone who, I'll repeat again, is claiming he is doing something that is literally legally impossible to do. Fables is not in the public domain. It cannot be. There is no legal avenue for it to be in the public domain. Period. He might as well be claiming that fairies exist. If you want to continue down this doomed argumentative path of "everyone owns Fables now", you first have to overcome this insurmountable hurdle. This impossibility is literally the reason the CC0 license exists, which is explicitly intended to be as close as possible to putting something into the public domain but not, since you can't¹.

Public domain means something extremely specific, that no one has rights they can assert on the work under copyright law because the work is either ineligible for copyright, or has an expired copyright; and that is simply not true in this case. DC purchased certain rights pertaining to the work, and they retain them (and we'll see which certain rights a couple lines down). As I mentioned above, his abandonment of his rights under copyright law does not place the work into the public domain. Because that is impossible.

The part that you should be concerned about from his statement is this quote (aside from his use of the phrase "If I understand the law correctly" which does a whole lot of heavy lifting by itself); which is the most telling quote about the actual nature contract he signed, emphasis mine:

quote:

I still can�t publish Fables comics through anyone but them. I still can�t authorize a Fables movie through anyone but them. Nor can I license Fables toys nor lunchboxes, nor anything else.

"Nor can I license ... anything" is exactly the understanding a layman would take from a contract that grants exclusive rights, because it is the only sort of contract that has that effective result. And, of course, without looking at the specific verbiage in the contract itself it's impossible to be 100% certain beyond trying to interpret the words of this guy who demonstrably does not actually understand the legal complexities of his situation (and nowhere does he even suggest he had a lawyer on his side at all, framing everything as his conversations between himself and DC's lawyers), but it is exceedingly unlikely, almost to the point of being laughable to suggest, that the contract binds to him, personally and not to the IP in question. The mere suggestion that he can get around having transferred exclusive rights by just transferring the underlying ownership to someone else as "One Weird Trick Corporate Attorneys Don't Want You To Know" is absurd, because if that was the case he could have just transferred his ownership to 'Fables LLC', a sole member company owned and operated by himself, and magically freed himself of the contract.

But if you want to believe in fairies and that he somehow did the impossible, by all means, go out and try to build a business on Fables content. The only thing you have to fear is DC.

^{1 - Also note that putting Fables under the CC0 is not something he can do, since CC0 is a license; and per his own words he cannot license creation of Fables content or products to anyone else.}

biznatchio fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Sep 16, 2023

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 02:30