Photographers using these kinds of copyright enforcement services are only hurting themselves in the long run. Most aren’t going to risk multiple thousands of pounds worth of fines for a few content images. They’ll switch to AI-generated content, or won’t use images at all, and licensing revenue will eventually decline.
If these enforcement services were legitimate entities instead of parasitic trolls, they would start by providing the infringer with options to either remove the image or purchase a royalty free license at a reasonable price, and only impose punitive fees if they continued to infringe.
Maybe, but "photographers" aren't really a collective... or too loose a collective to have foresight, interests and such.
The credit industry, traditionally, has a cascade of debt collection tiers. Once one tier fails to collect, they'll sell on the debt. The value of the debt (asset, to the collector) decreases drastically as we travel down the tiers. The "quality" of collectors also decreases. Business models that depend on illegal practices, betting on inadequate enforcement. Trial preparations that depend on 99% certainty of defendant not showing up. Most of the debt might be arbitrarily imposed interest and fines to nonresponsive "clients." The lawyer present may not have paperwork, or even know the companies' originally owed.
Financial assets like bad debt portfolios scale and bundle wonderfully, so there's no floor. There are multi-million dollar packages out there selling for $1000. An enterprising individual might take a blind chance. Apply creative means of collecting 1.3% of total debt. Maybe you offer 90% settlements. Maybe impose 500% fees and sell on. Maybe you specialise in deceased estates, acquire high morbidity debtor lists, and use systemic timing to advantge. Maybe you rebunde such that specialists can have a crack.
Anyway... At the copyright trolling end of this game, I'd make a distinction between "photographers," "rights holders" and the "copyright biz." What some shady lawtech startup does to monetize a copyright portfolio owned by their pay-per-performance client... "Photographer" is not really an active category within this structure.
> Once one tier fails to collect, they'll sell on the debt
I think there should be a law stating that if your debt is sold to a third party and you are not offered to settle with the same amount than the third party was paying, the debt should be automatically forgiven. Yep, that would make many loans more difficult to issue, and that would be net good.
Maybe. I mean, it might makes moral sense maybe. IRL, these things play out in unsatisfying ways.
"that would make many loans more difficult to issue"
Maybe in some cases, but I'm broadly skeptical. Selling bad debt is usually not an important part of non-shady businesses models. 2nd order effects, if any, are likely to be the main concern. If a business is known to offer 10% settlements after 2 years... that predictability will eventually be taken advantage of.
Honestly, I think the debt stuff (also aspects of copyright) are just the loose ends of major industries. Most bad debt or long tail IP assets aren't worth much. But if you can bundle, they're never too small to monetize.
Once you have an industry dedicated to squeezing that last drop... you probably have a destructive industry.
IMO, the best solutions is policing. Somehow, policing is rarely mentioned as a solution to corporate crime. That might mean occasionally tweaking laws to help make policing effective... but that only makes sense ifyou are already policing.
I bet these trolls are as sloppy as the victims they're targeting. At least in debt collection, at a certain depth... they're not doing any due diligence. Often, all they have is a name, number and sum. That means they often are collecting on BS premises. Charge them with fraud, or racketeering. A business practice premised on demanding payment of a debt, without proof that the debt is real... that's an extortion racket.
I wonder if the trolls here can stand up to scrutiny. Do they actually own the rights? Have they based their business model on strategic avoidance of due diligence? From what I've heard, IP trolling exists by exploiting liability limits of both corporate law, and practical law enforcement.
> If a business is known to offer 10% settlements after 2 years... that predictability will eventually be taken advantage of.
Yep. And the next order effect is that the business stops selling bad debt and sits on it. And eventually starts thinking more carefully to whom lends money.
Most lenders already know how risky a particular loan is. They know the predicted default rate and price the credit accordingly, including the sell-on value. Reducing the sell-on value won't make them "more careful", it will just make them price the credit higher.
That may make the very, very bottom tier of borrowers unable to borrow--maybe--but it doesn't prevent the vast amount of borrowers from getting a loan. It just makes it more expensive.
Ad I said, I'm skeptical of the more expansive of such expectations. They might just sit on the debt, almost certainly if it's valued below a certain sum.
The chains of effect leading to a useful improvement in lending prudence... long. The opportunities to stray some other way, many. Graveyards are full of wonks that expect a minor policy tweak to fix a problem, rather than just move it around.
Most of these debts are unpaid bills, car payments, etc. Not businesses that specialise in debt. They outsource that part, and that part outsources too. "More prudent" means credit rating standards, or (usually) higher interest rate. That's not doing anything useful, IMO. You still get left with as much or more defaults, lawless collection, etc.
IMO, if when we want to actually deal with something, we drop the grand ideas and operate at the level of the issue we want to affect. Where there are multiple "orders," we want to tightly control the "chain."
Lawlessness in debt collection? Law enforcement. IP trolls abusing the legal system. Make it illegal.
Look... Google, FB and such had IP laws specially tailored to them. Timed and written to shield them from legitimate copyright infringement claims, taking into account their ability to "implement IP" without interfering with their business too much. Where is the law for the person in OP's shoes? It doesn't exist. He has to suffice with the print paradigm that existed before www.
Not-incidentally, the "print paradigm" was tailored for newspapers. That's what fair use is. It's not some abstract concept that happened to work for news. It was designed for them, probably by them. Copyright just isn't designed to work for ordinary people, so once you have incidents like this posts'... the realistic thing to do is avoid being a copyright user at all.
If you want a clever law expected to make debt valued <X% impossible to profitably collect, make it dumb. You probably need an institution of some sort to control that second order, or a willingness to make blanket laws that harm other participants that aren't your target. Consider the RL structure of consumer lending, not a chalkboard model.
Disney, Google, or the think tanks they fund to develop laws... they're certainly looking for a tightly controlled cause-effect chain with built in guarantees.
The daily mail et al will continue to pay them - £150 for the first photo £50 for each additional [1] of "celebrity walking into a party" or "royal shakes hand".
Are people with blogs really paying Getty Images £150-£450 to have one of their images on their blog post? I suspect nobody else was paying the photographers for the images before this and nobody will after, it changes nothing.
Royalties are typically calculated by quantity: you do N transactions, you pay N x Y to the rightsowner. For photos it could be the number of magazines you print, or a percentage of sale on each magazine, or the number of impressions on a website, etc.
"Royalty free licenses" are typically one-offs. You pay a fixed amount and then are free to reproduce the work as many times as you want. Some of these contracts might be limited, i.e. you can only do it in one magazine issue etc.
Yep - I could say "here, you can use my photo for your book cover, just give me a penny for each book made or sold".
But it's simpler accounting to go with "give me $1000 for use of my photo in one case" or even "everything" but then rarely my photo ends up on the cover of Harry Potter 12: Eclectic Boogaloo and I feel I missed out.
All humans are doing is ripping off other people's work to train themselves to produce art, or writing, or code, or whatever other endeavor that's not completely technical.
If you'd spend any time at all looking at midjourney creations, there's no way you can conclude that there's any significant amount of "ripping off" people's work. Certainly not in all or most cases.
With the right prompt you might be able to get something that looks eerily similar to an existing work, or artist style, but hardly anyone is interested in doing that, except for memes which are by definition modified and transformative. Nobody wants to AI-generate a mimic of a copyrighted work. If they wanted to do that, they'd just rip off the original work.
None of this is a new issue. The Warhol case even resolved one remaining facet. If you take an original work and apply photoshop filters to it, or do the equivalent manually or with AI, that doesn't alleviate the copyright compliance burden. The fuzzy area is how similar something has to be to fall under copyright; that'll remain subjective until the law or courts resolve it or copyright collapses entirely under its own weight, but the vast majority of AI generated content is nowhere close.
>If you'd spend any time at all looking at midjourney creations, there's no way you can conclude that there's any significant amount of "ripping off" people's work. Certainly not in all or most cases.
They were trained on work of people who didn't consent to it, the authors were not compensated, and currently are losing money (demand for their work) because of it. How is that not ripping off.
Please don't compare software to people. They're not similar legally, morally or in any other meaningful way.
Creators don't get compensated just because you wish them to be. Creators don't get compensated based on the fact that they put work into something. Creators can't demand money in license fees when something they produced is used by someone else, unless there's a contract saying so.
Copyright is not about consent to use. It's about consent to copy.
You're confusing copyright with licensing, where, for instance, I pay amazon to contractually license me an electronic copy of a book.
AI companies did not enter into and then violate contracts with anyone for the material they used to train. Some of them may have run afoul of ordinary copyright law to acquire the content in the first place.[1] Even supposing they did, that act is the violation; it wouldn't subsequently be an additional violation to train an AI using those works, instead of keeping the works around on a storage array, as long as it wasn't redistributed.
The alternative to AI models currently at issue—created by OpenAI Midjourney StabilityAI Meta Alphabet et al from a corpus of partly openly available content and partly content of dubious provenance—is not some license scheme where creators get compensated equitably. The real alternative is for companies like Disney and Adobe and book publishers and record labels to band together and have their own paywalled AI models and extract rent from that forever, which would still be sufficient to saturate the market for imagined content, and would still kill demand for everyone else's work.
[1] I'm skeptical, though open-minded, about this. I'm not aware of any successful lawsuits, or any lawsuits at all, targeting defendants who only downloaded copyrighted content from pirate sources, as long as they did not upload or re-upload at all. There might have been, and probably were sometimes, threatening letters sent to people's ISPs. Threatening letters don't mean anything at all.
If I compress a Getty images photo to .jpg and put it on my website I’m still breaching copyright even though it’s gone through lossy compression and isn’t exactly the same. That’s essentially all a AI model is doing.
And copyright applies to every copy, not just when you download something to train the model. It also applies every time you make a copy with said model.
Then make it closed source and sell usage tokens. It reminds me of kids on Scratch copying programs made by other kids then put "I MADE THIS!" in the description box.
A whole chapter could be written about turning (other peoples) images into executables and assert ownership with a new kind of DRM.
If these enforcement services were legitimate entities instead of parasitic trolls, they would start by providing the infringer with options to either remove the image or purchase a royalty free license at a reasonable price, and only impose punitive fees if they continued to infringe.