Andy Baio

> You are perfectly entitled to write that Star Wars fanfic.

Nope. It's a derivative work, and, as such, requires the permission of the people who own the copyright and trademarks.

> You are not entitled to make money off it

This matters less than you may think. There's a four-part test [1], and profit is considered, but the work not being for-profit doesn't make the work legal.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107

Here's an old-ish article I like to link to, on Waxy.org, called "No Copyright Intended":

https://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/

> Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.

By all means, read the whole thing.

Here's a lawyer's take on it:

https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/can-derivative-works-be-copyrighted/

> Image yourself an artist (of any sort) who has drawn such great inspiration from another (copyrighted) work that you would like to modify that work to create something new. Are you allowed to do so? Could you get a copyright to your new creation? As with most questions in law, the answer is: it depends.

> “A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship” (17 U.S.C. § 101) is called a Derivative Work. The original copyright owner…

No, because it leads to an incoherent policy.

Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that.

Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems:

1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's always had that. HN has never been billed as "come say what you want." Changing the policy is a bait and switch to the old community.

2. It was never admitted to. While switching to the new policy, the official line was that the old policy was still in place.

3. It requires positive social capital. Remember Philip Greenspun's infamous article describing the VCs at ArsDigita as "a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off"[1]? That's what the reddit admin has been like for months, and it leads to negative social capital. Some guy was shadowbanned but didn't know it for years, patiently posting in subreddits all along. The CEO didn't use the company's only product.

If you've ever experienced a dysfunctional internet community -- and who hasn't -- you recognize the patterns of decisions made in a hurry to stop whomever is immediately yelling at you and then trying to justify it with whatever they can cobble together afterwards, and that explanation will be completely…

Excellent quote here:

And I really believe that's why we seem to win girls' nationals sections pretty easily every year: most people won’t tell teenage girls (especially the together, articulate ones) that they are lazy and the quality of their work is unacceptable. And sometimes kids need to hear that, or they have no reason to step up.

This could apply to boys as well as girls, and indeed to anyone at just about any age; sometimes we need to be told that we're not measuring up. I am reminded of Philip Greenspun's story about the venture capitalists who wrecked ArsDigita, the company he had built (from http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/):

[F]or most of this year Chip, Peter, and Allen [the VC Board members and CEO] didn't want to listen to me. They even developed a theory for why they didn't have to listen to me: I'd hurt their feelings by criticizing their performance and capabilities; self-esteem was the most important thing in running a business; ergo, because I was injuring their self-esteem it was better if they just turned a deaf ear. I'm not sure how much time these three guys had ever spent with engineers. Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, in a private communication to some faculty, once described MIT as "a no-praise zone". My first week as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student I asked a professor for help with a problem. He talked to me for a bit and then said "You're having trouble with this problem because you don't know anything and…

Penny Arcade[1] had a rant about this very subject this morning:

> The big players in this space all happen believe things about other people's intellectual property that are orthogonal to human flourishing. It appears to be endemic in their spaces. Other times, we don't have to work so hard. For example: Perplexity literally duplicates other people's work on its own site. Then, it will generate a podcast based on the uncredited work. They want the same thing as Google's Gemini, in that you'll come to it for a search experience that's owned end to end - powered by your own uncredited work.

Gen AI models have also been used to appropriate an artist's distinctive art style[2] in a way that pushes up against the edge of copyright. You've all heard about OpenAI and Scarlett Johansson[3]. This kind of stuff makes the industry look shady.

In theory existing copyright law should cover these new AI cases, but if you use something like Figma AI and it "rips off" (as John puts it) an existing app, you might not even realize that you're copying someone else's design because there's no provenance. That makes it harder to follow the law.

[1]: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2024/07/01/jobophage

[2]: https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwilling-illustrator-found-herself-turned-into-an-ai-model/

[3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01578-4

Related: "Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model" [0].

It's astonishingly simple to train both LoRAs and Embeddings nowadays -- if you combine it with tech like ControlNet, you can more or less have direct control over the illustration as well (see this example I converted to Hollie Megert's style with barely any effort [1] using the model from [0]) -- but FWIW I was playing with the WhatsApp AI stickers recently and human-made illustrations still have a "je ne sais quoi" that sets them apart, vaguely reminiscent of "realistic" animation vs. "squash and stretch". I would not be worried as an artist*, but I would be worried if I am making assets for corporations in Corporate Memphis [2].

[0] https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwilling-illustrator-found-herself-turned-into-an-ai-model/

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ZwtKug5.jpeg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

* In fact, I think I'd be excited, it can be a great tool, and people who lack artistic sensibility might find it almost as hard to use as to make art themselves. However, I do think there needs to be some kind of protection from having your 'style' commoditized without consent, using unauthorized images of your own art.

I agree wholeheartedly.

As any good writing or speaking course will mention, swears are a literary crutch.

English especially is a wonderful langauge for wordplay. Like most langauges we have entire genres of humor based on how and which words are used.

Most of the swearing I see on the internet is simply a lazy stab at adding adjectives or getting a reaction. I feel the same way about the (over)use as John Hodgeman does about the word "meh."[1]

I think you gain an even greater disdain for swearing with the more critical literature you read. Reading Ebert's movie reviews or perhaps Gordon Ramsey's words, you realize they have a kind of eloquence that you don't often see in everyday speech. It is because they work at it, and refined writing is beautiful, but also because they take the time to avoid lazy crutches like swearing.

[1]: http://waxy.org/2009/02/john_hodgman_on_meh/