From the it’s-complicated dept., Shannon Liao reports:
This week, NBC reported that facial recognition researchers at companies like IBM often feed their algorithms photos from publicly available collections, only protected by a Creative Commons license, without requesting permission from the people who are photographed. The incident raised the question of whether or not such training could be considered a valid use under the Creative Commons licenses.
It looks like the answer is yes — but Creative Commons also argues that today’s copyright laws may be insufficient to protect your face from being scanned, regardless of whether the photographer is using a permissive Creative Commons license or simply reserving all their rights to the photo. And that’s before we consider that the photographer, not the person photographed, is the one with copyright over a photo.
Read more on The Verge.