I haven't told anyone about this yet, so let's go: Last fall, attorney's working for a certain social media company we will call "Schmeta" reached out to me asking for help with a copyright suit specifically because I was an academic who is also an 'expert' with Blender. ๐งต
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They wanted an expert who would state that 3D models aren't worth anything because they are so easy to make. Evidently Shmeta and an ivy league school we will call "Schmarvard" had scraped data illegally from a certain company's online library and used it to to train their AI...
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These attorney's wanted me to show that I could make textured 3D models quickly and and easily in Blender to exhibit how easy they are to make and that the lawsuit against them for stealing hundreds of thousands of 3D models was worthless. They were willing to pay me significantly to do this.
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I said I was happy to exhibit how long it takes to make these models, but that it might not be what they want as it is still a time-intensive craft that takes years to learn how to do creatively and competently. They said they didn't want me to lie, but that was not what they were looking for.
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After several phone calls they eventually told me that they would not need my services. But I was left with the distinct impression that mega rich institutions like Schmeta and and Schmarvard are gleefully stealing every aspect of our culture to position themselves to resell it back to us.
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I also got the impression that our legal systems are in no way fast enough to stem the damage they will do to our creative classes and they know this and are working as fast they can to grab as much as they can before laws catch up to their crimes. https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-copyright-ai-lawsuit/
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@brentpatterson "They also allege that internal discussions about using LibGen data were escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as "MZ" in the memo handed over during discovery) and that Meta's AI team was "approved to use" the pirated material."
If there ever was any doubt about corporations' lack of respect for copyright of others, surely this is the end of it.
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@ticho @brentpatterson
Makes it hard to swallow that I spent 20 minutes today using my knowledge of copyright to explain to some poor comms staffer, who just wants to send out a link to an article and have it not be paywalled, "for THESE people, link A will work, but for THOSE people, you'll need to get link B with special tracking cruft from the corresponding author," all so the publisher can have a sustainable business model of charging $5k APC or $40 per download.
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@brentpatterson ::always have been dot gif::
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@brentpatterson Would you be willing to talk about this on @blendernation, Brent?
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@BartV @blendernation certainly.
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@brentpatterson And, of course, if the law moves too fast, we wind up with ill-thought-out, overly-specific legislation that ages like milk.
Ethics and morals sure do look like handicaps, sometimes.
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text/gemini