As the generation evolves, it appears that more people are recognizing other humans’ faces. From cell phones, the usage of facial identification as an unlocking mechanism to Facebook’s detection of faces in snapshots on its platform, facial recognition is quickly turning into a part of normal existence. Unfortunately, the way these datasets have been compiled and used is beginning to draw a few scrutinies, and rightly so. More importantly, the interplay with copyright regulation and your privacy is a lot less recognizable than you might imagine.
Whether you recognize it or not, your face may not be “yours” anymore. In a record from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, the Center determined that more than 117 million adults are a part of a “digital, perpetual lineup” available to law enforcement nationwide. Yet, even though you could not have ever gotten something more than a dashing price ticket, your image can be handy to law enforcement specialists as part of a surveillance database. Some of these pics are taken from surveillance cameras being utilized by city governments throughout the US, while others seem to have been compiled from less obvious resources. For instance, positive businesses carrying out facial reputation studies (like IBM) reap pics from publicly available collections for research functions to “educate” their algorithms. Unfortunately, this appears to have been performed without the consent of the human beings whose photos are being used in this manner, and what’s worse, it may not be on.
How can IBM do this? From a copyright perspective, they have covered at least one front. First, Section 107 of the Copyright Act surely lets in the “truthful use” of copyrighted works for “functions such as criticism, remark, information reporting, teaching (together with multiple copies for lecture room use), scholarship, or research….” On the idea of studies by myself, IBM’s use of such pix would be permissible. Secondly, the photographs utilized by IBM appear to derive from a set of 99.2 million photos known as the YFCC100M compiled through Yahoo (the previous proprietor of Flickr) for research purposes and difficulty to the Creative Commons license. That stated, plainly, the people whose snapshots have been used no longer consent to such use (according to NBC News).
The Creative Commons is a public license framework that allows the “creator” of the work to “preserve copyright even as permitting others to copy, distribute, and make a few uses of their paintings — at least non-commercially,” in addition to maintaining attribution to their works. There are one-of-a-kind forms of licenses available via the Creative Commons, so the question turns into whether Creative Commons allows such use. According to Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley, it seems that the answer is, properly, a “truthful” one:
