Technology

It's not exactly the same thing, but here's an article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF explains how image generators work within the law. The two aren't exactly the same, but you can see how the same ideas would apply. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.

Here are some excerpts:

First, copyright law doesn’t prevent you from making factual observations about a work or copying the facts embodied in a work (this is called the “idea/expression distinction”). Rather, copyright forbids you from copying the work’s creative expression in a way that could substitute for the original, and from making “derivative works” when those works copy too much creative expression from the original.

Second, even if a person makes a copy or a derivative work, the use is not infringing if it is a “fair use.” Whether a use is fair depends on a number of factors, including the purpose of the use, the nature of the original work, how much is used, and potential harm to the market for the original work.

And:

...When an act potentially implicates copyright but is a necessary step in enabling noninfringing uses, it frequently qualifies as a fair use itself. After all, the right to make a noninfringing use of a work is only meaningful if you are also permitted to perform the steps that lead up to that use. Thus, as both an intermediate use and an analytical use, scraping is not likely to violate copyright law.

I'd like to hear your thoughts.