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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

#131

Post by bryanrasmussen »

It seems to me the communal voice of HN varies widely on copyright issues depending on who is getting sued and who is getting potentially hurt by violations.

People who generally make less money than programmers - writers, artists, musicians - should stop their whining and their unfair uses of copyright to control their creative output.

Programmers who are getting shafted by big corporations using their code to build machine learning models need urgent protection and fairness.

It probably doesn't help that almost every copyright argument here gets made with the understanding of copyright prevalent in the American model - that is to say that copyright exists to promote the progress of science and the useful arts - whereas in many countries copyright is understood as existing because the creator of something has a moral right to control and ownership of whatever they made.

Obviously this lawsuit is in the U.S but I suppose even if it loses here other lawsuits in other countries, with a different understanding of copyright, might succeed.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#132

Post by hgomersall »

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…

Some years ago I had an idea to have a method of file sharing with strong plausible deniability from the sharer.

The idea, in stage one, was to split a file into chunks and xor those with other random chunks (equivalent to a one-time pad), those chunks as well as the created random chunks then got shared around the networks, with nobody hosting both parts of a pair.

The next stage is that future files inserted into the network would not create new random chunks but randomly use existing chunks already in the network. The result is a distributed store of chunks each of which is provably capable of generating any other chunk given the right pair. The correlations are then stored in a separate manifest.

It feels like such a system is some kind of entropy coding system. In the limit the manifest becomes the same size as the original data. At the same time though, you can prove that any given chunk contains no information. I love thinking about how the philosophy of information theory interacts with the law.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#133

Post by seydor »

This should be more about the externalities of the models. You can sue factories for emitting too much CO2 without making claims about their IP. The internet has been built, from the get go, on the premise of violating the spirit of copyright laws. Google got away with that because they gave away a small percent of their profits to content makers via ads. Other companies were not so lucky to have that privileged access.

The images here are a big part of the model, there is no way around it, that huge blob of numbers doesn't build itself from scratch. But i don't know if these lawsuits have much merit. There is so much money in AI that these companies can forgo scraping, and instead send thousands of people to take photos of pretty much every artwork for themselves.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#134

Post by forgotusername6 »

manholio wrote: post #84
visarga wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

But they are not original works, they are wholly derived works of the training data set. Take that data set away and the algorithm is unable to produce a single original pixel. The fact that the derivation involves millions of works as opposed to a single one is immaterial for the copyright issue.

If I were to take the first word from a thousand books and use it to write my own would I be guilty of copyright violations?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#135

Post by ben_w »

chii wrote: post #98
vkou wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the fundamentally flawed and misguided argument that can literally be applied to any technological progress to curtail advancement. No, this is the only fundamentally correct way to view this. Before the existence of the printing press, we didn't need copyright law. Yet all that the printing press did was make transcribing books by hand faster. Quantitative changes enabled by technology are qualitative chan…

name one qualitative change resulting from quantitative change that did not benefit the world as a whole?

Atom bombs.

Coal mining (if coal hadn't ever been mined, we'd probably have gotten large scale wind- and hydroelectric power much sooner).

Whitney's cotton gin, albeit due to it coming before automated cotton picking.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#136

Post by visarga »

lolinder wrote: post #115
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

It's not hypocrisy, it's diversity. HN is not a person, it's a forum with lots of people with different opinions. Depending on dozens of factors (time of day, title of the article, who gets in first) different opinions will dominate. I've seen threads on Copilot that overwhelmingly come down in favor of Microsoft and threads on Stable Diffusion that come down hard against it. Also, even in a thread that has a lot of…

Funny thing - the forum works like a language model. It doesn't have one set personality, but it can generate from a distribution of people. The language model can generate from a distribution of prompts, which might be persona descriptions.

> Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06899

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#137

Post by realusername »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #131

It seems to me the communal voice of HN varies widely on copyright issues depending on who is getting sued and who is getting potentially hurt by violations. People who generally make less money than programmers - writers, artists, musicians - should stop their whining and their unfair uses of copyright to control their creative output. Programmers who are getting shafted by big corporations using their code to build…

I'm personally for a massive reduction of copyright time to align it on patents but that's beside the point, even in the current copyright system that argument against machine learning makes no sense.

The proof of that is they even had to lie about how stable diffusion works on this website to make it convincing, that's a clear sign that they are in the wrong.

Even themselves discovered that the truth won't get them very far.

> Obviously this lawsuit is in the U.S but I suppose even if it loses here other lawsuits in other countries, with a different understanding of copyright, might succeed.

The cat is just out of the bag anyways, if machine learning is outlawed in the US, it will flourish somewhere else instead.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#138

Post by jaapbadlands »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #77
TheMiddleMan wrote: post #31

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 cop…

I don't know if you're right or wrong, but it seems plausible that we could create a database of copyrighted images to check against.

Every original image is copyrighted. You're suggesting making a digital copy of every image there is to check that AI isn't generating digital copies of every image there is.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#139

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

kh0st wrote: post #43

"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 strugg…

the funny part is these tools are inspiring new creativity and mediums. someone made a 3d game using ai generated images. it was a lot of work to combine and put together, it only saved on the drawing. this is opening new doors for artists. but ya, they'll need to adapt.

maybe an even worse analogy, but i stopped using Photoshop when css got good. no need to make images for rounded corners. no need for me to pay adobe. but no one is suing css.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#140

Post by professorsnep »

chrischen wrote: post #22

“It is a par­a­site that, if allowed to pro­lif­er­ate, will make artists extinct.” This is the fundamentally flawed and misguided argument that can literally be applied to any technological progress to curtail advancement. Imagine if the medical tricorder (a device from Star Trek that does maybe 99% of what modern doctors do) is suddenly invented today. Doctors could use this argument to defend their livelihoods, bu…

I tend to use the argument, "if we stopped developing technology because it threatened some people's livelihoods, a 'calculator' would still refer to a person."
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