Bibliotheca May 2023 – Royalty: The Courts of Hell Enforce Copyright Law
Welcome back to Mukashi no Sewing! This month’s theme for the Bay Area Kei Bibliotheca blog circle is “Royalty.” Originally I intended to write about how denizens of Hell were depicted in Chinese and Japanese art (with a little weirdness thrown in from medieval grimoires of the West), but I hope you don’t mind if I sidestep into “royalties” instead so I can talk about generative AI, creativity and culture, and intellectual property because – spoiler – basically infernal denizens just dress like the people depicting them. So there wasn’t much to write about there – but I promise I’ll still include some delightful Hellish artwork in this post! ❤
Let’s start off with intellectual property and counterfeiting in fashion, shall we? I live in the US, so I consulted the US Immigrations and Customs enforcement site, which states “The production and trafficking of counterfeit goods poses a significant health and safety threat to consumers. It also impacts the economic growth of legitimate businesses and consumers through lost revenue, downtime, and replacement costs.” Estimated at between 3.5 and 7% of global trade (at least $600 billion USD annually), fashion counterfeits seem harmless – a way to get luxury brand style at bargain basement prices – but not when you consider the bigger picture. Setting aside claims that counterfeiting funds terrorism (it probably contributes, but also probably that contribution is overstated to serve political ends), it’s equally as important to think about just how those low prices are achieved. Exploitative working conditions, substandard materials and construction, and environmental damage to developing nations are all standards of how both fast fashion and counterfeiting operations manufacture their goods at appealing price points.
I’d like to argue that there’s an even bigger cost to counterfeiting fashion, however; and it’s the poisoning of the well of creative endeavor. Gucci will keep putting out bags no matter how many shady vendors on the streets of New York sell their fakes, but independent creators can’t afford the financial and emotional toll that art theft takes. Prada can afford a legal team to fight their battles, but one-person creatives often simply give up in the face of their designs being stolen.
“I actually had to take a break… I’m not sure if I’ll ever start (my business) back up again and a very big part of that is what happened with Shein,” Florentine Röell explains. The 22-year-old, who lives between Brussels and London, started crocheting “useful items” to relax, but that changed as she began to post her creations on TikTok and gained attention…
Röell’s designs are feminine, cosy, and eclectic, a reflection of the joy that crocheting brought into her life. Though when she discovered that Shein had stolen two designs – one of which she hadn’t even had a chance herself to produce or sell – that was the last straw. “This whole thing with Shein has totally taken all my will to produce and show people my work,” she laments. “I never know if someone will just rip it off and make money off my creative abilities – I’m just so tired and so discouraged.”
From “How Shein got away with daylight robbery in 2021” by Kish Lal on Dazed
This corrosive aspect of intellectual property theft brings me, then, to the latest weapon in the war of capitalism versus creativity – generative AI.
If you’re not familiar with it, generative AI is an artificial intelligence that produces what looks like creative output – pictures, writing, songs, etc – based on “training” it has received. That training, currently, is based on the collective work of artists, writers, and musicians that exists on the internet. An AI is fed this data, and then given feedback from humans or software rules that tell it how to interpret it, and then how to produce its own approximations. (Here’s a really good layperson’s overview of the different types of AIs and their training methods, if you’re interested!) Does this sound a little like intellectual property theft? Yeah, that’s because it totally is.
The people whose work has been used to train the largest generative AI models have not been compensated for their inclusion. Even the Getty has commenced legal proceedings over their copyrighted work being stolen. And, just like with fashion counterfeiting, art theft doesn’t just impact the ability of creatives to make a living; it attacks our shared culture and the human connection created by art.
AI generation, whether text, voice, or imagery, can produce nothing on its own; it can only take what you and countless other humans have created, and combine it all into a shape dictated by random chance. It does so without contributing a single new thing of its own to the mix, so at its core, it’s more than a form of intellectual theft; it’s the theft of intelligence and creativity itself.
Human culture, for better or worse, is something we’ve earned and have a right, as humans, to participate in and foster. But the proliferation of generative AI content will all but cut off any avenue for genuine human creativity and thought to develop in a meaningful, constructive way.
From “Generative AI is stealing the valor of human intelligence” by John Loeffler on TechRadar
Fake creativity – whether we call it counterfeiting or artificial intelligence – is against everything we should stand for as human beings. Buying replica lolita dresses is wrong – not only because it takes money away from creators, but because it demeans the value of their original creative work and reduces it to a lowest-bidder dollar amount. Scraping Archive of Our Own to train an AI on how to write stories belittles the passion and real emotion that people in fandoms put into their work and the connections they make because of it. Using Stable Diffusion to mimic an artist’s style not only destroys their livelihood but diminishes their contribution to the record humanity’s existence. Artistic endeavor is one of the few triumphs of our species – it should be celebrated and protected, not reduced to a casualty of capitalism and technology.
How can you help? Discontinue or avoid the use of generative AI whenever possible, don’t buy counterfeits or replicas, and support independent artists and creators as much as you can. Fund programs like Glaze that protect artists from further theft of their work and pressure lawmakers to regulate use of generative AI and to protect copyrighted works. Visit and support museums of all kinds! Create something yourself, if you’re so inclined, and share creative works you love so that others can fall in love with them too and so the creators can see that it’s worthwhile to continue creating. And of course, please do subscribe below to get a notification each week about my latest post! 🙂 Thank you so much for reading this long and heartfelt essay, and I look forward to seeing you next week here on Mukashi no Sewing! ❤
Check out what other members of Bibliotheca had to say about this month’s topic!
Cupcakes and Unicorns spreads the word of Queen Cat
Kelp has a successful dessert experience with Royal Purin!
frillSquid discusses punk lolita, crowns on clothes, and the legacy of imperialism
Subscribe so you never miss a post! New adventures in history and sewing every Tuesday.
昔のSewing 
