Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

stablediffusionlitigation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 473 posts

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#41

Post by limitedsupply »

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…

So what happens if you put a painting into a mechanical grinder? Is the shapeless pile of dust still copyrighted work? I don’t think so.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#42

Post by visarga »

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…

> 90%ish of a single input image

Oh, one image is enough to apply copyright as if it were a patent, to ban a process that makes original works most of the time?

The article authors say it works as a "collage tool" trying to minimise the composition and layout of the image as unimportant elements. At the same time forgetting that SD is changing textures as well, so it's a collage minus textures and composition?

Is there anything left to complain about? unless, by draw of luck, both layout and textures are very similar to a training image. But ensuring no close duplications are allowed should suffice.

Copyright should apply one by one, not in bulk. Each work they complain about should be judged on its own merits.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#43

Post by kh0st »

"assum­ing nom­i­nal dam­ages of $1 per image" that's quite an assumption lol.

To quote "You can't put the genie back in the bottle"

And unless I start to see some evidence that this is theft, by an identical piece in a collage being "created" by AI (impossible I think) - then I have ZERO time to consider how they are being stolen or thinking of compensation ideas.

I say this with an arts degree - it sucks for struggling artists, but I only find it nominally sad that a bunch of people are gunna be out of work making Art for the McCorpos -

If you are one of those artists then i'm sorry if I sound flippant or cruel about this, but you can adapt or you will die. Not literally, of course.

But real artists know its the message not the medium - and they aren't in danger of dying off. They adapt.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#44

Post by synu »

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…

You could make the same argument that as long as you are using lossy compression you are unable to infringe on copyright.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#45

Post by andybak »

akjetma wrote: post #35
Salgat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was with you right up until the final sentence.

How did "style" become "work"?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#46

Post by dymk »

klabb3 wrote: post #29
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #3

You are literally modern day luddites. If you succeed, you will undo decades of technological progress.

How? If you want to distribute a commercial non-research model, simply train it on data sets where people have given consent. I doubt that research would be affected. At most, I’d expect copyright legislation around training to slightly delay commercial mass-deployment. Given the huge socio-technical transition that is ahead of us, it’s probably a good thing to let people have a chance to form an opinion before openi…

Every professional artist trained their own brains on some number copyrighted images, without the consent of the original creator.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#47

Post by readthenotes1 »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #39
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

what if they shut us down because of a copyright dispute? :-)

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#48

Post by synu »

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 suspect it's different people. There's a kind of bias where it seems like everyone else on a forum is all one person who behaves super inconsistently, I've thought it as well.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#49

Post by sacrosancty »

akjetma wrote: post #35
Salgat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]
Post reply on HN