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We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

stablediffusionlitigation.com

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Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#31

Post by TheMiddleMan »

An artist can look at images for reference, and draw something new inspired by them. Why does it matter if a software tool can do this much faster?

If the artist makes the image very similar to one of the reference photos, it may be a copyright violation. It doesn't matter if the artist used a pencil or software to create the new work.

Current AI image generation does, however, make it easy to unknowingly violate copyright. If it generates an image similar to something else out there you wouldn't know.

I don't know much about copyright law though, am I wrong?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#32

Post by polotics »

blululu wrote: post #25

21st century collage tool? While advocating for the illegalization of collages seems a bit of a stretch, I’m curious how true this is. The LAION B dataset is something like 100 TB and stable diffusion is about 10 GB so there is a factor of 10000 compression. That means a single pixel represents a 100x100 region. Perhaps someone more familiar with the topic could weigh in, but it would seem that the model would need t…

Good analogy. I think that it indeed demonstrates that if the data set used to generate SD's images had been generated based on innate knowledge about painting, like Bach's created temperament with his knowledge of music, then SD would be free of copyright entanglement.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#33

Post by dymk »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #13

Sometimes I have to wonder about the hypocrisy you can see on HN threads. When its software development, many here seem to understand the merits of a similar lawsuit against Copilot[1], but as soon as its a different group such as artists, then it's "no, that's not how a NN works" or "the NN model works just the same way as a human would understand art and style." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326

How do you know it's the same people making those comments?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#34

Post by limitedsupply »

akjetma wrote: post #20
dr_dshiv wrote: post #2

“Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions—and pos­si­bly bil­lions—of copy­righted images.” That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? “Hav­ing copied the five bil­lion images—with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists—Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bine…

I don't think you have to reproduce an entire original work to demonstrate copyright violation. Think about sampling in hip hop for example. A 2 second sample, distorted, re-pitched, etc. can be grounds for a copyright violation.

Perhaps different media has different rules? You can’t necessarily apply music sampling rules to text, for example. Eg I don’t think incorporating a phrase from someone else’s poem into my poem would be grounds for a copyright violation.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#35

Post by akjetma »

Salgat wrote: post #26
akjetma wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you have to reproduce an entire original work to demonstrate copyright violation. Think about sampling in hip hop for example. A 2 second sample, distorted, re-pitched, etc. can be grounds for a copyright violation.

The difference here is that the images aren't stored, but rather an extremely abstract description of the image was used to very slightly adjust a network of millions of nodes in a tiny direction. No semblance of the original image even remotely exists in the model.

there are some artists with very strong, recognizable styles. if you provide one of these artists' name in your prompt and get a result back that employs their strong, recognizable style, i think that demonstrates that the network has a latent representation of the artists work stored inside of it.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#36

Post by ggm »

Good. The points of law here deserve to be discussed, and understood. If there is such a thing as IPR then this is front and center in what rights are. If there is something like artists moral rights then this is front and center in that debate.

I didn't like the Sunny Bono law. It exists. The questions about law need to be asked.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#37

Post by kstenerud »

This sounds so much like how albums and radio threatened artists because there would be no more demand for live performances when you can just record it once and play it back a million times.

Or recordable tape, or VCRs, or art reprints.

And then there were the endless lawsuits over the "theft" from sampling and remixes.

The medium evolves. Some artists evolve with them, while others are left behind.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#38

Post by dymk »

TheDong wrote: post #21
dr_dshiv wrote: post #2

“Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions—and pos­si­bly bil­lions—of copy­righted images.” That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? “Hav­ing copied the five bil­lion images—with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists—Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bine…

It doesn't matter if they exist as exact copies in my opinion. The law doesn't recognize a mathematical computer transformation as creating a new work with original copyright. If you give me an image, and I encrypt it with a randomly generated password, and then don't write down the password anywhere, the resulting file will be indistinguishable from random noise. No one can possibly derive the original image from it…

> But, it's still copyrighted by the original artist as long as they can show "This started as my image, and a machine made a rote mathematical transformation to it" because machine's making rote mathematical transformations cannot create new copyright.

Do you have evidence that this is actually what the courts have decided with respect to NNs?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#39

Post by yazaddaruvala »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #28
dr_dshiv wrote: post #2

“Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions—and pos­si­bly bil­lions—of copy­righted images.” That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? “Hav­ing copied the five bil­lion images—with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists—Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bine…

> That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? In fairness, Diffusion is arguably a very complex entropy coding similar to Arithmetic/Huffman coding. Given that copyright is protectable even on compressed/encrypted files, it seems fair that the “container of compressed bytes” (in this case the Diffusion model) does “contain” the original images no differently than a compressed folder of images contains the…

lol thinking about this more:

I understand people’s livelihoods are potentially at stake, but what a shame it would be if we find AGI, even consciousness but have to shut it down because of a copyright dispute.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#40

Post by TheMiddleMan »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #13

Sometimes I have to wonder about the hypocrisy you can see on HN threads. When its software development, many here seem to understand the merits of a similar lawsuit against Copilot[1], but as soon as its a different group such as artists, then it's "no, that's not how a NN works" or "the NN model works just the same way as a human would understand art and style." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326

I believe Copilot was giving exact copies of large parts open source projects, without the license. Are image generators giving exact (or very similar) copies of existing works?

I feel like this is the main distinction.

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