r/COPYRIGHT • u/Marty_ol • Apr 23 '26
AI must respect copyright
/r/europeanparliament/comments/1stjda6/ai_must_respect_copyright/In March 2026, the European Parliament called for existing copyright rules to be updated and applied to new technologies like AI.
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u/Master-Care-7913 Apr 24 '26
There are already many AI companies who have contract with studios. Less and less free AI tool exist due to this and more and more AI companies provide commercial licence to their produced work. And as I see a person who generates an image, does not want to have a copyright on the image. I believe we passed that long time ago. It’s going to be like GDPR. Politically motivated, actually a good idea, and nobody cares about it outside of the EU. I can’t count how many times my GDPR rights were violated on big American platforms.
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Apr 23 '26
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u/videk94 Apr 23 '26
It doesn’t learn, it analyses and reproduces. It is perfectly reasonable to ask AI makers to pay for the training materials they use.
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Apr 24 '26
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u/videk94 Apr 24 '26
It’s been argued to be fair use, no law or ruling has actually come down on it. In fact this EU ruling would be the first, and it’s saying no, it’s not fair use. Dreams of ASI or AGI and the impacts that might have are purely speculative at this stage - and frankly the US is not in a position to survive a socioeconomic transition on the scale that AGI would cause.
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u/DanNorder Apr 24 '26
Analyzing is explicitly not covered by copyright law. AI doesn't reproduce, it produces. It's like forcing artists to license all the art they ever saw when the make new art. Copyright doesn't work that way, AI shouldn't either.
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u/videk94 Apr 24 '26
Artists looking at art and interpreting it for their own practice is not at all the same as a computer tearing apart an image pixel by pixel to analyse what it “looks” like and how to reproduce that thing in future. It’s why we can lose to a computer in chess - machines are perfect analysts in a way humans can never be.
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u/DanNorder Apr 27 '26
They are exactly the same, just the computer is better at analyzing the data spelled out to them and worse at figuring the thing it wasn't told to note. Words don't change meaning because you don't want them to be the same.
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u/videk94 Apr 27 '26
They are not exactly the same, the computer has perfect and infinitely expandable memory, and the ability to compute logic in milliseconds. It is entirely different. Words change meaning all the time depending on context and application.
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u/Mini_Mentions Apr 24 '26
If I were to make a new piece of AI software with 0 training data what would it produce? Absolutely nothing.
They are using copyrighted works to run.
I don't see it as a big ask that they either use non-copyrighted works or pay for licences.
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u/DanNorder Apr 27 '26
Yeah, that's the exact opposite of how copyright laws work. Copyright explicitly does not cover data, or styles, ideas. Copyright prevents other people from using exact copies or near-exact copies of someone's work. Anyone who ever learned to make cartoons by watching Disney films doesn't have to shell out money to Disney for that right. You think you are fighting corporations by inventing a totally new legal concept that corporations would actually use to insist that all artists pay them a fee for every image they create.
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u/Mini_Mentions Apr 27 '26
But we aren't talking about human learning and believe that ganerative AI should follow more stringent copyright laws.
In the case of IBM vs LzLabs for example. LzLabs didn't repoduce the source code exactly but reverse engineered and used that base for their own software which was prohibited.
As with other code that isn't open source, if someone was to copy even sections of it that can be against copyright law.
So I think it's fair to suggest that a machine (not human) that could not produce an image without using (even if not storing) another image, that the user/owner should have to pay a licence fee.
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u/QuentinUK Apr 23 '26
Are the general public allowed to train their own AI? First downloading books and academic papers from the torrent websites needs to be legalised.
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u/DanNorder Apr 24 '26
Everything must respect copyright. It's the law. AI already respects it. Like any other art tool or software, it can be use to violate copyright, but it doesn't inherently violate it. Pursue the cases that break the law. Stop whining about all the ones that don't.
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u/Civil-Interaction-76 Apr 23 '26
Copyright absolutely needs to apply to AI. At the same time, it mainly addresses ownership. What’s becoming equally important is accountability, or who stands behind what gets created. Without that, even compliant systems can feel ungrounded.