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Yeah no shit. The way you do this is you release it, no notice. Open source or at least release the files so others can repackage if needed. Then if you get a C&D, it’s out there and you can take yours down but others can upload dozens of other copies. But they all want to build up their fame first with teasers.
Makes me think it wasn’t real when they keep making the same mistakes.
Speaking to IGN, Toasted Shoes said he still plans to publish the full video showcasing the mod, but will comply with any further copyright notices from Nintendo. “We would love to complete the mod pack and release it for free to the public, however for now we are playing it by ear as we don’t want any legal troubles,” Toasted Shoes said.
It’s not even complete yet. I’m betting this is the last we’ll hear of it.
Yep, if he’d release it first then publicize it, we could have had copies of it floating around but this influencer had to spread hype to all the news outlets, getting attention from big N real quick.
These days you train a “AI” to reproduce the copywritten assets, distribute your “AI” and then say the machine did it, so it’s not copyright.
Not really how copyright works but ok
EDIT: The fact that you got an AI to replicate something that already exists does not invalidate the original rightholder’s copyright. Further, “AIs can’t hold a copyright” just means the person who prompted the AI owns the work, in the same way Photoshopping something doesn’t mean that Photoshop itself now owns the copyright (nor does Adobe). Thus, you still end up the person responsible for violating Nintendo’s copyright and trademarks, and we’re just doing the same thing with extra steps.
Yes, but by OpenAIs line of argument, the model itself isn’t piracy/theft/rights-infringing.
The output of the model might be, but that’s not the model creators problem. So by distributing the model, you’re no longer distributing infringing material.
The output of the model might be, but that’s not the model creators problem
But it is the problem of the hypothetical person trying to launder copywritten assets through an AI. I guess you were probably just joking but it doesn’t make sense.
Further, “AIs can’t hold a copyright” just means the person who prompted the AI owns the work
Assuming you’re in the US: not true. In order to be able to be copyrighted, a work must have had its traditional elements of authorship produced by a human, and it has been well established that simply providing a prompt does not qualify.
Such a work has no copyright protections of its own, but that does not prevent it from being a violation of someone else’s copyright or trademark. If you’re responsible for the creation of a work, it’s irrelevant whether that work is itself copyrighted when determining if you’ve created a derivative work that infringes the copyright of the original rights-holder.
From https://copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf
in 2018 the Office received an application for a visual work that the applicant described as “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine.” 7
The application was denied because, based on the applicant’s representations in the application, the examiner found that the work contained no human authorship. After a series of administrative appeals, the Office’s Review Board issued a final determination affirming that the work could not be registered because it was made “without any creative contribution from a human actor.” 8
More recently, the Office reviewed a registration for a work containing human-authored elements combined with AI-generated images. In February 2023, the Office concluded that a graphic novel9 comprised of human-authored text combined with images generated by the AI service Midjourney constituted a copyrightable work, but that the individual images themselves could not be protected by copyright. 10
…
In the Office’s view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author,” which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans.
…
And in the current edition of the Compendium, the Office states that “to qualify as a work of ‘authorship’ a work must be created by a human being” and that it “will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.” 22
…
In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of “mechanical reproduction” or instead of an author’s “own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form.” 24 The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work.25 This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry.
If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it 26 For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt 27 from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office’s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output. 28 For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare’s style. 29 But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. 30 When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship.31 As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.32
In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” 33 Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. 34 In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of ” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself. 35
This policy does not mean that technological tools cannot be part of the creative process. Authors have long used such tools to create their works or to recast, transform, or adapt their expressive authorship. For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image, 36 and a musical artist may use effects such as guitar pedals when creating a sound recording. In each case, what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work’s expression and “actually formed” the traditional elements of authorship.37
Huh, I thought it was that it couldn’t qualify for copyright because it was ai produced. Not made by a human. Like the monkey selfie
This supposed showcase he intends to release should be worth a laugh at least
Who had “within 24 hours”? Anybody?
forget hours, I am surprised he even survived pressing the upload button
Luckily, the corpos haven’t gone full Minority Report on our asses yet.
give them a decade give or take lel
I wonder if anyone is going to mod Steam Boat Willy into the game and see how long it takes Disney to claim trademark infringement.
Steamboat Willy is in the Public domain as of Jan 1st
Yes but now they are trying to trade mark it
They’d be 23 days late on that claim
They’ve started putting steam boat Willy in front of all their movies so they can protect it with trademark since the copyright has expired.
have they actually tried enforcing it yet? or is that just the internet’s working theory?
Just the theory but it isn’t outside of Disney’s MO
Not that this would save the average person from litigation hell, but does Nintendo actually have a legal leg to stand on? What would make a (free) mod any different from any other artistic expression?
Also assuming the mod creator didn’t do anything crazy like rip assets from an existing Pokémon game.
Copyright law doesn’t really care if its commercial/personal - just if its fair use. For reuse of characters, its an esspecially high bar. In this case, its reuse of characters as-is so that wouldn’t be considered transformitive, and its obviously not criticism, so it wouldn’t be allowed.
For a comparison, every Pokemon is under the same protection Mickey Mouse was a decade ago. Basically, unless you’re directly criticizing the art or character its not technically fair use. Even gameplay footage is a grey area. Its just a matter of how litigious Nintendo wants to be.
Edit: minor correction, commercial/personal sort-of matters, but more in a “is it competing with or damaging to the original work” sort of way - something making money looks more official and suggests more effort and intent, for example.
How is it that the pokemon mod for minecraft never received such pushback from nintendo, but this modder gets DMCA’d on the spot? Fair use should cover using characters. There’s plenty of games that re-use characters as mods (look at skyrim and all the ridiculous mods that import characters from other franchises).
All this copyright nonsense over a free mod is just a waste of resources.
All this copyright nonsense over a free mod is just a waste of resources.
This is what it boils down to, not that these mods are legal. Copyright is basically meant to block anything that could even remotely compete with the work, and give a monopoly over the idea. Doesn’t matter if its a free passion project or a billion dollar company. Thats part of why its so absurd that copyright lasts so long. That said, most don’t want to spend a fortune playing whack-a-mole with their own fans’ free passion projects, unless those passion projects compete with them directly. That might even be why Pixelmon is left up - its seen as too janky to directly compete whereas this mod/game combo is pretty much what fans have been asking GameFreak to make for a decade and as a paid, commercial product at that.
Because rightsholders have discretion about who they take action against. In this case, Nintendo doesn’t want violence and Pokémon together, so it gets taken down. Minecraft is nonviolent (at least no more than Pokémon itself) so it gets a pass.
They would also take something down for being for-profit or competes with their own products (e.g AM2R being taken down right before Samus Returns came out).
Could the obvious symmetry between pals and pokemon not be leveraged as a political statement on the lore, and thus critique of the in-world enslavement of pokemon? The topic has already been covered in numerous “deep-dives” in written and visual media. So long as the creator of the mod starts being smarter than he has been so far, he could easily claim the mod is intended to be satirical, could he not?
Even in parody works, you’re inherently walking on eggshells. It needs to be a pretty direct and obvious ciritique of the original material. Something like PETA’s Pokemon Red, White and Blue is unchallenged because its so unsubtle they’d have a reasonable defense. It would need to be a lot more than just a line in the mod description to give him a good defence. Even if it was as direct in it’s criticism as PETA’s game, just because he’s legally probably covered, also doesn’t mean he can’t be taken to court, and unlike PETA, a mod-maker won’t have a fortune to burn on an expensive fair-use lawsuit, nonetheless if its a riskier or more complicated case.
Good explanation, thank you. It looks like fair use is a lot more limited than I had thought. And obviously not worth the risk for the average person to try and use as a defense.
It wasn’t free is the problem. They were selling it on patreon from what I have heard.
In many countries, the question of profit doesn’t matter as to whether it violates copyright or not. Who knows where the legal stuff would happen but I looked up Australia’s copyright laws as well as I could and it seems similar to US copyright with the fact that it doesn’t matter whether someone is profiting from it or not.
Ah, thank you for that context, I didn’t see any mention of Patreon in the article.
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They own all of the Pokemon characters. Any art using Pokemon characters is copyright infringement. Non-profit fan art using those characters is almost never fair use; it’s just not worth addressing until it’s more significant than a fan drawing Pikachu.
They probably would have sent the takedown regardless, but putting it behind a paywall was a huge red flag begging to be shut down even faster.
Wait, this idiot announced a Pokemon mod without it actually being complete?
Block and ignore him immediately, he is just chasing clout.
Nintendo Ninjas are real. They come armed with wiimotes and nunchucks.
How can something that is a free mod get a DMCA claim? I’m not a professional at all but shouldn’t there be a stipulation that says if it’s free it doesn’t count or something? I knew copyright laws were really bad but I always figured free passion projects were fine.
It uses assets owned and copyrighted by Nintendo. It doesn’t matter if it’s free, If they don’t want their stuff being used, they have that choice.
The creator of the Best Buy asset on Steam Workshop for Cities Skylines was issued a takedown for whatever reason.
Minecraft has a pokemon mod, wonder where nintendo lawyers were with that one?
I mean if you brag enough they can request a takedown, go ahead!
Pointing fingers with this kind of thing is silly. It’s obvious it’s because it drew attention.
I suppose that does make sense, still lame though. I do hope that everyone starts dog piling on Nintendo soon though. They are almost as bad as Disney with hogging all the cool generational content behind bullshit public domain laws
I stopped buying Nintendo products awhile ago. I’m not a fan of how they treat people. The DMCA needs to be eradicated, it is just a way for companies to bully people.
It also allows you to easily take down someone infringing upon your own rights to your work. Prior to the DMCA, you’d either have to rely on the good graces of the hosting platform, pay a lawyer for a C&D, or file a lawsuit.
The DMCA safe harbor provision is absolutely huge to the ability of sites to host user generated content.
Without it, sites would have to be far more restrictive because they’d potentially be liable for that content.
Y’all feel free to download OP for asking an honest question. That’ll show 'em!
You wouldn’t download a car.
