Legal question aside, it's still can't decide if I feel like it's dickish.
Even that has a spectrum, from "What is harry potter book is first?" to "What is the first line of harry potter?" to "What is the text of the first harry potter book?"
That does depend on jurisdiction and the definition of fact
(for an extreme version the other way round: for a long time a UK copyright troll called Football DataCo claimed copyright of lists of UK football scores and demanded license fees - even where publishers actually obtained the scores from sending their own journalists to grounds. This was eventually overruled by the European Court of Justice, so it might be back again in future...)
A lot of Google's answers to questions veer towards being written opinions and original definitions anyway
With a compilation, you are able to find the original sources, but with a GAN is it even possible to find the original sources based on an output result alone?
How would you even prove “derivative work”? My understanding is that in proving derivative work you would need to show the original, but in a GAN output which could be made up of 20MM nodes you would not even be able to confirm which 200K image(s) where used in the production of the output result
This actually might have interesting connections to ideas from differential privacy.
Maybe the work is derivative of a particular training image if we can easily predict the presence or absence of that training image given only the trained model?
If you load 50k celebrity images into a tensor of size (500000, 28, 28, 3) and then generate a resulting tensor that results in a (28, 28, 3) tensor where each of the pixel locations is merged to form an average face image (similar to https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1355521/Average-f... ), then although the trained model contains all the images; I would have thought the output average face image is an entirely new creative work?
Good question, IANAL but how is a human artist drawing a face (based on their learned reality of what a face looks like) any different than a GAN drawing a face (based on the GAN learned reality)?
> IANAL but how is a human artist drawing a face (based on their learned reality of what a face looks like) any different than a GAN drawing a face (based on the GAN learned reality)?
A human artist is a legal person, a GAN is not. That's a fairly substantial legal difference.
But the output result is the same (i.e. human can produce a drawing of a face, GAN can produce a new drawing of a face).
If another animal such as chimp draws a human face what do you think would be the outcome? Would a chimp drawing a face be any different to a human drawing a face?
Law is only extremely rarely concerned with only output results and not process, status of actors, etc.
> Would a chimp drawing a face be any different to a human drawing a face?
Yes, legally, the outcome wouldd be different (whether it was original, a direct copy, or something made by copying elements but with some new content) because chimps are neither legal actors that can create a copyright through authorship nor ones who can violate copyright.
There’s a really interesting adjacent problem - the so-called “monkey selfie” which was recently settled by stating that works created by a non human we’re not copyrightable.
Sounds like heaven!