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Megaface

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Re: Megaface

#81
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know if attempts have been made to trick these ML models into reproducing original copyrighted inputs verbatim (edit: or close enough)? Edit: Asking about verbatim copies wasn't really a great question. I should have asked about producing things that are "close enough to cause legal trouble" (whether that be due to copyright, trademark, or something else).

There's been a lot of work on memorization, yes, and you can also do nearest-neighbor lookups in the original data to gutcheck 'memorization'. As usual, the answer is "it's complicated" but for most practical purposes, the answer is 'no': you will get the Mona Lisa if you ask for it, absolutely, but the odds of a randomly generated image being a doppelganger is near-zero. (If you've seen stuff on social media to the…

If there's a specific prompt that makes the model produce such an image (without img2img), why shouldn't it count? The question isn't whether the model produces such things randomly, but rather whether it's capable of producing them in principle, even if it requires a very elaborate prompt.

Re: Megaface

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

Avoiding doing something because you don't want to get sued and subjected to a lengthy court battle is completely rational and it doesn't mean that doing that thing is illegal. For example, for decades many TV shows came up with their own lyrics for Happy Birthday song, even though it was well known that the song wasn't copyrighted, because nobody wanted to get sued and fight that battle. Easier to just change a few…

It's not just legal issues that'll lead to self-regulation. It's also stuff like this:

https://imgur.com/a/vAqCUP7

Re: Megaface

#83

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 o…

>Or is it republishing of the original data? If it's publishing _data_ then you're fine under regular copyright as it only protects artistic works and not things like data. You might fall shy of other IP legislation but not copyright. YMMV, this is not legal advice and represents my personal opinion unrelated to my employment.

Yep, in the EU you can run afoul of database rights. This is separate from copyright.

Re: Megaface

#84

It strikes me as sad that people's photos have been taken a used to train a technology for a corporate profit. People just wanted to share their wedding photos.

Do ad blockers also make you sad?

Re: Megaface

#85

This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law [1]. Any person in Switzerland has the right to their face in any picture taken now and any time in the future even if taken by someone else. Without the explicit consent of a person, their face may not be used or published in anyway or form. There are only a few exceptions like for public figures and celebrities but even then they also have a right to privacy. SRF…

> This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law

And drinking alcohol violates Saudi Arabian law.

Unless the institutions involved are subject to Swiss jurisdiction (which doesn't appear to be the case), this doesn't mean much. If anything, the blame lies with the Swiss government, which allowed a foreign company (Flickr) to operate in Switzerland without adequate guarantees that this company would protect Swiss users' data from unlawful applications.

But like most other governments, they were happy to let US tech giants bait their own citizens into giving them boatloads of personal data, which ended up outside of the regulatory control of said governments. Any complaints now are just posturing. The time to act was 15 years ago.

Re: Megaface

#86

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 o…

>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.

So... the HN crowd seems perfect to ask, since everyone's always clamoring for a Goodreads alternative: where is the line between "data" and "content" (on public pages)? AFAICT, Goodreads has been entrenched for so long because their ToS doesn't allow anyone else to use their book/reviews data, which makes quite a large moat. This comment would make me think it's legal to scrape that moat.

Re: Megaface

#87
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, no, only if you’re under the jurisdiction of the EU courts. That is an awfully naïve argument my friend. If it were that simple then there would, for example, be no need for a 68 page document entitled "The Sedona Conference Commentary on the Enforceability in U.S. Courts of Orders and Judgments Entered under GDPR" [1]. Allow me to quote from the Conclusion on page 68: "As the Commentary shows, the enforceabi…

It's not about jurisdiction in which the defendant is based , of course, but rather in jurisdiction where it has presence. If foreign laws were enforceable against actors who never operated in those other countries, we'd have to enforce Saudi laws against atheism and Russian laws against "gay propaganda".

There are literally millions of US companies with no EU presence, but who have online ordering of digital products. To the parent: Good luck enforcing GDPR on them. They won’t even abide by an EU subpoena that asks “what PII are you storing?” And right to delete? Haha, good luck.

Re: Megaface

#88
Challenge this:

If I am legally allowed to look at a million pictures to learn how to draw in different art styles, or even how to imitate a very certain art style, I basically train weights and biases in my brain.

If StabilityAi does the same with pictures available online, and release the weights and biases as Stable Diffusion, how is this different from humans learning from that data?

Re: Megaface

#89

Challenge this: If I am legally allowed to look at a million pictures to learn how to draw in different art styles, or even how to imitate a very certain art style, I basically train weights and biases in my brain. If StabilityAi does the same with pictures available online, and release the weights and biases as Stable Diffusion, how is this different from humans learning from that data?

Law does not work by analogy. The difference is obvious - one of them is an automated computer system, the other is a human. As mentioned above it is not clear whether use/redistribution of this data is legal. But generally speaking, drawing an analogy between a piece of software and a human being is not an argument that will hold any weight in court.

Re: Megaface

#90
post #85

This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law [1]. Any person in Switzerland has the right to their face in any picture taken now and any time in the future even if taken by someone else. Without the explicit consent of a person, their face may not be used or published in anyway or form. There are only a few exceptions like for public figures and celebrities but even then they also have a right to privacy. SRF…

> This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law And drinking alcohol violates Saudi Arabian law. Unless the institutions involved are subject to Swiss jurisdiction (which doesn't appear to be the case), this doesn't mean much. If anything, the blame lies with the Swiss government, which allowed a foreign company (Flickr) to operate in Switzerland without adequate guarantees that this company would protect Swiss…

Can't agree, if an assassin illegaly enters a country and commits a crime, the blame falls on the miscreant for their behavior not the country for failing to notice the deceptive miscreant.

You would have to demonstrate the Swiss govt was made aware of Flickr before they were a thing there and then failed to ban them, for this line of reasoning to make any sense...

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