Fake porn of celebrities has been prevalent on the Internet for a long time. I don't have precise statistics, but I think it might predate the web. For the most part it hasn't been particularly controversial. Now that advances in technology have significantly improved the quality, everybody suddenly has a problem with it.
Let's back this up a few steps. You're an actor, you appear on television. By being filmed and accepting the pay offered to you, you're agreeing to allow these images of you be disseminated to the general public, for their enjoyment. But what if somebody finds you attractive, and looks at your picture whilst... you know. Can you sue? No, they're well within their rights to do so. What if they cut your face out and place it over a Playboy centerfold? Same deal. Several technogical innovations later, here we are. Fundamentally, nothing has changed. Fundamentally, people are still 100% within their rights to combine images legally obtained in this way. And post them online. This may not be what the Internet was created for, but this was always what it was used for.
> people are still 100% within their rights to combine images legally obtained in this way. And post them online.
Are they? If you distribute movies and media to the public, you normally are breaking laws. (Hence the infamous FBI warning on movies for a couple decades now.) Likewise, you cannot just use people's likeness in marketing and other public uses without their permission. So I'm not at all sure that just because you have an image, you have the rights to create and distribute derivative works from them.
If I film someone in public, even though I own the copyright on the film since I shot it, I still need to get them to sign a release to be able to utilize their likeness in my work. It's not a simple black and white issue and we'll need laws to catch up to address it. Claiming everything as "transformative" and thus you own the copyright as some do is silly. Otherwise, it would be legal for me to take everyone's Facebook pictures and "transform" them by putting them into the AI and sell the resulting AI porn.
> If you distribute movies and media to the public, you normally are breaking laws.
That's not what we are talking about. You can transform any public image for parody, criticism, etc. Porn is considered speech so anyone can make pornographic parodies/etc. This is especially true if fans are doing so for fun and not for profit.
Of course reddit has a right to ban it from their platform, but you as a fan can transform any public image and criticize, parody, etc it.
> Of course reddit has a right to ban it from their platform, but you as a fan can transform any public image and criticize, parody, etc it.
Maybe, maybe not. Transforming generally creates a derivative work. On its face that requires permission from the owner of the copyright of the work, but there may be exception that allows it in particular cases. In the case of parody in particular, it MAY be covered by fair use.
A lot of people on the net think that parody is automatically fair use, usually from misunderstanding the Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994) case.
Briefly, in the case, the district court said that parody was fair use. The appeals court said because it was commercial parody it presumptively could not be fair use.
The Supreme Court said they were both wrong, and it might be parody and sent the case back down to the lower courts.
A lot of people just looked at as the Supreme Court reversing the appellate court's reversing of the district court's ruling that parody was fair use, and took it as therefore the Supreme Court saying parody was fair use. (I don't blame people for misunderstanding--the press is generally terrible at reporting Supreme Court decisions. They often fail to interpret Supreme Court rulings in the context of the lower court decisions that led to the case).
That's not what we are talking about. You can transform any public image for parody, criticism, etc. Porn is considered speech so anyone can make pornographic parodies/etc.
This is true. It's not censorable free speech, meaning the government can't prohibit it ahead of time. But speech can be subject to tort claims despite surviving the First Amendment. A deepfake victim can sue for damages in civil courts, and there's a 99.99999% chance they'd win massive damages every time.
This is especially true if fans are doing so for fun and not for profit
Profit motive may affect the amount of damages, but it doesn't effect whether or not the victim can sue and win in a court of law. Even in the US, you'd be paying out significant damages to someone for damage to reputation or use of likeness.
What would their suit entail that isn't covered by existing porn parodies? So long as the final composition is labeled as a fake I don't see them winning on damage to reputation. Use of likeness might go through in a few states that cover non-commercial use but in most states as long as it's fan-made they would probably be okay.
I'm sure if you would ask the people in those fakes they had a problem with it from the beginning. "It has always been a thing" isn't an argument for something.
Usually people use the slippery slope to avoid things, not encourage a descent into depravity, but to each their own.
In any case, you shouldn't pretend as if this is morally okay just because you can focus in on each individual step and find a way to justify it. There are a lot of crimes that clearly fall into this bucket: stalking, for example. Any one interaction may be innocent, but it's the sum total of actions that completes the picture of abuse.
If you endorse distributing fake naked pictures of celebrities, you are a bad person, no matter your line of reasoning.
This is an interesting final opinion. Can you explain your reasoning? I’d like to understand more about why you dislike this?
This idea of altering images has always confused me. When I was a kid, I got a scanner and a printer. The first thing I did was take a picture of a Battletech Griffin 55 ton battlemech (a giant war robot) and replaced the robot head with that of my mom, titling it “Grifmom.” I thought it was awesome and she burst into tears and beat me terribly. I never understood why. And this didn’t have any nudity or offensive material, just a normal face on a robot body.
Do you honestly think that using someone else's copywritten material to transform yet another person's likeness into something that very few people would consent to (when you almost certainly didn't try to get consent) is a fair use right, legally or socially?
Well, it is definitely transformative. In fact, nothing of the original work really survives the transformation.
You can't merely copyright your likeness.
As for socially, consider this: They have used the likeness of Bruce Lee, Carrie Fischer, Prince, and Peter Cushing in commercial works, undoubtedly without prior consent. We also have "public" nude photos taken and distributed of celebrities on a regular basis (paparazzi). This appears to be quite socially acceptable, so I'll run with the idea that "socially acceptable" is pretty fluid when it comes to celebrities likenesses.
> They have used the likeness of Bruce Lee, Carrie Fischer, Prince, and Peter Cushing in commercial works, undoubtedly without prior consent.
Who is "they"? Who has been using Fischer's and Cushing's likenesses without contractual agreements?
> We also have "public" nude photos taken and distributed of celebrities on a regular basis (paparazzi)
Public photography has legal protections. Doesn't mean that if you took a photo of Obama at the gym you can use the photo in an ad campaign that suggests his approval of commercial usage.
I'm pretty sure celebrities have also been able to request the removal of fake porn featuring themselves, and online communities have been able to ban the posting of it. So we're not really in any particularly new territory here.
Luckily in the free world we don't need "rights" in order to do things. In third world countries people are often put in prison for photoshoping their leaders. Hopefully this trend towards that kind of authoritarianism doesn't continue in the west.
While I agree with you, it's much more invasive than a superimposed face on a still image.
A photograph of something is open to interpretation or dispute, but a video is a series of such stills, each one slightly different, each of which adds to the provenance of the whole.
Banning it doesn't make the underlying tech go away. You seem to imply a video is inherently more trustworthy, this is no longer the case, we need to acknowledge it.
What if they cut your face out and place it over a Playboy centerfold? Same deal. Several technogical innovations later, here we are. Fundamentally, nothing has changed.
You have two images, one physically overlaying the other...it's not even remotely the same thing as a single integrated image, technically or legally. Integrating the (edit) images (end edit) changes everything.
Fundamentally, people are still 100% within their rights to combine images legally obtained in this way. And post them online.
Completely. False. You may have the right to combine images for your own personal use (in the US, ignoring discussions of CP), but you absolutely do not have the right to distribute those images, and the associated tort actions both pre-date and have survived the First Amendment.
Let's back this up a few steps. You're an actor, you appear on television. By being filmed and accepting the pay offered to you, you're agreeing to allow these images of you be disseminated to the general public, for their enjoyment. But what if somebody finds you attractive, and looks at your picture whilst... you know. Can you sue? No, they're well within their rights to do so. What if they cut your face out and place it over a Playboy centerfold? Same deal. Several technogical innovations later, here we are. Fundamentally, nothing has changed. Fundamentally, people are still 100% within their rights to combine images legally obtained in this way. And post them online. This may not be what the Internet was created for, but this was always what it was used for.