> Left: “Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer” by Stable Diffusion Right: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer
Even that if done by a person as far as I understand it would not constitute a copyright infringement. It's a separate work mimicking Vermeer's original. The closest real world equivalent I can think of is probably the Obama Hope case by AP vs Shepard Fairy but that settled out of court so we don't really know what the status of that kind of reproduction is legally. On top of that though the SD image isn't just a recoloring with some additions like Fairy's was so it's not quite as close to the original as that case is.
No hadn't heard of it, I don't follow copyright law extremely closely it tends to make me annoyed. On it's face reading the case summaries and looking at the two pictures, it feels like the act of manually repainting and the color choices should be enough to render it a transformative work. It's one of the fundamental problems with trying to apply copyright to anything other than precise copies, art remixes and recombines all the time, it's fundamental to the process.
Even that if done by a person as far as I understand it would not constitute a copyright infringement. It's a separate work mimicking Vermeer's original. The closest real world equivalent I can think of is probably the Obama Hope case by AP vs Shepard Fairy but that settled out of court so we don't really know what the status of that kind of reproduction is legally. On top of that though the SD image isn't just a recoloring with some additions like Fairy's was so it's not quite as close to the original as that case is.