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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

#211

Post by realusername »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #186
realusername wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it generates you an image like Biden still does not make it a derivative either. You can draw Biden yourself if you're talented and it's not considered a derivative of anything.

Correction: if you draw a copy of Biden and it happens to overlap enough with someone’s copyright of a drawing or image of Biden, you did create a derivative (whether you knew it or not).

is that really how copyright law works? Drawing something similar independently is considered a derivative even if there's no links to it?

It's bad news for art websites themselves if that's the case...

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#212

Post by visarga »

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…

> before opening the floodgates

How can you uninvent and undistribute a technology?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#213

Post by visarga »

astrange wrote: post #197
klabb3 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is not necessary because the model was trained in Germany and the law there explicitly says you don't need to do that.

Use the model to generate image variations, filter out things that look too similar to the original. Then you can replace the original art works in the training set. Also remove artist names from the text, you can later create new style IDs. This will make it harder to duplicate the exact expression of an original work but still learn the ideas and visual styles in a more abstracted way.

For all the non-problematic training images you can use the originals. Some artists might want their names to become popular as style keywords.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#214

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

jaapbadlands wrote: post #138
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a copy, a hash or fingerprint. Just enough data to measure if it's substantially similar.

But yes, it may be infeasible to index and compare against every image ever uploaded.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#215

Post by Ferret7446 »

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 think the pushback from programmers has a different motivation.

Programmers love to share code, but they don't want to share it with corporations who don't give back. We invented copyleft as a way to (ab)use the legal system to open up everything. We hate copyright and "love" "copyleft" as a means to weaken copyright.

It would be like if artists gave away all of their art, except not to corporations who hog their copyrights.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#216

Post by Last5Digits »

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…

This surely can't be the case, right? If it was, then what's stopping me from taking any possible byte sequence and applying my copyright to it?

I could always show that there exists some function f that produces said byte sequence when applied to my copyrighted material.

Can I sue Microsoft because the entire Windows 11 codebase is just one "rote mathematical transformation" away from the essay I wrote in elementary school?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#217

Post by synu »

astrange wrote: post #209
synu wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many bytes make it an original work vs a compressed copy?

Usually judges would care more about whether the bytes came from than how many of them there are. Since SD is trained by gradient updating against several different images at the same time, it of course never copies any image bits straight into it. Since it's a latent-diffusion model, actual "image"ness is limited to the image encoder (VAE), so any fractional bits would be in there if you want to look. The text encod…

The important distinction then is using another program or device to analyze the bits but without copying them, that takes its own new impression? Like using a camera?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#218

Post by synu »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #208
visarga wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a huge understatement. 5 billion images to a model of 5GB. 1 byte per image. Let's see if one byte per image would constitute a copyright violation in other fields than neural networks.

Another thing worth referencing in this context might be hashing. If a few bytes per image are copyright infringement, then likely so is publishing checksums.

What is a 1080p MP4 video of a film if not simply a highly detailed, irreversible but guaranteed unique checksum of that original content?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#219

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mijamo wrote: post #204
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…

Copyright does not exist in every country. You have intellectual rights and commercial rights but those are different from the US concept of copyright. In France for instance an artist cannot transfer the moral rights over its art, but can transfer the commercial rights, and there is no copyright concept (which makes is funny when sites copy the US have have a copyright mention at the bottom)

That's also true, but copyright does exist in a lot of countries - often with moral rights as the basis for the concept.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#220

Post by bryanrasmussen »

rysertio wrote: post #193
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well I guess it wouldn't be different, only there aren't any companies zipping up millions of images and then offering people the chance to get those images by putting in the text prompt that recreates them without paying any fees to the artists whose images were used.

Search engines do that.

good point, but didn't Google Image search lose some case and have to change their behavior?
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