The meat of the article is not talking about an injustice to the consumer. It's arguing that there's an injustice to the artist because artists' portfolios are critical to their career advancement. It's not enough to say "I worked on this team." You need to literally show your personal results in detail to get your next job. But, artist employers are requiring that the majority of their results be locked in a vault forever.
Some are even pushing to claim ownership of all art made during employment. That's blatantly a move to repress the employee's negotiating power.
> many artists are worried about their livelihood while a multi-billion dollar company is working towards making them obsolete often using their own work.
You do realize that most commercial art is "art for hire" and in this very story some of the examples trained were not owned by the artist.
Multi-billion dollar companies already do this. Hire artist to draw Corporate IP. Corp owns and can do whatever they want with it. Maybe they hire that artist again. Maybe they hire someone else and they share the work in a reference folder.
Hmmm, and why should an artist have to keep track of all and any companies that may be scraping their online portfolio (which any professional or even semi professional artist is expected to have) to opt out, just in case their work has been used.The burden should be on the company profiting from them.
I'm not sure your argument makes sense - Does conducting your business in a serious way as an artist involve finance-levels of know-your-customer regulatory compliance? Most business, aside from finance, do not know much about who's buying whatever product they're selling. Individual artists shouldn't be on the hook to do background checks on art buyers.
Don't forget about the fact that contracts separate out pay-schedules for different types of distribution. And since there is no way to identify how the original copy of the artwork being infringed was obtained, they have no contractual obligation to provide any money to the artists (and even if they could, the artists are paid per-sale, and lost sales that are recouped do not get included).
The distinction I think is that the multi-billion dollar company working towards making artists obsolete by using their own work didn't pay any of these artists for that IP. At least with hiring an artist to draw corporate IP, an artist has to relinquish their rights to that work explicitly and are paid for those rights.
The fact that their internal processes show total indifference as to whether a photo is sourced from Public Domain or any other source speaks volumes about their attitudes re: the art they sell; and from the top of the company down.
It shows their #1 priority was collecting as many pieces of work as they could, and their #2 effort was reinforcing their payment system (a la threats if you don't pay).
No where in that equation was the artist, the art itself, or any related interests. They only cared about being the middleman and acted like it.
That’s why copyright exists, so that more people create art for a living. You can be against copyright, but it’s certainly something that the law concerns itself with.
> In that scenario the original artist is granted copyright and assigns it to the company.
Whoever paid you to create it is the copyright holder, the artist doesn't have to grant anything when commissioned to produce work for hire, as it's the employers'.
I don't think it's a strawman; it's a response to the frequent argument that artists ought to be compensated for their art via copyright mechanisms... as she stated in the very first sentence, as a matter of fact. If that argument was never actually made, well, maybe then it would be a strawman; but it is made all the time.
The article hurt my head too, by the way, but that is because of the Weird Capitalization.
I think there's a bit of conflation across several questions going on, both here and in most discussions on the topic:
* Is an artist entitled to compensation merely for creating art?
* Is an artist entitled to compensation by those who view their art?
* Is an artist entitled to compensation by those who redistribute her art?
Some are even pushing to claim ownership of all art made during employment. That's blatantly a move to repress the employee's negotiating power.
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