On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 3:55 PM John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
People on another forum says portraits are personal
data and use of
them is a breach of Art. 6 GDPR Lawfulness of processing. This creates
a problem in most European countries. This is a breach of privacy
laws, and not a copyright issue.[1]
Something that can be used to recognize you face is certainly personal
data, so under the GDPR its operator needs to have a lawful reason to store
or process it. That could be user consent, public interest (e.g. in the
case of the police using it), possibly even a legitimate business interest
- the GDPR is pretty vague on what counts as a lawful reason.
Not sure how to interpret the local copyright law on
this. It can be
read both as it is legal (even to just repurpose all kind of images no
matter license) and as it is illegal to do it (it would be similar to
sampling of previously published music). Seems like you are allowed to
train a model, but you can't publish it…
In the EU, the CDSM directive mandates a copyright exception for data
mining [1] (for scientific research always, otherwise in the absence of an
explicit prohibition from the copyright owner). It is still new and most
member states have not adopted it into their local law yet, so the exact
form that exception will take is still an open question.
[1] see Title II Article 3 and 4 in the EU's crappy un-section-linkable law
page:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32019L0790&a…