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Comment by eadmund

6 days ago

> Artists in Europe have already been fighting to protect the copyright of Tintin to keep the artwork away from large language models (LLMs) training various AI algorithms.

There is no copyright in the character anymore, so there’s nothing to protect.

I really do not understand this perspective. Do people also wish to use legal force to prevent others from working with, for example, Gainsborough, or Moliere, or Julius Caesar, or Homer? Come on: at some point something has to enter the public domain and become part of the shared treasure of all mankind.

78 comments

eadmund

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fnordian_slip  6 days ago

While I don't have a dog in that fight, describing the opponents position as being against Tintin "becom[ing] part of the shared treasure of all mankind" seems rather unfairly dismissive.

I would expect that most of those artists don't mind the journey into public domain. Rather, the are against large corporations hoovering up that treasure and regurgitating it with a profit motive.

  • Gormo  6 days ago

    So they don't mind work entering the public domain, but they do mind people making use of that work in an organized way after it has? Seems a bit strange.

    • mihaic  6 days ago

      LLMs are not people, and some organized way are worse than others, yes.

      In the same way we defined "fair use" for those reviewing a movie for instance to be ok, but we don't find it acceptable to put 99% of the movie with a single comment.

      12 replies →

    • jfim  6 days ago

      Some countries have moral rights which are perpetual, and are meant to prevent works from being mutilated, defaced, misattributed, or otherwise could cause reputational damage to the author.

      It's not unreasonable for an author to want their creation to be enjoyed as it was designed to be, but not torn apart to be reassembled in different ways.

      1 reply →

    • tokioyoyo  6 days ago

      It’s not strange if you think how the worth of the images have plummeted down to zero, both emotionally and monetarily, in the last few years. I’m not an artist, nor directly in AI field, but it is weird how I have zero emotional response to any image I see, because I think it might be AI generated.

      1 reply →

GuB-42  6 days ago

In Europe, Tintin is under copyright until 2053 (death + 70 years).

And the rightsholders (Tintinimaginatio, previously Moulinsart) are very aggressive about it, even more so than Disney. They don't have the lobbying power of Disney, but they are going to do everything in their power to protect and possibly overstep their rights. It includes using trademark laws and publishing new Tintin adventures against the will of the original author as an attempt to renew their copyright.

bazoom42  6 days ago

Tintin is notable in that the series was not continued by other artists after the desth of Hergé. While the estate is critized for guarding the IP too zealously, I greatly respect this decision, which is part of what makes it such a classic.

  • bigmattystyles  6 days ago

    Maybe not in the official series, though I’d love to see Al-far one finished by someone. But as far as tintin, there may not be official series, but there is a lot of new work based on it, from merch to the Spielberg movie, as bad as it was.

    • lcouturi  6 days ago

      Several fans have created their own (unauthorized) completed versions of the Alph-Art. Most famous is Yves Rodier's version from 1991.

      1 reply →

  • JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B  5 days ago

    European comics are usually done by one artist only. I can’t explain why but it’s very different from American comics where the same concept (one character with a simple background) can be derived by a hundred people.

    Both are good but I guess they come from a different background and tradition. You have Joachim Phoenix playing a joker without Batman, but people would never understand why a new Tintin would have a different art style than the old one. It would be very confusing even to me.

mongol  6 days ago

I can see a difference between being allowed to publish an expired work as-is, and profit from it, vs reusing the characters for a completely different story.

  • toss1  6 days ago

    Right, so by that rule, someone could stage a theater production or movie of the exact text of one of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books, but could not make anything similar to the characters and relationships of Holmes and Watson. Forever.

    And exactly how similar must the new production be? Can there be any deviation from the exact words written by Doyle? It seems your rule would certainly ban the excellent BBC production of Sherlock [0]

    What about Shakespeare? It seems this would ban the entire writing and production of West Side Story (of course a 1950's riff on Romeo and Juilet) [1,2].

    That sounds like a permanent extension of copyright, with a limited media exception.

    [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018ttws

    [1] https://www.westsidestory.com/

    [2] https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/west-sid...

    • cryptonector  6 days ago

      We have tons and tons of derivative works not remotely faithful to the original. The list of examples is very long. What about Roxane? What about A Fifth of Beethoven? What about all those novels with biblical inspiration? The works of H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne, and many others have been adapted endlessly.

      Derivatives have to be allowed to differ markedly from the original, even offensively. As you point out, the definitions problems that arise in trying to control derivatives are intractable / inherently political rather than legalistic.

      1 reply →

  • cryptonector  6 days ago

    No, people have to be able to derive works from other works, especially when the latter are in the public domain. Up-thread I sardonically said to burn Picasso's Las Meninas, and I repeat that here because I think it's a good example, and I think you can probably think of many more on your own. E.g., A Fith of Beethoven vs. Beethoven's Fith Symphony -- good or bad?

kmeisthax  6 days ago

In Europe (and Japan), training LLMs and AI "art" generators on copyrighted work is explicitly permitted. So this is doubly confusing to me, since even if it wasn't public domain, it'd still be legal to train on it.

  • Findecanor  6 days ago

    In legal terms, that is not entirely correct. In practice, it is however. For now.

    EU (which is not the whole of Europe) has regulation that allows a copyright owner to opt out of data mining for AI training. But the framework is incomplete: there does not exist a generally agree-upon method to actually opt out. There are a few protocols and file formats from a couple of organisation but none which has been given any official status. While a publisher may use one, a web scraper might support only another.

    Japan has traditionally been quite strict on copyright law. I would not be surprised if the law would get tightened to explicitly disallow AI training on copyrighted works.

spencerflem  6 days ago

Yes, or at least, we should prevent companies from cheapening our cultural legacy with endless tackyness, spin-offs, merchandice, advertisements, and other vulgar things.

Timwi  6 days ago

I think I understand this perspective somewhat. It's coming from a mindset where it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism. They don't really want to keep Tintin from the common folk, but they want to keep it from the hands of greedy capitalists, and they assume that those will always be with us.