On Copyright and Computers (with a side of Complaining)

(c) 2024 Echovita. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

Here's the deal, see:

I don't have a long page telling other people what they can and can't do with my characters.
I don't trademark my characters so I can sue artists into oblivion when they make a drawing I don't like.
I don't put obnoxious watermarks or "Not Yours" stamps on everything I post online.
I don't use Glaze, Nightshade, or other anti-AI technologies.
I don't place arbitrary limitations on the ability to use gifted, commissioned, or traded art.
And I don't hold recipients' ability to use their art as they please hostage unless they pay hundreds of dollars in ransom.

Why?

Because I'm an archivist, and I've seen every single one of those restrictions implemented. And they drive me nuts. I might sound a bit offensive here, but I'm tired of All Rights Reserved being the be-all, end-all. I would rather make concessions now that help keep art around in a decade or five. Creative works should be able to be reimagined, parodied, expanded upon, and used by the next generation of creatives. They shouldn't be locked in a box, hidden away, or forgotten forever because the one extant copy disappeared and nobody bothered to archive it. (I'm still shocked at the sheer volume of pieces on DeviantArt that were lost to time.) I've gone to numerous artist's now-nonexistent webpages on the Internet Archive to look through their old catalogs. More often than not, the early-2000s scare over easily accessible home printing caused artists to compress the files into itty-bitty JPEGs with a watermark covering half of the image. And a copyright notice at the bottom. And a warning in Big Red Letters somewhere on the homepage telling people not to copy their stuff.

Now, this is why all of that gets to be annoying. Here's a full-res, 600dpi, 24-bit .TIF that I made on an XP-era-appropriate Epson Perfection 3390 scanner. (I converted it to a .png for the sake of load times - the original file was around 25MB.)
<Hi-res copy>
(c) 2024 Echovita. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

These are fairly common settings for 2001-2005 - the era where many artists started pushing online presences further than ever before. The rise of DA and other sites made sharing art online quite a bit easier -- but sharing full-res files was uncommon. More often than not, all that was published online was something more like this:
<Eww.>

It's the same piece, just as a "protected" JPEG. (I've downscaled it to 20% of original size, added numerous obnoxious watermarks, and exported it at 80% quality.) Now, I won't deny the fact that Internet speeds back then were still stuck in molasses. Trying to download a 5MB file to look at might take quite a while. However, many such tiny art files I've found aren't thumbnails. They're the highest resolution versions that were publicly available. If you've ever wondered why you never see much art from the late 90s and early 2000s online -- this is why. Most of it looks like this in some way, shape, or form; the watermarks weren't always in play, but the resolution and quality surely were. Nobody bothered to save a file that looks like this, because it's not all that much to look at. It's an ad for a product, not an art piece to share.

Unfortunately, such attempts to keep art 'safe' as a product caused much of it to become lost media. Somebody might have a high-res copy of it somewhere, but it's probably hidden deep within the Documents folder of a computer they don't use. Or it was on a forum that long since died. Or a DeviantArt page that got taken down. Maybe the YouTube speedpaint is still up, but it's in 240p. The original art is likely gone, too - lost while moving, stored on a dead hard drive, sent to Goodwill, or faded beyond recognition. It was twenty-five years ago, after all -- Copics and many other traditional media aren't lightfast, and most computers of that era weren't "capacitor-fast" either.

All of this is why I'm quite lenient about my copyright protections -- unlike many other artists.

Sure, my art might end up training an AI model.
I don't care. It's so unusual, it'll likely make the model worse. :-)

Someone might post it on a site I don't agree with.
So what? If it brightens someone's day, I'm a happy camper.

Perhaps it gets put in a book without my knowledge.
Big whoop. Someone saw fit to make some space and use some ink on something I made.

Or somebody prints it out, frames it, and puts it on their bedroom wall - without sending me an e-mail.
Cool! Enjoy the new wall art.

In an era where people already suggest paying with the currency of "engagement" or "reach," why not make the eyeballs free?

Besides, if somebody wants to copy art badly enough, they will find a way to do so. Legal protections might catch a case or two, but there's not much stopping Joe Public from pirating a Patreon, buying a professional large-format photo printer, working a little Photoshop magic to remove watermarks and other copyright information, and printing out their own copies of whatever they want. Except, perhaps, the fact that legit prints are usually around $10 and far less cumbersome to make. But why spend $10 for a sheet of paper when you can spend $5000 on your very own law-flouting printing studio that can make the same sheet of paper? It's just good business!

(For legal reasons, that was a joke.)

I understand that I'm just a hobbyist, and that professional artists are more likely to take a pro-copyright stance. That's fine. They're allowed to do that. And I understand that they need to put food on the table. Painters need to eat just as much as engineers do. But I fear the latest scare over AI may well be this decade's "home printer moment." It's new, it's untested, and nobody knows what to do with it - so they try the most painful methods possible. A decade from now, we'll probably see the wreckage of Glaze all over the Web. The folks who made the software claim you can't see the changes it makes. I can, and most everybody else probably can, too. Low-resolution copies with adversarial noise fail to live up to their protective promises, and instead turn potential patrons away from your work. Complain all you want, but I'll never commission an artist who uses Glaze or other AN technologies on their public galleries.

Just for fun, see if you can tell which of these is Glazed, which one is a JPEG, and which one is the original file.
<With Glaze> <Without Glaze> <JPEG>

If you can't see the oily streaks and strange spaghetti patterns on the left piece, you might want to get your eyes checked. Now, imagine every new art piece on the Internet with that same unfortunate texture. Again - I'm all for keeping artists around. But I don't think sacrificing this much quality is worth it. Artists with full galleries would have needed to glaze their entire archives before the dawn of AI -- and that window's long since closed. There's no point in trying to ward off the scrapers and "AI bros" now; the damage has already been done. You might be able to stifle a new model or two - but anti-Glaze tech already exists, and (to be blunt), people who use AI were never your customers to begin with. They want a picture. They don't want your signature. (But that's another article for another time.)

New technology almost always brings new copyright problems. First came cameras. Then came scanners. Home printers, too. And then Facebook. Now, AI. The question most artists ask is, "How do we keep our rights?" In my humble opinion, that's the wrong question to ask. We should be asking, "How do we serve our patrons and viewers?" Ttypically, that means making archives more open. Art museums may have given way to the Web, but the concept is the same: Let people see the art. If they like it, they'll save it. (Or buy more of it.)

As far as I'm concerned, I make art for the glory of God, the eternal Artist, alone.
I feel that doing so means making it true, beautiful, good -- and free. Free to view. Free to share. Free to build upon. Free to enjoy.

Thanks for reading.
- Echovita