> "As a thought experiment, I think it’s interesting to consider how one might justify photographing or photocopying original works using a similar line of thinking."
Especially if the camera or photocopier has a distortion in it. Do Smartphone filters evade copyright? Does printing a digital photograph of a painting using a dot matrix printer evade copyright?
Well sure, but it seems that Andy Warhol may also have been in violation of copyright by transforming the art of others in his paintings. That's the interesting thing.
Sure, but that's not exactly news either. "Appropriation art" has been in debate w/ regards to fair use and copyright for decades. If you are coming at this issue as an ignorant layman, then yeah you'd probably be like "but Andy is an artist, how can that be!?!?" Fair use is a really complicated analysis and, frankly, whether or not Warhol's Prince paintings should qualify, is in my opinion, a legitimate question that your response belies.
I, too, consider it a legitimate question. I'm trying to indicate in some way that a heavily modified photocopier or printer can make such significant transformations that it could be consider on par with Warhol.
Or even moreso, say a one-off piece of copying equipment made by an artist that only ever copies the pages of a novel in a manner that makes it look like a Dali painting, substitutes the letters and number of the novel with emojis (simple substitution), and incorporates all of the pages and the machine itself into a display piece of art.
Where will the line be drawn? Who knows. But as I stated in another post the only thing the AI produces that can be copyrighted is the input of the human, whatever that is. So maybe the AI art isn't copyrightable, maybe the prompts to the AI are all that's copyrightable. Which would make a great deal of sense. But if someone can get the same image by using different prompts, or even by drawing it themselves, then they're free to do so. Or if the prompt is something simple like "Something like Dali, taller than it is wide", maybe none of it is copyrightable.
This entire thing is an interesting philosophical and legal question. And it's interesting to try to see the parameters that the decision will be made on.
Sorry, I just realized I went off on a tangent from the original posted story.
Especially if the camera or photocopier has a distortion in it. Do Smartphone filters evade copyright? Does printing a digital photograph of a painting using a dot matrix printer evade copyright?
These aren't entirely new questions. https://huckleberryfineart.com/exploring-the-debate-over-and...