Users report that Google's new AI model, Gemini 2.0 Flash, is exceptionally good at removing watermarks. Here's why it isn't a major shift.
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2025/03/18/why-ai-watermark-removal-is-not-a-game-changer/
We have just launched the website for the CommonsDB project where we are documenting our work on building a public registry for #PublicDomain and openly licensed works:
If you are interested in #copyright registries & want to follow our work you can subscribe to our newsletter.
Sad to say, I think I agree with the EFF’s position here. Those of you who follow me know that I’m almost vehemently against #AI, especially in the way they are deployed today, which impoverishes humanity.
But #copyright enforcement is the wrong way to curtail this phenomenon. The damage is not done because of the way AI is trained, but in how it is wielded. Make no mistake: using copyright to limit what AI can train on won’t stop AI; it will enrich companies who own a ton of copyrighted materials as they *further abuse* copyright laws to extract money from the AI industry.
I wrote about this some time ago here: https://www.humancode.us/2024/05/15/copyright-ai.html https://mastodon.social/@eff/114180299139460854
@schizoidman aka #openai is only profitable if it has a complete #monoply on #ai and its #generativeai is only viable if #chatgpt is allowed to steal as much #copyright material as possible.
#Piracy demanded to assure the future of #US #AI
OpenAI wants the US government to ensure it has access to any data it wants to train GenAI models, and to stop foreign countries from trying to enforce copyright rules against it and other American AI firms.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/openai_data_copyright/
“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
｢ The true threat from AI models training on open access material is not that more people may access knowledge thanks to new modalities. It’s that those models may stifle Wikipedia and other free knowledge repositories, benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into supporting them while also bleeding them dry ｣
https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/
In a speech at the High Court of King Diarmaid in 6th Century Ireland, St. Columba aka Colmcille advocated for the right to copy books ~1500 years before the Budapest Open Access Initiative (Ray Corrigan, 2007 http://oro.open.ac.uk/10332/1/GIKII_Colmcille_final.pdf).
Diarmaid ruled against him; Colmcille's subsequent rebellion led to 3000 deaths in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_C%C3%BAl_Dreimhne
More in @mmasnick's #TechDirt article: https://www.techdirt.com/2009/08/20/the-very-first-copyright-trial-in-6th-century-ireland-sounds-really-familiar/
Hier wird sie quasi sichtbar, die „sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation“ (Marx) der KI: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000261522/openai-will-staatlichen-schutz-vor-copyrightforderungen
.
Wer im Original bei Marx nachlesen will … wir haben da was vorbereitet: Das Kapital 1.2 (unter 10 €): https://dietzberlin.de/produkt/marx-das-kapital-1-1-1-5-das-kapital-1-2
Sam Altman asks #Trump to grant #OpenAI blanket permissions to steal everyone's copyrighted works so he can train his #AI. He raises the threat of China AI dominance as the bogeyman.
https://futurism.com/openai-over-copyrighted-work
#copyright #FairUse #AIhype #SamAltman
The Reserve Bank of Australia has faced a number of complaints in the past over misappropriation of Indigenous IP (from Malangi, Yumbulul, and the Unaipon family). How will the Bank fare this time round - as it commissions a new design for the $5 dollar note?
'The Reserve Bank of Australia has opened submissions for an artwork to honour the “enduring emotional, spiritual and physical connection” of First Nations people to the land, seas and waters dating back thousands of years...
Australian bank notes and coins have borne images or engravings of Indigenous peoples, plants and animals since the 19th century, when the country still used pound sterling.
The £1 banknote, first issued in June 1923, was a homage to the artist E Phillips Fox’s Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, which depicted then Lt James Cook and Joseph Banks’ point of first contact – with Gweagal warriors and their spears armed resistance to the encroachment of territory.
In 1966, however, the artwork on the new A$1 note marked the first Aboriginal copyright dispute, after the Reserve Bank failed to seek permission from Arnhem Land artist David Malangi when it reproduced his work on the note. He was later paid $1,000, a medallion and a fishing kit.
The $2 coin has depicted the image of Gwoya Tjungurrayi, sometimes referred to as “One Pound Jimmy”, since 1988. Tjungurrayi survived one of Australia’s last recorded frontier massacres in 1928 where 60 men, women and children were murdered in the Northern Territory.
In 1995, the RBA released the $5o note, which depicted the author, explorer and inventor David Unaipon, from the Ngarrindgerri nation of present day South Australia.
Entries for the redesign close in April.'
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/17/australia-5-dollar-note-redesign-first-nations #IndigenousIP #copyright #auspol #auslaw
»OpenAI zu Trump – Erfolgreiche Copyright-Klagen bedrohen Sieg im „KI-Krieg“:
Die #Trump-Administration will einen AI Action Plan aufstellen, um die Vormachtstellung der #USA bei der KI-Entwicklung zu sichern. #OpenAI hat nun eine politische Wunschliste veröffentlicht. Zu den Maßnahmen zählen: #Copyright-Regeln, die das #KI-Training legitimieren, und Exportkontrollen für KI-Modelle.«
Deswegen gehe ich mal davon aus, dass die weder tech. & inhalt. viel zu bieten haben.
https://www.europesays.com/1918531/ People are using Google’s new AI model to remove watermarks from images #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #copyright #Gemini #google #watermarks
Section in the #photography newsletter I'm sending later today:
#copyright talk vs. copyright walk
In a blog post, Carl Svensson takes a look at the demo scene and its relationship to copyright, including a foray into the history of the (Amiga) scene.
Fair Use is about genuinely societal benefits, like quoting a paper for further research or parodying a song or celebrity. Strangely, Google and OpenAI seem to think that mere copying to enhance their profit margins should be on the same level.
#AI #copyright #fairuse
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/google-agrees-with-openai-that-copyright-has-no-place-in-ai-development/
Reuters: News Corp sued by Brave Software, a Google search engine rival. “News Corp has been sued by Google search engine rival Brave Software, which seeks to forestall a lawsuit by Rupert Murdoch’s company for when readers are directed to copyrighted articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.”
"While books that come on audio CDs don't have DRM embedded in them, files downloaded from Audible or other for-pay sources often do. Audiobookshelf won't play books with DRM, which means you need a method of stripping that DRM out.
Unfortunately, here's where we run into a problem: removing DRM from your audiobooks is not universally legal. "In the US, the law against 'circumventing' effective DRM has no personal-use exemption. In Europe, it varies by country," explained the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Competition and IP Litigation Director Mitch Stoltz when Ars reached out for advice. "That's as silly as it sounds—stripping DRM from one’s own copy of an audiobook in order to listen to it privately through different software doesn’t threaten the author or publisher, except that it makes it harder for them to charge you twice for the same audiobook. It’s another example of how anti-circumvention laws interfere with consumers’ rights of ownership over the things they buy."
And that means you're kind of on your own for this step. Should you live in a jurisdiction where DRM removal from audiobooks for personal use is legal—which includes some but not all European countries—then sites like this one can assist in the process; for the rest of us, the only advice I can give is to simply proceed in a legal manner and use DRM-free audiobooks to start with."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/i-threw-away-audibles-app-and-now-i-self-host-my-audiobooks/
"Anyone at an AI company who stops to think for half a second should be able to recognize they have a vampiric relationship with the commons. While they rely on these repositories for their sustenance, their adversarial and disrespectful relationships with creators reduce the incentives for anyone to make their work publicly available going forward (freely licensed or otherwise). They drain resources from maintainers of those common repositories often without any compensation. They reduce the visibility of the original sources, leaving people unaware that they can or should contribute towards maintaining such valuable projects. AI companies should want a thriving open access ecosystem, ensuring that the models they trained on Wikipedia in 2020 can be continually expanded and updated. Even if AI companies don’t care about the benefit to the common good, it shouldn’t be hard for them to understand that by bleeding these projects dry, they are destroying their own food supply.
And yet many AI companies seem to give very little thought to this, seemingly looking only at the months in front of them rather than operating on years-long timescales. (Though perhaps anyone who has observed AI companies’ activities more generally will be unsurprised to see that they do not act as though they believe their businesses will be sustainable on the order of years.)
It would be very wise for these companies to immediately begin prioritizing the ongoing health of the commons, so that they do not wind up strangling their golden goose. It would also be very wise for the rest of us to not rely on AI companies to suddenly, miraculously come to their senses or develop a conscience en masse.
Instead, we must ensure that mechanisms are in place to force AI companies to engage with these repositories on their creators' terms."
https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/
@theverge @tech-news-theverge What you need to understand here is that this doesn’t mean Taylor Swift or affect someone else than you:
#Copyright protects YOUR data
#AI #Training requires massive amounts of it. What matters to them is OUR data
This is NOT about scanning famous artworks
What this means is your family pictures appearing in somebody else’s revenge porn
What this means is your holiday shots being used as backdrops in synthetic far-right propaganda
OpenAI and Google ask for a government exemption to train their AI models on copyrighted material
