← Back to context

Comment by luma

3 years ago

Google scrapes copyrighted material every day and then presents that material to users in the form of excerpts, images, and entire book pages. This has been ruled OK by the courts. Scraping copyrighted information is not illegal or we couldn't have search engines.

Google is not presently selling "we trained an AI on people's art without permission, and you can type their name in along with a prompt to generate a knockoff of their art, and we charge you money for this". So it's not really a 1:1 comparison, since there are companies selling the thing I described right now.

  • That pretty clearly would fall under transformative work. It is not illegal for a human to paint a painting in the style of, say, Banksy, and then sell the resulting painting.

Scraping is only legal if it's temporary and transformational. If Google started selling the scrapped images it would be a different story.