My thoughts on copyright

Old Web

I obviously love old web revival, but one of the things about the revival that bother me is that people are treating images differently. Not illustrations, mind you, but graphics like buttons, stamps, or pixels. Graphics that are more or less made to be used on sites (with the exception of pixels, depending on context). As an artist, I understand why some people would want to source every image, but this is not how the old web worked. I think you should respect when people don't want their work to be reposted, but if someone requires credit, I just don't use it. It's clunky, and it's just not true to the old web spirit. This is why I tend to try to use images from the public domain. People who have the credit as a click-through link are at least making it less visually obtrusive, but I find it to be grating and, frankly, performative if it isn't explicitly required by the artist. A lot of stamps and blinkies rely on using other people's photographs and pixels anyway. I think artists should embrace it being copyright-free. We can only control so much - a scary thought, true, but it does good to acknowledge this truth, in some kind of Buddhist way. Obviously, I can't force anyone to not credit stamps or whatever, these are just my thoughts.

AI

As someone who is firmly anti-AI "art", I think the focus on copyright has done a lot of damage to the rhetoric. It's easier for proponents of AI to argue against than the cold, hard fact that it is taking away rights from laborers (artists, animators, etc.). I still think Ghibli should try to sue the IDF and American government for their AI shit, but that's more of an emotional response on my part.

Last updated 5/21/2025