For disclosure I am a former member of the American Photographic Artists/Advertising Photographers of America, and I have works registered at the United States Copyright Office.
When we put works in our online portfolio, send mailers or physical copies of our portfolios we're doing it as promotional works. There is no usage license attached to it. If loaded into memory for personal viewing, that's fine since its not a commercial application nor violating the intent of that specific release: viewing for promotion.
Let's break down your example to help you understand what is actually going on. When we upload our works to third party galleries there is often a clause in the terms of service which states the artist uploading to the site grants a usage license for distribution and displaying of the image. Let's look at Section 17 of ArtStation's Terms of Service:
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License regarding Your Content
Your Content may be shared with third parties, for example, on social media sites to promote Your Content on the Site, and may be available for purchase through the Marketplace. You hereby grant royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, licenses (the “Licenses”) to Epic and our service providers to use, copy, modify, reformat and distribute Your Content, and to use the name that you provide in association with Your Content, in connection with providing the Services; and to Epic and our service providers, members, users and licensees to use, communicate, share, and display Your Content (in whole or in part) subject to our policies, as those policies are amended from time-to-time
This is in conjunction with Section 16's opening line:
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Ownership
As between you and Epic, you will retain ownership of all original text, images, videos, messages, comments, ratings, reviews and other original content you provide on or through the Site, including Digital Products and descriptions of your Digital Products and Hard Products (collectively, “Your Content”), and all intellectual property rights in Your Content.
So when I click your link, I'm not engaging in a copyright violation. I'm making use of ArtStation's/Epic's license to distribute the original artist's works. When I save images from ArtStation that license does not transfer to me. Meaning if I were to repurpose that work it could be a copyright violation depending on the usage the artist agrees to. Established law states that I hold onto the rights of my work and any usage depends on what I explicitly state and agree to; emphasis on explicitly because the law will respect my terms and compensation first, and your intentions second. For example, if a magazine uses my images for several months without a license, I can document the usage time frame, send them an invoice, and begin negotiating because their legal team will realize that without a license they have no footing.
- Yes, this also applies to journalism as well. If you've agreed to let a news outlet use your works on a breaking story for credit/exposure, then you provided a license for fair compensation in the form of credit/exposure.
I know this seems strange given how the internet freely transformed works for decades without repercussions. But as you know from sites like YouTube copyright holders are not a fan of people repurposing their works without a mutually agreed upon terms in the form of a license. If you remember the old show Mystery Science Theater 3000, they operated in the proper form: get license, transform work, commercialize. In the case of ArtStation, the site agrees to provide free hosting in compensation for the artist providing a license to distribute the work without terms for monetization unless agreed upon through ArtStation's marketplace. At every step, the artist's rights to their work is respected and compensated when the law is applied.
If all this makes sense and we look back at AI art, well...
