Megaface

"All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use."

I wonder what the implications are for Stable Diffusion, DALLE and Midjourney since that art images on the internet are copyrighted by default.

Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists.

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/lensa-ai-art-images-withou...

Are there any licenses that are generally permissive, but prohibit certain programmatic, law enforcement, government, etc. usecases?

It'd be interesting legal territory if someone has tried this already.

> Stability AI is happy to follow copyright laws for their music model, because they know that music labels will hold them accountable. So this seems like a good time to point out to larger companies like @WaltDisneyCo that their copyrighted material is being stolen and used too

I mean this is a pretty good point. If they're so sure this is legal, then train on copyrighted audio+video media as they already do with copyrighted visual media.

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means.

What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis on scraped data is permitted by law, and you can publish your analysis of that data.

The question is, is an AI model trained on scraped data a derived analysis that is therefore legal? Or is it republishing of the original data? We need a test case to find out.

In the case of this dataset, I don't think the CC license applies to people using it. It "may" apply to redistribution of it for free. If the dataset was sold, that would be a violation. I suspect (after tested in court) a model trained on this dataset would be allowed despite the CC license on the photos.

Personally, in this case I think the ethics committee of the University should have put up barriers to the project. The morals of this are questionable at best.

0: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

IANAL.

I don’t think you can prevent scraping or use in ML corpuses in this way. Copyright prevents the creation of non-transformative copies of a work other than some protected use cases (parody, education, etc). All OSS licenses do is provide a right to copy a work provided certain conditions (attribution, copy left) are met. But the general legal consensus as far as I know is that most ML models meet the threshold for being a new transformative work, so copyright doesn’t apply. Accordingly, you can’t use copyright to prevent something from being part of a ML corpus.

That said, I if your question is broader than the article… if you’re just talking about non-transformative uses (I.e., just using open source software) I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t create a license that doesn’t allow software to be deployed into certain environments. Some examples:

https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license2.pdf

https://www.linux.com/news/open-source-project-adds-no-milit...

No idea how these would do in court though.