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Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

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Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#371

Post by dTal »

kranke155 wrote: post #369
dTal wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you articulate a meaningful (and more importantly legally provable) difference? Both human brains and these sorts of AI programs are intractable black boxes. Maybe you think computer programs lack some sort of divine spark, but even if we accept that it seems to me that it's not a given that humans apply their divine spark every time they create something either.

That’s a bizarre definition. So because they’re both black boxes we suddenly treat them both the same legally? I don’t have to prove that an ML transform is equivalent to a human being. Divine spark isn’t necessary to protect you from copyright - we have laws that determine what you need to do and those laws have allowed IP to exist as a profitable area for a century. Here’s a simple question - if I were to take an i…

>But if I build an ML engine I apparently can take 100 of his images, produce similar images and charge money for it. Magic!

You can pay a human artist to produce "similar" images too, and as long as they aren't too similar it's fine.

You seem to be conflating - repeatedly - exact copies of a work with merely copying a style. Family Guy had an episode where Brian and Stewie visit a Disney universe, and everything was animated in the style of a classic Disney film. A bunch of humans did indeed watch a bunch of Disney films, and make a new animation based on what they saw. Did Disney - a notoriously litigious company - sue? Of course not. Copying a style is not infringement! I don't see why it's any different if an AI program does that.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#372

Post by not2b »

andybak wrote: post #368
not2b wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 1, there's probably a case where a picture that exactly matches the prompt is very famous, so maybe the right prompt would manage to effectively select an image licensed by Getty. The GPLed fast inverse square root routine was an example of this kind of thing: one good match and the model finds it. Finding such a case might or might not be possible. For 2, you can't find what isn't there, so something random woul…

> For 2, you can't find what isn't there, so something random would come out. It's not a search engine. It can synthesise things that it hasn't seen to some degree (assuming it knows the elements that make up the request. The tricky bit would to teach it "Gettyness" without showing it Getty images but I think that's entirely possible. Getty images aren't astonishing examples of unprecedented originality. So it just n…

Suppose that there's a really iconic pic of George Clooney eating a burrito in Times Square, with a "Getty Images" watermark on it, in the training set. It's perfectly framed, has a somewhat comic expression, and a bit of the contents spilled on his shirt. It seems quite possible that the model could produce an image that isn't identical to this but so much so that people assume it's a copy, maybe produced by an artist based on the picture. Worse, it will have most of the "Getty Images" watermark right on the image.

If that doesn't convince you that there might be an issue I'll just stop here.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#373

Post by kiicia »

sacado2 wrote: post #349
cheald wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, but why is using copyrighted images to train a model be any more illegal than studying copyrighted paintings in art school? Copyright doesn't prevent consumption or interpretation, simply reproduction.

The fact watermarked images are available for free doesn't necessarily mean you can do whatever you want with them. It depends on what the getty licence on watermarked images says exactly. I'm pretty sure they don't include something like "you can use these picture as data in automated processes". They are (I guess) available "for your eyes only".

iirc court already stated that you can crawl available net and use what you find there, it was after that company doing face recognition, wasn't it?

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#374

Post by kiicia »

brobinson wrote: post #336
nomel wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it copyright infringement to experience copyrighted material and make new art based on those experiences? Yes, covered under "derivative work": https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf > A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already existing works. Common derivative works include translations, ..., art reproductions, abridgments, and condensations of preexisting works. Another common…

So by this logic, Deadly Premonition and Mizzurna Falls are derivative works of Twin Peaks?

"inspired by"

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#375

Post by belorn »

extra88 wrote: post #164
belorn wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few seconds of a song is also very small, and yet it only take a few notes in some cases for a court to find someone guilty of copyright infringement. > On top of that, if the plaintiff could win, the actual market value of the source work is relevant to damages and that value is likely almost nothing so congratulations, you tied up the legal system just to get one AI-image taken down. The pirate bay trial gave pre…

Different domains of copyrightable material have different norms. The music industry, in response to sampling, has established that even small, recognizable snippets have marketable value and can therefore be infringed upon (there's it's also rife with case law with, in my opinion, bad wins by plaintiffs). For photographic images, collage is already an established art form and is generally considered transformative a…

It is the correct case, but the "promoting" might be a bit of an translation issue. They were found guilty of aiding and enabling infringement, but as I describe above, not for any specific infringement of a specific work but rather the act of infringement in a general sense.

There has been cases where "enabling" infringement been argued by US prosecutors, but I don't know what the legal status of that argument is. I have heard lawyers argue that nothing in copyright law explicitly forbid enabling, but that was mostly around the time of 2010.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#376

Post by hedora »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #118
hedora wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if someone uses the Stable Diffusion editor plugin for photoshop, etc?

I don't see how that's an issue. Using photoshop doesn't automatically allow you to post the images. You can post the images IF it was not made/edited by an AI model, regardless of if photoshop was used. If you use the Stable Diffusion plugin, then you're using stable diffusion, and therefore can't post the image. It doesn't matter at all that you used the photoshop plugin.

Ignoring the philosophical ambiguity, their announcement specifically says this policy change doesn't apply to pictures made with Photoshop.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#377

Post by deltasevennine »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #346
deltasevennine wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

copyright doesn't apply. Nothing was copied. The AI was trained in the same way you trained your brain when you look at something. Nothing is copied. Nothing immoral was done. No law was broken.

When I look at something I create an image of it on my retina. When a computer "looks" it creates an image somewhere. The former is allowed, the latter comes against copyright scrutiny, things like caching images to show you a webpage have been addressed by copyright law--through precedent--and this will be similarly addressed.

The image is not saved in a neural network. No identical image can be extracted from the network.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#378

Post by kranke155 »

dTal wrote: post #371
kranke155 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a bizarre definition. So because they’re both black boxes we suddenly treat them both the same legally? I don’t have to prove that an ML transform is equivalent to a human being. Divine spark isn’t necessary to protect you from copyright - we have laws that determine what you need to do and those laws have allowed IP to exist as a profitable area for a century. Here’s a simple question - if I were to take an i…

>But if I build an ML engine I apparently can take 100 of his images, produce similar images and charge money for it. Magic! You can pay a human artist to produce "similar" images too, and as long as they aren't too similar it's fine. You seem to be conflating - repeatedly - exact copies of a work with merely copying a style. Family Guy had an episode where Brian and Stewie visit a Disney universe, and everything was…

Parody is a well known copyright exemption.

I just don’t see how you can go - this is just like a human being, let me make a million dollars out of it.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#380

Post by LtWorf »

karmasimida wrote: post #317
Jevon23 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer and I can't say how existing copyright law applies to this situation, but, how is taking images and feeding them into an ML model different from taking library code and including it in your software? In both cases, you take a series of bytes (the image data / the library source code) that is ultimately crucial to the functioning of your software, combine it with your own original code you wrote (trai…

> If you use a GPL'd library in your software, then it's uncontroversial to say that you have to follow the terms of the GPL. You can't say "well actually, the compiler is just reading your source code and learning what sort of binary it should produce, just like a human learns by studying source code, so I actually don't have to follow your licensing terms". No one would buy that. You clearly used that library, so y…

> What if I read the code, understand its concepts, and re-implements another library that provide similar functionality without directly linking to the original repository, that is not an infringement

It might be… which is why famously wine developers don't look at leaked windows code.

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