Can you source the claims of databases being obtained illegally? An interesting conversation of "consent" comes to mind - I think the issue is if somebody's face appears in a news article is it allowed to then download that same image and store it for unrelated purposes? Wouldn't that make google image search illegal? How about FB's now defunt face matching system they just removed? As far as I have seen some regulators have demanded the data be deleted as it might be considered to breach GDPR, but there are absolutely countries (like the USA) where this is considered absolutely acceptable behavior.
So far, no public court cases with decisions can be found anywhere from what I can see.
Clearview is selling use of the imagery without a license. If you or I scraped everything off of Instagram and started offering derived data as a SaaS, we'd go to jail.
These people don't because they're using it to help the cops.
They are selling the images themselves... if you scraped all the images off Instagram to make a list of the most popular memes and songs of the week the lawsuit would be much more difficult against you.
I don't think that is true. Scraping Facebook and the like has already been litigated several times. I can't find the outcome of those cases, but jail is definitely not a possibility.
If I take a picture of my family and tag everyone on Facebook, I own the copyright to that picture and the metadata. If Clearview AI scrapes that image and uses that to build their database, they're violating copyright.
Why don't they get prosecuted for industrial scale copyright infringement? IMHO it's because they're not violating the copyright of an ultra wealthy company or individual. It's only normal people getting cheating, so nothing gets done.
You gave facebook permission to give the photo away. Facebook makes it available to the public.
Google, Yandex, Bing will read/save the image and provide a link to the original resource during a search if any text in a link matches. Uploading a photo will these searches will try to match against yours.
You as the copyright holder had the freedom to do whatever you wanted. By making it public you granted people access to view your content. People can legally view that image and make judgements including that you are similiar to another photo that was taken.
It's not about authors wealth your friends can save those images. If they sold or republished you could have a case but not if they directly link to your facebook pictures.
Yes, but Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Clearview or anyone else cannot take an image of me and use it for biometric purposes without my express consent as an Illinois resident. It doesn't matter if I took the photo or uploaded it. It's still a photo of me, and I have not consented.
> By making it public you granted people access to view your content. People can legally view that image and make judgements including that you are similiar to another photo that was taken.
This is not how copyright works. Clearview has no license to the copyrighted material from which they are profiting.
Facebook et al do - the license grant is in the signup TOS.
It might not actually be a violation of copyright, or search engines, the internet archive (which is nowhere near rich or powerful BTW), caching services and more in general could not legally exist in a practical manner. I'm guessing clear view exists under similar law. It's an image search engine, focused on faces. Google & microsoft could probably implement it today with their own image index, but don't because they will get a shit ton of negative PR and legislation for not enough money for that niche use case, because they are too big and powerful.
Google could very easily start the most effective hedge fund in the world due to their search engine power and ability to hire the smart, but do not, probably for much of the same reasons.
So far, no public court cases with decisions can be found anywhere from what I can see.
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