Step 1: Create a Watermark remover that requires a business email and card on file to use.
Step 2: Create an agency/service owned by the Watermark remover company which works with photographers, artists, etc on hunting down and enforcing licensing deals on large copyright infringers.
There is a lot of watermarked content that you can't buy as a digital file, content on redbubble comes to mind for example (stickers. clothing designs, &c.), harvest watermarked art, clean it up, put it for sale somewhere else.
I don't think this tool targets well intentioned law abiding, copyright respecting people
I’m not sure I understand what you mean… isn’t harvesting watermarked art from redbubble and selling it somewhere else illegal under copyright law, if you don’t own the product or the image? Did I misunderstand your suggestion? How and when is taking a watermark off something you didn’t create well intentioned and law abiding?
It is a much different problem to pay for a license for every single image you have scraped from an arbitrary variety of sources and watermarks than to pay for software that removes any watermark.
Seems like a post-scarcity race to the bottom. The question is whether we can encumber post-scarce resources with IP in a meaningful way for much longer.
The content aware fill on Photoshop can do the same thing, actually, there are many AI based solutions to remove watermarks and a considerable amount of them are free to use.
Watermarks is no more a stopper for people who don't want to pay for images. Here is an opportunity to inventing new ways to protect stock images.
The AI boom makes it crystal clear that (c)opywrong laws are idiotic and unjust.
It's time to pass the #FreedomToPublish Amendment to the U.S. Constitution getting rid of (c)opywrong laws forever:
Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is hereby repealed.
Section 2. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to publish or peaceably implement ideas.
It always leads back to that half empty warehouse, inhabited solely by robots who suddenly stop doing anything because they all reach singularity and it's most efficient to wait it all out, we don't last as long.
I'm a photographer, and I've encountered people who stole my pictures. Believe me, waking up at 5AM, staying up running around all day to take pictures, to then see some people not even pay the price of a lunch for them is... well, doesn't feel great.
Thankfully that's a minority of people.
What I mean to say is: f*ck people who make such "watermark removal" tools.
Well there's event and event. In my line of event, I sponsor the events so I can be there and sell pictures to the participants. It's just part of life that some people will steal pictures.
Doesn't mean I don't enjoy that work though. After all, I'm out doing the thing I love doing. Otherwise yes, I would have stopped doing it. But you know, tradeoffs :)
It just makes me quite unhappy that some a*hats on the internet would make stealing pictures easier. That's fully unethical work. It's like if I were selling copies of keys to people's homes and saying "but don't you use them to rob people, yo."
It's literally not stealing though. You have been brainwashed. Stealing is a word that refers to taking physical molecules that have been assigned to one person from another, thus depriving that person of those physical molecules. What you are referring to is slavery: you want to exert control over another person in their own home. You want to prevent a person from sharing information to another person peacefully. That is not stealing, that is slavery, and you are trying to be the master. Those are the real physical terms, if you stop and think about it and do the math.
I am not sure if you will understand this—if you are willing to take red pill—as I've found the saying "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" to be quite accurate.
If your business model depends upon restricting the freedoms of other people, pivot until you have a better business model.
I feel like your comparisons to slavery are an appeal to emotion rather than a rational argument. Can you either expand further on your argument (rather than just stating it as fact) or link to somewhere where you (or someone who represents that point of view well) discusses it further?
I don't buy the "exert control over another person in their home" argument. I'm not sure why laws about information rise to the level of "slavery" in your view. I think even calling digital items simply "information" is a bit of a (likely intentional) misclassification.
I think there are a ton of problems with the way we handle digital materials from a legal standpoint, and I do think vast swaths should be more freely available, and that the length of copyright and other laws are way too long. So I'm sympathetic, to a point. But the argument you make in the above post isn't really convincing, even to me (someone who likely leans closer to your PoV than many here).
> I feel like your comparisons to slavery are an appeal to emotion rather than a rational argument.
Yes, it is an appeal to emotion but it's also rooted in logic. The "intellectual property" lie is also an appeal to emotion (attempting to falsely piggy back on anti-communist sentiment, even though (c)opywrongs and patents are actually anti-property rights) but not rooted in logic.
> Can you either expand further on your argument
If you program a multi-agent simulation of the world and define slaves and masters you'd have:
class Person
class Slave extends Person
askOnDate(recipient)
if (this.master.grantsPermission())
super.askOnDate(recipient)
sendFile(recipient, file)
if (file.master.grantsPermission())
super.sendFile(recipient, file)
class Master extends Person
Someone who has to ask permission of a 3rd party not involved in a transaction is a partial slave.
On New Year's eve I was holding a book in my hand written in 1927 that was someone else's "intellectual property", and when the clock struck midnight magically it wasn't! I'm the one with the unhinged take?
My take is literally the only take grounded in reality.
I will pay you ten thousand dollars if you can come up with a set of axioms that define 1) physical property rights 2) slavery 3) copyright and patent laws, where #3 are #1 but not #2.
There is a LOT of room for improvement on copyright and patent laws, no disagreement. But there is a lot of middle ground between where we are now and no laws at all around copyright/patents. In an increasingly digital society, creators should be able to exercise some level of control over what they create for some (relatively short) period of time.
FWIW, I probably lean slightly closer to your side of the spectrum than most, and even I feel this take is extreme.
> So you disagree with most open source licenses like the GNU GPL, as well as the Creative Commons licenses?
Yes!
I think they are a clever maneuver to weaponize (c)opywrong laws against themselves. But they are short-sighted.
Ultimately the solution is to Amend the Constitution. The idea of "Licenses" on Ideas is repulsive when you think about what that means from root, and the goal should be to get rid of such a concept all together, like we got rid of the concept of Licenses on People. FSF, EFF, and CC should come together and realize this and take a real stand. Go on the offense.
I don't think I'd pay for this, but I would pay for an invisible-watermark remover for protecting whistleblowers and scholarly-journal pirates, ideally for use with PDF's. Although it might be hard to convince me to trust it.
Whee! Another AI service with ethics implications that will be commonplace (i.e. unstoppable with open source implementations) sooner rather than later.
DPReview talks about this service in their article at
Why would we need watermarks anymore when we just have the AI making the art in the first place? People certainly don't think they have like ownership/authorship over AI art right? At least not enough to put a watermark on it I hope.. that would be very funny though, especially if the artist in question doesn't realize the irony.
Right, I am just saying, I hope stuff like this becomes less needed in general as our relationship to this kind authorship changes. Granted, right now, stuff like this is just needed I guess to steal stuff... But aren't we hoping for a world where individual authorship of art is extinct? Where the need to watermark your work is obsolete because the idea of possessing or authoring a creation is long gone due to the liberating power of the computer as artist? Or am I misunderstanding the coming utopia?
Photographer here. If I spend time working for people to take pictures of them during events, I need to get paid for it, otherwise I can't feed myself.
However I also need to show them the pictures before they buy it (would you buy a picture without seeing it?), and increasingly that's happening online.
So no, "individual authorship of art" will not go extinct as long as people are working for it. Are you expecting to be able to take someone's work without any compensation?
I certainly think right now we live in that reality, and certainly hope you can continue to feed yourself, but the future is long! I didn't mean to make a big claim about how things are now, or will be in the near future. But just kind of projecting what a world will look like if all these things play out like people are saying it will. But you are right, event photography is a great example, where maybe the only change there is that the watermark will point you to the particular photographer-robot-business you can contract in the future, but the watermark itself will still be necessary to show the quality of the robot.
(Don't get me wrong, I don't like this idea at all, its not a good future, and many people will suffer for it. I do like the idea of "Art"-art being de-individualized in the future, to free us from egoistic myths of the "Artist" and all its problems and limitations, but I hate the idea of lots of hard working contractor-types like yourself being without a source of income.)
Qualifying art as egoistic is misunderstanding. We do "art" (or any expression, really) to share it. Because we love the effect it has on people. Making them smile, think, wonder, dream... Art in a vacuum is nothing but a senseless waste of time. Fundamentally, art is about relationships.
I agree that AI art is also art. I've seen some stunning generated landscapes that made me want to be there, want to explore and go out.
However it is still an expression of one's feelings, and the way you experience it is an expression of your own feelings. It will always be personal. Sure, event photographers might be replaced by automated cameras (hell, I have plans on doing that myself to some extent), but then the "art" is simply displaced to whoever uses that tool. Maybe an influencer or something.
But ask yourself this: what motivates people to use these tools?
Surely it's for expressing themselves or earning money (or both). That, in itself, will make any form of art personal, individual authorship still applies.
I was simply qualifying a certain kind of way understanding art and the artist that has been prominent since around the 19th-18th century in Western world, since the beginnings of what is known as Romanticism. So prominent in fact, that people have forgotten art could be understood any differently, as your response seems to show here.
You describe a certain popular story about the "artist" who strives to externalize the ineffable. Its a good story, and it is rightly attributed to many great works and artists. But it far from exhausts what art can be or was at certain times in the past. Art can be entirely communal, or even entirely institutional/political. There have been cultures that wouldn't understand you at all when you say that only certain people are artists, and that they do something that is particular or specialized.
Even further, the idea in general of the "working" artist, one who uses their labor like any other worker, is even younger than that of the romantic artist. Most of the big artists in canon didn't need to "work" like you did, it was either things like patrons, or a lifelong devotion to a church or something.
Art is too big and too full of possibilities to define as easily as you are here.
For my part, I haven't yet seen something like a good "artistic work" from one of the models, but I see the potential in principal.
The existence of communal/institutional/political art doesn't forbid the existence of individual art. If for example I like the work of a specific painter, and want to have a reproduction of his work at home, I want his work, not anybody else's.
I'm curious about that political art you're referring to though. Any examples come to mind?
I was not trying to forbid anything, rather just reminding you not to--whether you think "egoistic" is too negative or something, I don't know, but it's certainly pretty common these days. You seemed to be saying its not egoistic, but its still necessarily this "expression of one's feelings".
The big example in my mind was art made because of and through the Catholic Church for like a millennia or so. It's function in spreading the religion, encoding meaning, etc. Still some incredible and beautiful art in some cases in my opinion.
Consider also things that we tend to classify as "crafts": knitting, sewing, embroidery. These things used to be/are rich with traditional and deterministically cultural-political meaning, but still can be beautiful--certainly pieces of art IMO.
In all these cases, there are certainly particular artists with certain abilities and feelings behind each particular instance, but that is only a sufficient, not necessary, quality to them being works of art I think. It's at least not as important as the fact that Van Gogh did Starry Night.
I'm onboard with the idea that knitting, sewing, embroidery and other crafts can be considered art. Even though it doesn't typically fall under the "fine art" umbrella doesn't mean it's not filled with know-how and love. I certainly know a few artisans who... well it's in the name, isn't it? "art-isan"?
However I truly believe that each work is heigtened by the individual who contributed to it, even though it might be a common thing.
Folk music, for example, is just a series of people liking some tune, spreading it to other people with their own take on it. One of these, very dear to me, "Wild Rover", has probably countless versions. They're all about the same story, yet I prefer some versions, sung by some specific persons, because they're linked to a memory or I just think they sound better.
Ultimately I don't disagree with you, but I firmly believe that good art/crafts/ai renderings will always be very personal and down do the individual. Sure, if we both type the same thing in Dall-E, we might get the same results. But would we type the same thing?
> I'm onboard with the idea that knitting, sewing, embroidery and other crafts can be considered art.
I didn't even realize that there was any sort of debate on this point!
> Even though it doesn't typically fall under the "fine art" umbrella doesn't mean it's not filled with know-how and love.
"Fine art" is art that serves no practical purpose. It only exists as artistic expression. But it's not even the most common sort of art. There's functional art (sewing, etc), there's commercial art (advertising, etc.), and so forth. That they aren't "fine art" doesn't carry an implication that they aren't art, or that they are some sort of inferior art. They're just art that also serves a purpose other than being art.
I have a 'fine art' degree. I embriodered, crocheted, machine knitted and beaded my work. I have made bowls and cups and forks and knives.I think your perception of what fine art is is not quite on point. Ceramics, Fibers and Jewelry/metalsmithing are majors that are considered Fine arts. Fine arts are the more traditional arts (painting,sculpture, printmaking, ceramics,photography, illustration, fibers, jewelry/metalsmithing, bookmaking as opposed to media arts (digital and timebased), and art and design (fashion, interior design, industrial design). Many 'fine artists' are multimedia artists incorporating several of the above. Although there is a craft vs art debate in certain circles it is the elite few that hang onto the idea that fine art is above craft. Art museums are full of functional art including clothing, dishes, suits of armor, etc.
Since I'm not an artist, I was really just going by the dictionary definition of the term. The very first definition is all the dictionaries I just checked is a variation of "Art produced or intended primarily for beauty rather than utility."
However, the third in them all is a variation of "Something requiring highly developed techniques and skills." That definition, though, seems uselessly broad.
So, I'd say that neither of us is wrong, exactly. We both are just ignoring the effects of context.
> Art museums are full of functional art including clothing, dishes, suits of armor, etc.
Absolutely, and as it should be. Art museums should have a greater breadth than just pure fine art. I would also add that pure fine art can, and very often does, incorporate elements of functional art.
To me, the dividing line is "is the art piece intended to be used for a practical purpose, or is it intended to be only experienced as art?" If the former, it's functional art. If the latter, it's fine art regardless of whether or not it could technically be used for a practical purpose.
My primary point, though, is that "fine art" has a technical meaning that is not synonymous with "better" or "real" art.
I recently used this to create a web site design. I wanted to see it without watermarks. Then after the customer approved the design, I purchased the image to use in the implementation of the design.
Step 2: Create an agency/service owned by the Watermark remover company which works with photographers, artists, etc on hunting down and enforcing licensing deals on large copyright infringers.
Supply, meet demand.