Dear @creativecommons ,

I read your article about your initiative for new licenses for dataset holders in the AI industry.

Let’s be clear: I do not want to re-license my hundreds of CC-By comic pages to please AI giants.

I wish you would support CC artists suffering from massive plagiarism. You should enforce your own existing licenses against AI mass crawling. It seems you’ve joined the battle only after the casualties and still managed to side with the wrong people.

https://creativecommons.org/2025/06/25/introducing-cc-signals-a-new-social-contract-for-the-age-of-ai/

@davidrevoy @creativecommons i might misunderstand this: Isn't this more about creating a way to express an artists terms towards using their work for ai? Meaning just like i can select a CC with -BY- i should be able to select something like -NOAI- or only non commercial AI.... give more control and make it very clear what's allowed and what isn't? I would like that... Making sure my work is open for humans and not for ai. I would also imagine such an ai specific license would make legal battles a lot easier... just some thoughts.

@ms_zwiebel @creativecommons Unfortunately, there is no mention of a 'no AI' rule... quite the opposite, in fact. You can read the four drafts by following the links here: https://github.com/creativecommons/cc-signals?tab=readme-ov-file#cc-signals-1

It's just an attempt to reinvent CC-By, but written 'for AI', so it's modern instead of enforcing their own legacy CC-By. There's also the promise of breadcrumbs for artists in the form of financial contributions, but it's the AI giants who decide who gets how much in good faith, lol. It cannot work.

@davidrevoy

I'd love to pick your brains about this particular news. From what I can read it looks so vague that it's no so much introducing something as inducing anxiety.

I have no reaction because it doesn't appear to have anything in it. Perhaps out of sheer cowardice. It's hard to gauge anything other the a will to "do something" or be seen to be doing something at least.

Interested?

@doctormo Sure! But I think the four links on their Github https://github.com/creativecommons/cc-signals?tab=readme-ov-file#cc-signals-1 with mini draft 'key idea' for the four new licenses speaks already a lot about the intent, the philosophy behind it.
- Tailoring an attribution licence for AI giants in case they change their minds and decide to respect something.
- Believing in the royalties breadcrumb system, whereby the AI lord decides in good faith (lol, their words) who receives the financial micro-percentage income from reuse. yay.

@davidrevoy @creativecommons ahhh i only read the post from them not the drafts, sorry. If there is no special options to disallow or set rules for AI use i agree... i will check out the draft to get an idea...

@ms_zwiebel @creativecommons Yes, I'm curious to see how this draft will evolve. Hopefully they'll realise that a NOAI tag would be a welcome addition to the BY/SA/NC/ND family. But we can let them know this, can't we? 🙂

@davidrevoy I would be happy if they just said: there were always clear rules. cc by can be used by machines, but then every single creator whose creations got used must be attributed properly.

Most of my creations are under cc by-sa. If a machine builds something on top of my creations, the rule *should* be clear: keep the license. If it reads cc by-sa, it must be cc by-sa (or a compatible license like GPLv3).
1/2
@creativecommons

@ArneBab @creativecommons Very true. I wish they could help creators and huge CC content providers enforce CC licensing in the era of AI. That's all. CC-By-Sa and Wikipedia are good examples of this. CC should fight to make all prompt output CC-BY-SA if they used Wikipedia.

Also, what I wish for is a clear NOAI tag that artists could use, (eg. CC-BY-NOAI )

This would complement the BY/SA/NC/ND toolset and make it easier to enforce the licence if the artwork were to be found in any dataset.

@davidrevoy
Alternatively let’s apply the same to humans: allow me to build on Star Wars for my own art, then I’ll gladly allow machines similar with my works.

But doing that requires new international "Intellectual Property" treaties.

2/2
@creativecommons

@creativecommons The fact that there isn’t a “no AI use” option is first and foremost telling about who this is for. It’s an after the fact permission of the abuse that these companies have already subjected us all to.

They’ve been abusing both shared resources (the environment), and the resources of others (our intellectual property, and the web servers we host our stuff on), and by extension have violated the social contract.

And even if there was a no AI option with these new rules for Creative Commons, the past behavior of these companies has made it crystal clear that they won’t bother respecting it. They pull back when big enough companies push back, but the rest of us can’t afford to go after them in court, so they just run right over us like we don’t matter.

All this is, is giving them permission after they’ve already abused the common good will. Doing that will only further build up their sense of entitlement.

Who did you all consult? Just the AI companies, right? No one who actually has looked at the harm these companies are doing, clearly.

@davidrevoy

@deathkitten @creativecommons Yes, we clearly need a NOAI in the CC toolset of BY/NC/ND/SA... Something that would be enforcable in front of the law if the artwork is reused for AI. I'll be ready to use a "CC BY-NOAI" license like that if it existed.

@Linebyline @ms_zwiebel I agree completely. The ideal would be to not have to opt out at all. If CC had a spine, it should be built-in every CC license by default.

@davidrevoy @creativecommons from the 4 proposed signals (credit, direct contribution, ecosystem contribution and open), none of them is about forbidding the usage of the assets to train AI😬

https://creativecommons.org/ai-and-the-commons/cc-signals/implementation/

@davidrevoy
But... Who are the right people?

And what do you expect as the "right" solution? To deny CC-licensed art usage for machine learning by default? I don't think that would be fair too.

@skobkin In my final sentence, the 'right people' metaphor clearly refers to the users of their licences: CC artists, authors and content creators.

What they wrote here looks tailored to the AI giant industry. I would tell them that they are kissing up in the hope of receiving crumbs.

Yes, CC should build the 'no AI' rule into all their license to protect users, and offer an 'AI' option in their toolset (BY/SA/NC/ND) for those who want to opt in. I think that would be fair.

@skobkin @davidrevoy

From how I see it CC-BY licensed art is allowed for machine learning, except only if it actually follows the license. The fact that software companies cannot meaningfully do that in image generators and LLMs is not the fault of the license or people wanting their work to be at least credited.

@untsuki @davidrevoy
Wait. When you saying "at least credited" that means that the work was either reproduced or modified. But that's not how generative models work.
They can mimic the style, but license is not applied to it.

And if user uses something like Stable Diffusion with David's work as an input and asks it to modify it, then it's on the user.

Let's say I'm asked to draw an image in the style of David (I can't draw, but that's irrelevant). I do that. Do I need to credit David? For me that's not really clear.

I personally can leave a link to his works because I like them and want them to be spread. But I don't think that every author inspired by his works should do that.

@skobkin @untsuki If the AI dataset has a CC-By input, the output is a derivative work and therefore the attribution should follow. This is a possible enforcement of the CC Attribution license.
Also, the concept of 'style' does not apply to machines; they cannot define a style that is not connected to a clear input file. If a file was used in the process, it's reuse. That's all. ¯\(ツ)/¯

@davidrevoy @ArneBab @creativecommons I guess NC and ND already forbid most of the AI use. They just don’t care about it…

@breizh @creativecommons @ArneBab True!

@davidrevoy @creativecommons

I just read this and... I have no idea what they're saying. It just seems to be an entire page of jargon and rah-rah devoid of any actual meaning.

As far as I can see, the fundamental issue is that they're proceeding from the flawed position that the "AI" companies have any redeeming value to society at large whatsoever (they don’t), and that they care what license we publish under (they don’t).

@knbrindle @creativecommons I think you understood the point correctly, immediately identifying the two major flaws in their reasoning. 👍

Yes, they worked hard on the rah-rah jargon to duck the issue, or perhaps they delegated this task to an LLM 🤣 I wouldn't be surprised at this point.

@davidrevoy @untsuki

If the AI dataset has a CC-By input, the output is a derivative work and therefore the attribution should follow.

If I learn to draw using your work (not only yous, but yours ALSO), should my work be considered derivative of yours?

they cannot define a style that is not connected to a clear input file

Eh... no? Each input file only slightly affects the resulting weights. It's somewhat similar to how humans learn to do things based on other's work.
You can't distinctly say whose works affected the result of the "AI"-generated image. You can guess, but you can't say for sure. Well, people like to say with confidence things they don't understand, but if we trying to keep the logical discourse, than it's much more difficult.

@skobkin @untsuki You are human, your brain will only learn what you like. What you care, yes, it's a privilege you have over a machine to learn a process from source, forget the source, and make it your own. A machine doesn't have this privilege.

@davidrevoy I'm not sure what you mean by enforcing their licenses? They can only enforce their licenses on works they own; they don't have any right to enforce anyone else's copyrights, even if they wrote the license the work is published under.

@Thad Well, I'm sure they own a couple of things that AI could replicate, such as their own CC logos or pictures on their blog. They could use their legal expertise to conduct an exemplary trial, win it, and then set a legal precedent that would enable many other CC artists to follow in their footsteps.

@davidrevoy @creativecommons Fucking hell. Next time I see a ✨ on something I’m burning it.

@indigoviolet @creativecommons Oh yes, +1 and seeing the CC logo and this thing next to it makes me want to... 🤢

@ms_zwiebel In addition to what @davidrevoy said, NOAI is a problem because it's an opt-out: Anyone not using it is presumed opted-in.

Accepting a NOAI tag means conceding that literally everything that *doesn't* have the tag is fair game for the scrapers. And it's not fair to artists, especially ones with huge bodies of work, to make them go and tag each and every work with a new NO[whatever] every time a new exploitative technology comes out.

@ms_zwiebel @davidrevoy To put it a bit more pithily: It's still assault even if they weren't wearing a "don't punch me" tag.

@Linebyline @ms_zwiebel @davidrevoy There is some flaw in your reasoning. Not opting-out does not mean you opted-in. That would be very weird.

Normally opt-out is really shitty since companies love to to assume you consented to something. Bad practice in software in general, also why for example the EU stepped in with GDPR. To make clear that “no assuming consent is not good enough or allowed” (within reason there is a lot to the GDPR so please excuse this gros simplification here)

Copyright works on a different basis. It is opt-out by default but here it works in favor of creatives. It is generally assumed in copyright that unless stated otherwise you keep all the right to your creation to yourself and no one is allowed to use it in any capacity* without your explicit consent (the famous “all rights reserved”)

Now copyright is a highly legislated field but I am pretty sure this general assumption is still the norm to this day.

There is obvs. the big elephant in the room here called “ fair use”. Its a whole can of worms which is very complicated tbh. The general terms would be this (in the US):

“the fair use of a copyrighted work, […] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”

But if AI meets any of these critieria is a legislative question. Also AI-Use will involve IP-law as well.

So no I don’t think the addition of an “No AI” would make it a free-for-all to use any images that don’t have the tag for AI. Copyright itself is so much opt-out its the reason why creative-commons even exists.

without CC I would need to assume that every image I see on the internet is considered “all rights reserved” and if I can’t claim fair use I would need to message the artist and ask for permission first. Gets tiring fast.

Creative Commons is a legal framework where artists can license a broad set conditions to x-people with a common license.

So generally I think it is a good Idea that CC adds more signals to its system just so its easier for artists to express their will in a legally binding and legally-approved way. There shall be discussion on what that entails.

Also there is the technical aspect. How do I tell AI this. Its not reading the webpage like a human would looking for license info. So you would need to find a way to tag the image with say CC-NOAI in machine readable form and make it in a way its very parasitic and cannot be stripped from the image without making it useless. I would then still scrape all images but toss-out these that have such tags. But that assumes no ill-intent on the side of the creator of the AI. Which was shown we cannot trust on. But how to enforce this.

CC cannot really help you out here since its the individuals matter to protect their copyright in court. CC could only maybe collect such cases and make some sort of combined legal case…

@Linebyline @davidrevoy @ms_zwiebel now what I cannot tell you is if such a explicit ban of the use of AI is stronger than fair use.

I would think no since not even the most restrictive default-state of "all rights reserved" cannot do that.

I might be wrong here, I only do tax-law for a living not IP-law xD. So you are welcome to educate me.

@carl @davidrevoy @creativecommons @rick As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread: The CC-Signals proposal is building on top of an IETF proposal. The IETF proposal allows `ai=n` to opt-out of all training-use. CC-Signals then allow you to provide more fine-grained exceptions to that.

So, the reason there is no CC-signal forbidding it altogether is that having that option is a precondition for CC-signals.

@stefan @davidrevoy @Linebyline @ms_zwiebel "How do I tell AI this. Its not reading the webpage like a human would looking for license info."

Okay now can we take a step back and look what happened here. This is a complete backwards view of responsibility and a massive power shift. Why should the artist be responsible for making AI behave according to law? If the AI is not reading the license, it has to be illegal, period. It cannot legally use any material that it can't determine the license of.

This is the fight that artists and copyright holders need to fight. If AI training is deemed fair use, then all licensing ceases to matter. If it exists, it can and will be scraped. If you don't make it your hill to die on that AI is responsible for respecting licenses, then the battle is lost.

@stefan @davidrevoy @Linebyline @ms_zwiebel This is a matter of legal principle too. The same thing cannot be illegal if I do it once but legal if I do it a billion times with a computer.

@Merovius @carl @davidrevoy @creativecommons @rick if that’s the case, they massively messed up in communicating this

@skaphle (I will just untag some people here if thats okay. Not really wanting to spam their mentions if not needed)

I am with you that it is illegal to just take images from somewhere and putting into a dataset is (in most cases) illegal. As I outlined with the general opt-out nature of copyright. That is until a court decides otherwise.

Enforcing it is obviously is the problem. Disney and Universal are fighting OpenAI in court over this issue right now. Will be an interesing case to follow.

Scraping in and of itself can be still fair use btw. Its more a matter of how you use the data. Doing this for scientific for the research of AI in a scientific setting might be deemed legal (i.e because scientific is considered fair use broadly)

If openAI can clear that mark I dunno. But likely not since they are using stuff commercially not just to research behaviour of AI and stuff. But thats ultimately the job of courts to decide.

As I said as well i dunno if an explicit prohibition in a license can beat fair use or not. If yes the NoAI-tag might proof useful as it makes for a clear against thr alternative of fighting over fair use or not. Making that tag machine-readable / embedded also makes sure you cannot claim.you did not know as an AICompany.

But as I said I dunno if thats correct or not. If fair use beats that and OpenAI somehow gets FairUse through we are fucked anyway

@creativecommons Psss! After reading all those comments here, I just had to channel my inner artist. So, here’s my new logo for you; because clearly, you need all the help you can get in your new mission. You're welcome! 😂

@davidrevoy

I like that, mind if I add it to my article here https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/ai-signal/ when it's published online? 8-D

@creativecommons

@oblomov Thank you and sure! Feel free to reuse it. I can't apply a CC license to it because the CC logo is trademarked, but let's say it's for 'fair use' and only on a non commercial and humorous purposes. 😉

@davidrevoy "building a more equitable, sustainable AI ecosystem rooted in shared benefits" Shared benefits? LOL. I don't want to share anything with fascist, world burning billionaires and their dream machines.

I don't see why we need extra signals and I don't see how it would help if their bots circumvent any measures and contracts we had for ages. The ones who have to change are no we who want to share and value an open internet, its them who must change! creativecommons@mastodon.social

@davidrevoy

I don't want to "debate", I want to understand. I think/worry there are important issues going on beneath the surface of this discussion that I worry are being channeled through "Do you love big corporate AI or not?"

These questions are things like:

1. What do you see is the purpose and role of Public Domain?
2. What do you see as the boundaries of Freedom 0?
3. What is the role of attribution in this discussion?
4. What is the role of labeling generally here, eg would an "AI" label help?
5. What is the role of the license of the AI model? Would you feel more comfortable with a Free model ingesting your work than a proprietary model?
6. What options do you feel CC had in this? You feel they should have incremented their licenses with this new restriction under the "or newer" clause?
7. What is impersonation vs copying an art style?

Where can people who care about Free Culture discuss these and similar topics?

@creativecommons

@serge @creativecommons So many interesting questions, but I'm limited to 500 characters here on my instance (and I'm also limited by my 'french artist's brain' 🤣).

Ping @doctormo , who is also interested in creating a discussion about the Free Culture Challenge in the era of AI.

@davidrevoy They have a forum on github: https://github.com/creativecommons/cc-signals/discussions

Would be cool if more people commented there, so they can't just ignore "a few people on mastodon".

@jollysea Thank you for linking it here. Yes, I read it yesterday and added my +1 to many threads.

However, I don't expect them to change their minds or publish something about coming back on what they wrote.

Creative Commons relies mainly on subsidies, so if they move in this direction, it's probably to follow the money. I'm sure they'll invent a new ethics policy to justify this and demonise anyone who opposes their plans...

@davidrevoy @creativecommons@mastodon.social I released works under the CC to allow them to be remixed by people, not corporate machines

@elfi Exactly. 💜

@davidrevoy Voire Creative Crawling

@danslerush Oh, celle-ci est bien aussi! 😆

@davidrevoy @serge @creativecommons

Thanks for the tag in.

There's a lot of questions to ask, although I admit to being interested in different ones centred on consent, the social implication of being abused without recourse, and of course then the active discussion on "signalling" can happen on top of those resolutions.

So I guess we need a bunch of perspectives because we are not on the same page (might not even be the same book!)

@doctormo @serge @creativecommons Right. 👍

@davidrevoy

When I was at QuestionCopyright.org, they had an idea that I think never got the right level of endorsement. The idea was called the Creator Mark, and the way it would work is that it would let anyone produce a work, even for profit, under a very Free license, but then if you wanted to support the artist, only when the artist agreed, they'd be able to use the Creator Mark.

For example, let's say that I wanted to make a book of P&C. Nothing stops me from doing so.

But if my neighbor wants to make the same book, he'd come to you and say "I'll give you 25% of the profits", you agree, and then he can use the "Creator Mark" to show that if you buy from him (vs me), it supports you.

I wonder if so much of the issue with "AI" isn't "AI", but other issues you raised such as (your word) "plagiarism". Is it someone pretending the work is yours? Can we use attribution to address that? Should AI be required to attribute itself in the output? etc.

@serge As you know, it's not an issue with LLMs, AI or the technique itself (src: even before the AI boom https://www.davidrevoy.com/article642/ , or more recently, Krita's and GMIC's own neural network experimentation on a small ethic dataset with consent).

I have more of a problem with the abuse of the 'fair use', the impossibility of expressing a non-consenting opinion, and how my work, which has been crawled, contributes to something that infringes my moral and political beliefs (and threaten my own job).

@leah @davidrevoy @creativecommons yep what we want is just *less tigers eating faces* not more sharing with the tigers eating faces party.

@f4grx @leah @davidrevoy

Today sounds like an excellent time to bring up Nightshade.

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

#AI #creativecommons

@vansice @f4grx @leah Not FLOSS + not for Linux = no thanks.

Also, it is not known to be efficient enough. Attempts by other teams to replicate the protection on trained dataset were ineffective. Simply scaling down or filtering the picture would break the protection. It's a shame.

But it looks like they are building up a strong supporter base, using the authority artists figure bias to gain credibility. As soon as they make it commercial, they will make a lot of profit for sure...

@davidrevoy

I know, that's why I'm wondering what CC could have done differently to not bring up your ire! :)

The issue of consent models is a key component for sure. One thing that I see as a core issue here is the idea of "default yes" or "default no".

It sounds like you would have preferred CC take a "default no" position regarding AI use, and CC's position is "This is already allowed so in order to make it not allowed, we must be explicit"

@serge Yes...

@davidrevoy Wait, what does a language model have to do with Krita? Do you have a link with more information about this?

@BetaRays Sure, the experimentation was fully transparent https://krita.org/en/posts/2024/fast_sketch_plugin/ , and on the forum https://krita-artists.org/t/introducing-a-new-project-fast-line-art/94265

I was around to help (giving feedback, sometime) Tiar, the sole developer on this project, with her progress. Many artists on the forum provided a selection of artwork, including sketches and corresponding line art, under an ethical licence to create a dataset that only Krita could use to train this 'filter on steroids' experiment.

@davidrevoy Ah, I see, but that’s not a language model then. I was a bit scared there 😅

@BetaRays Sure, I sometimes use LLM for anything that has been trained on a dataset, even images. My bad, sorry. I should have used 'neural networks'. I'll make a quick edit to the footer of this toot. Thank you for spotting it!

@davidrevoy

I genuinely don't think they could have done this legally with confidence that it would have worked in court.

@serge Yes, maybe they're waiting for a precedent-setting court case, probably involving major copyright issues, before trying anything with a CC licence.
A big trial like the recent one where Disney and Universal are suing AI firm Midjourney¹ might unlock many things if they win.

How ironic this is! I'm now rooting for a Disney intellectual property case. 🙃

(¹) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo

@davidrevoy @creativecommons Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they update their current licenses, you will have to relicense everything anyway.

@4c31 Not really, you can still publish under CC By-Sa 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en even if the 4.0 is most up to date now. That's one of the good thing about CC licenses, and Wikipedia, Open Game Art have many versions.

When I wrote "I do not want to re-license my hundreds [...]" it was in a meaning that there is nothing that attracts me in benefiting the four new 'CC Signals' licenses proposal ( CR / CR-DC / CR-EC / CR-OP , https://github.com/creativecommons/cc-signals?tab=readme-ov-file#cc-signals-1 ).

@davidrevoy I'm sorry if I didn't express myself correctly; English is not my first language. What I meant to say is that if you have CC X and then they launch CC Y, you would need to relicense if you want to use CC Y. However, with your clarification, I now understand what you mean.

@4c31 No worry, I'm on the same boat (French here), and it is not the first time that I miss the nuances in a discussion, especially on a complex topic like license. Thank you for the clarification too!

@davidrevoy @ArneBab @creativecommons isn't output from AI actually public domain? afaik there's not copyright on machine output. so, no CC can be enforced in this sense (SA)

@prinlu that is still to be found out.

AI does not *add* copyright to content, but the copyright of the sources may survive.
@davidrevoy @creativecommons

@ArneBab @prinlu @creativecommons Yes, and also you might accidentally get an AI output that is a blatant plagiarism without knowing it. You can't therefore be sure your output is public domain.
Eg. if someone ask the AI to generate a warrior with a big sword in dark fantasy, and the AI generate Guts (Berserk). If you never see this manga and use the character as your concept-art for your video game project thinking it's public domain, you might run into big trouble with your final game.

@davidrevoy @ArneBab @creativecommons hmmm...

"Under current law, content produced entirely by AI immediately enters the public domain, allowing unrestricted commercial use. Works can be copyrighted if they are authored by a human that provides ‘meaningful input’, and AI is just used as a tool."

https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2025/03/20/ai-generated-works-are-public-domain-court-affirms/

@prinlu under current *US* law.

Those decisions are being disputed, though.
@davidrevoy @creativecommons

@ArneBab @prinlu @creativecommons I wish it was so simple as claiming that every output is "public domain", but it's more complex, esp. regarding Intellectual Property.
Eg. The Terminator picture with a guitar generated (in your link) is clearly reusing the Terminator Intellectual Property. It's an accumulation of elements: the glasses, the face, body, the jacket... If you try to make a business with selling this picture, the copyright owner (StudioCanal) might sue you and win easily.

@davidrevoy @ArneBab @creativecommons well, in the US that was tried in the courts and the courts said no. it's not me who's claiming that. it's a judiciary precedent.

it doesn't mean it makes sense. especially from a more european point of view (or understanding of IP / copyright law), but that's the reality of these artifical (as opposed to natural) laws. we can both agree that AI output is a rip-off of work of many humans and is damaging, but copyright law in US (at least) - as far as I understand - is based on human output/intervention. automatic output from machine learning does not fall under that under that system.

it's amazing how copyright law protected content industry from taping onwards, and it now allows this excemption for the big tech. in all cases those with a lot get more, and those with little get nada.

again, i don't think it's actually constructive to debate copyright law. it will not protect the artist. it never did.

to be fair, even CC was not about protecting the artist, but about protecting the consumer from being a criminal (via help from the artist who slapped the CC on it). ok maybe the ShareAlike clause was a way to ensure enriching the commons in favour of everyone, I guess.

@prinlu @ArneBab @creativecommons No: the court refused the author of "A Recent Entrance To Paradise" to be copyrighted. Not a case of a owner fighting for their intellectual properties.

The fact "it can't be copyrighted" doesn't mean it cannot be attacked if it degrades the Intellectual property of a brand, or owner, or bring them commercial prejudices.

The result of this https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo will answer (on a US law POV) the debate around Intellectual Property usage in AI output...

@stefan Not sure what you mean. Maybe the opt-in/opt-out language is tripping us up, so let's call it default-allow/default-deny.

Under a theoretical US copyright law that wasn't weighted in favor of whoever had the most expensive lawyers, copyright is a default-deny system. Copyright reserves certain rights to (usually, initially) creators, and those rights are *denied* to everyone else unless the copyright holder explicitly *allows* it. (1/2)

@stefan NOAI flips that on its head. If we accept that AI scrapers can use anything that doesn't have NOAI, that means copyright is now default-allow for any use that has a NO[whatever] tag.

And the existence of NOAI implies that. If I use NOAI only for new work, scrapers can argue that's implicit permission because why would I say no to some if I mean no to all? And if it becomes a standard, they can argue that anyone not using the standard deny implicitly want to allow. (2/2)

@Linebyline Its not how copyright works (Part two of.the post). As you say it is default-deny in its core. This does not change with a Tag that explicitly states NO[Whatever]. You ALWAYS retain the rights to your UNLESS you explicitly allow usage. Thats ultimately the spirit of the law.

The addage of a line that says "No one can use this for anything, but fuck AI in general" does not change that nor makes it anything default-allow. You cannot assume that in copyright. Never. When you are in doubt over if you can use something or not. The answer will lean to "no". Everything else will end very badly for you.

Technically even Public Domain is only a license and you retain some form of copyright. you just grant a very very permissive license.

You actually got it right with the first part.

I know I am generalizing here but its the spirit of the law, pretty certainly. I did not get into exceptions like private-copies or fair use here.

@stefan Public Domain is not a license. It is the absence of copyright. Were you thinking of CC0?

NOAI is not "fuck AI in general," it's "I am explicitly not giving AI permission to use this work."

You're ignoring the concept of implied licenses. The specifics vary by jurisdiction even within the US but if AI bros can convince a court that my conduct (e.g. by marking some other works NOAI but not *this* one) implies a license, I might not be protected. (3/2)

@stefan Moreover, if NOAI becomes a de facto industry standard, then if I never use it, the AI companies could easily persuade a judge that my participation in a space where AI scraping permission is normally expressly denied, but not denying it, I am implicitly granting that permission.

This isn't about what the statute says. It's about precedent. (As you know, statutes don't mean what they say. They mean what the courts *say* they mean.) (4/2)

@Linebyline Tbh still seems hella backwards for me. But US copyright is broken to hell and back anyway. Implying copyright of a work being being something else than the default-deny would be a big no-no. Companies like disney would fight tooth and nail against such a ruling pretty sure.

Good I am not in the US but EU Its atleast a bit less shitty here.

But anyway I wish you a nice day. I will step back from this discussion as I have nothing more to say

@stefan Agreed, I think if we go further we're just going to be shouting past each other.

Just, do me a favor: Pester your politicians to keep an eye on us and not repeat our mistakes.

Have a good one!

@davidrevoy @creativecommons
A new topic for a new video of @vousavezledroit