CLNZ (Copyright Licensing NZ) provide advice about how to protect your creative outputs. Free workshops are listed on their website, along with up-to-date information. Here's a recent post on protecting your work from AI image generators,
Steps to protect your art from AI image generators |
Chances are you’ve already had a look at some of the AI image generators available online, and the ways in which users are able to input terms to create images in the style of other living artists.
You may already be aware that several artists are in the process of suing the creators of a variety of AI art generators for infringing their rights, by training their generators using art scraped from the web, without permission.
So, it’s timely to talk about measures you can take to make your artwork harder for AI generators to scrape and use without your permission. Some of these are the copyright basics and are highlighted in our Creative Rights for Creative People workshops. For example: Ensuring you use the © symbol and including your name on your work.
Using watermarks and low-resolution uploads - this makes it more difficult for the AI to make use of the image as source material, because the image is either obscured or low quality. Watermarks can also allow images to be identified as the work of a particular creator as well.
There are also some mechanisms you can use to specifically opt-out of various generators’ training datasets. It’s not a catch-all unfortunately, but it’s worth looking at Spawning’s Have I Been Trained and assigning HTML “noai” or “noimageai’’ meta tags. Take a look at this in-depth guide.
You can also read Sam Irvine’s thoughts on AI and Copyright in the autumn 2023 issue of NZ Author magazine. |
Staff and students of Media Design School (MDS) in New Zealand need to take account of their actions with copyright material under New Zealand’s Copyright Act 1994.
Media Design School has a PTE licence agreement with Copyright Licencing NZ, which covers material that originated in print (e.g. hard copy books, journals, magazines). Staff making copies to provide to students are subject to the following copying limits:
Excluded works are works not within the scope of the PTE licence (however these may be copied or made available to students under other licences or conditions).
Notices
Staff should ensure that material made available to students will have an appropriate copyright warning notice attached in line with the following:
Copyright Notice
This material is protected by copyright and has been copied by and solely for the educational purposes of Media Design School under licence. You may not sell, alter or further reproduce or distribute any part of this material to any other person. Where provided to you in electronic format, you may only print from it for your own use in the relevant course of instruction. Failure to comply with the terms of this warning may expose you to legal action for copyright infringement and/or disciplinary action by Media Design School. |
MDS students should familiarise themselves with their New Zealand copyright obligations by visiting the Copyright Licencing NZ website: Tertiary Students.
Staff doing their own research or personal study may take advantage of fair dealing provisions for study or research, refer to these sections on the Copyright Licencing NZ website: Statutory Exceptions for Researchers and Fair Dealing.
Alison Scott
University Copyright Officer
Library & Learning Services
copyright@torrens.edu.au
Copyright and the Creative Sector
Study of the role of copyright and registered designs in the creative sector in New Zealand. (2016)
Report produced by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, in consultation with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.