Hayao Miyasaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio known worldwide for their stunning, emotional, beautiful stories and movies. At the core of Studio Ghibli’s work is a deep engagement with questions of humanity. About what it means to be a human, about how to care for one another and the world […]
They’re trying to make some type of argument that a private studio should have exclusive rights to a specific style of art and that by openai allowing users to generate art in that style, we are slipping into anti-democratic authoritarianism.
My opinion is that you can’t own “styles” of art and that there’s nothing wrong here. Legally speaking I can copy any art style I want.
Thanks for that explainer. I thought the verbiage in the article was a little over the top.
However there is a point at which the “style” of the art is the thing that is copyrightable, sort of by implication.
The standard for proving a copyright violation where a defendant claims a transformative use or a derivative work is “substantial similar.”
For as long as I can remember that includes the overall presentation of the work, and it’s hard to describe that as anything other than a “style.”
The article draws a comparison that allowing copyright protection for styles would be like allowing copyrights for entire genres. I don’t think that’s right. Nobody could copyright all “landscape paintings” as a genre, but look at landscape works by Katsushika Hokusai, and that style, to me, is creative enough to warrant protection, if it were made originally in America today and not already in the public domain. And he didn’t invent woodblock prints or even woodblock prints of landscapes, but the way he did it is so unique as to be insperable from the copyrighted work itself and arguably deserving of protection simply for its advancement of the art.
If you made a woodblock print in the same style but used it to portray a scene typical in anime, rather than a landscape, that’s clearly transformative and derivative, but not substantially similar. If you use the style to make prints of waves breaking around Mt. Fuji, that’s substantially similar. So like, as to dude’s anime style, if you use the same style to make landscapes, certainly that’s not infringing, as it’s not substantially similar.
I also don’t see the threatening outcome the author suggests as worrisome. There are still exceptions for blatant copying that apply, mainly parody and fair use.
They’re trying to make some type of argument that a private studio should have exclusive rights to a specific style of art and that by openai allowing users to generate art in that style, we are slipping into anti-democratic authoritarianism.
My opinion is that you can’t own “styles” of art and that there’s nothing wrong here. Legally speaking I can copy any art style I want.
Thanks for that explainer. I thought the verbiage in the article was a little over the top.
However there is a point at which the “style” of the art is the thing that is copyrightable, sort of by implication.
The standard for proving a copyright violation where a defendant claims a transformative use or a derivative work is “substantial similar.”
For as long as I can remember that includes the overall presentation of the work, and it’s hard to describe that as anything other than a “style.”
The article draws a comparison that allowing copyright protection for styles would be like allowing copyrights for entire genres. I don’t think that’s right. Nobody could copyright all “landscape paintings” as a genre, but look at landscape works by Katsushika Hokusai, and that style, to me, is creative enough to warrant protection, if it were made originally in America today and not already in the public domain. And he didn’t invent woodblock prints or even woodblock prints of landscapes, but the way he did it is so unique as to be insperable from the copyrighted work itself and arguably deserving of protection simply for its advancement of the art.
If you made a woodblock print in the same style but used it to portray a scene typical in anime, rather than a landscape, that’s clearly transformative and derivative, but not substantially similar. If you use the style to make prints of waves breaking around Mt. Fuji, that’s substantially similar. So like, as to dude’s anime style, if you use the same style to make landscapes, certainly that’s not infringing, as it’s not substantially similar.
I also don’t see the threatening outcome the author suggests as worrisome. There are still exceptions for blatant copying that apply, mainly parody and fair use.