On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 3:55 PM John Erling Blad jeblad@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&am...