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	▲	godelski 4 days ago
		`> where it can freely be downloaded by anyone at any time, by people who are then free to do whatever they like with it on their own hardware` I think you have a strong misunderstanding of the law and the general expectation of others. I'd like to remind you that a lot of celebrities face legal issues for posting photos of themselves. Here's a recent example with Jennifer Lopez[0]. The reason these types of lawsuits are successful is because it is theft of labor. If you hire a professional photographer to take photos of your wedding then the contract is that the photographer is handing over ownership of the photos in exchange of payment. The only difference here is that the photo was taken before a contract was made. The celebrity owns the right to their body and image, but not to the photograph. Or think about Open Source Software. Just because it is posted on GitHub does not mean you are legally allowed to use it indiscriminately. GitHub has licenses and not all of them are unrestricted. In fact, a repo without a license does not mean unfettered usage. The default is that the repo owner has the copyright[1]. `> You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work.` A big part of what will make a lawsuit successful or not is if the owner has been deprived of compensation. As in, if you make money off of someone else's work. That's why this has been the key issue in all these AI lawsuits. Where the question is about if the work is transformative or not. All of this is in new legal territory because the laws were not written with this usage in mind. The transformative stuff is because you need to allow for parody or referencing. You don't want a situation where, say... someone including a video of what the president has said to discuss what was said[2]. But this situation is much closer to "Joe stole a book, learned from that book, and made a lot of money through the knowledge that they obtained from this book AND would not have been able to do without the book's help." Just, it's usually easier to go after the theft part of that situation. It's definitely a messy space. But basically, just because a piece of art exists on public property does not mean you have the right to do whatever you want with it. `> is equally a description of Google.` Yes and no. The AI summaries? Yeah. The search engine and linking? No. The latter is a mutually beneficial service. It's one thing to own a taxi service and it is another to offer a taxi service that will walk into a starbucks take a random drink off the counter and deliver it to you. I'm not sure why this is difficult to understand. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2qqew643go [1] https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY