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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

#241

Post by Kim_Bruning »

I keep getting reminded of the Tom Scott near-future video on how lawyers end up ruining the singularity. [1]

As the line between artificial neural nets and natural neural nets continue to blur, surely the same rules should apply to both?

Of course the counter-argument "some NNs are somehow different than others based on color [2]" walks you straight into an ongoing ethical minefield in the social sciences and biology. It's certainly going to be interesting times.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E Tom Scott, how lawyers ruined the singularity

[2] by analogy to https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 what color are your bits

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#242

Post by Filligree »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #121
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.

This is very much a 'color of your bits' topic, but I'm not sure why the internal representation matters. It's pretty trivial to recreate famous works like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night or Monet's Water Lily Pond. Obviously some representation of the originals exist inside the model+prompt. Why wouldn't that apply to other images in the training sets?

It applies to these specific images because there were thousands and thousands of copies in the training set. That’s not true for newer works.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#243

Post by techdragon »

realusername wrote: post #211
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

No that’s not… at least in many countries. Unlike patents, “parallel creation” is allowed, this was fought out in case law over photography decades ago, because photographers would take images of the same subject, then someone else would, and they might incidentally capture a similar image for lots of reasons and thus before ubiquitous photography in our pockets, when you had to have expensive equipment or carefully control the lighting in a portraiture studio to get great results… well it happened and people sued like those with money to spare for lawyers are want to do, and thus precedent has been established for much of this. You don’t see it a lot outside photography but it’s not a new thing for art copyright law and I think the necessity of the user to provide their own input and get different outcomes outside of extremely sophisticated prompt editing… will be a significant fact in their favour.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#244

Post by debugnik »

madaxe_again wrote: post #232
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…

Well, there was a copyright case in Europe recently where an artist had taken a photograph, flipped it horizontally, and painted it. It was deemed an original work by the court. I can’t see how, with such a precedent, they could rule that SD doesn’t produce original works. https://www.rangefinderonline.com/news-features/industry-new...

> It was deemed an original work by the court.

The resolution is much weirder than that, the court argued that the pose isn't original enough for the photo to deserve copyrights at all, independently of what the plagiarist did with it.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#245

Post by wumms »

professorsnep wrote: post #140
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."

Seconded - you might even say a 'computer': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#246

Post by techdragon »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #164
XorNot wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it means there is a 512 bit number you can combine with the training data to reproduce a reasonable though not exact likeness (attempts to use SD and others as compression algorithms show they're pretty bad at it, because while they can get "similar" they'll outright confabulate details in a plausible looking way - i.e. redrawing the streets of San Francisco in images of the golden gate bridge). Which of course t…

> It's equivalent to trying to sue a compression codec because a specific archive contains a copyrighted image. This is the most salient point in this whole HN thread! You can’t sue Stable Diffusion or the creators of it! That just seems silly. But (I don’t know I’m not a lawyer) there might be an argument to sue an instance of Stable Diffusion and the creators of it. I haven’t picked a side of this debate yet, but i…

Exactly, the quarrel here is between the users of Stable Diffusion, some of which are deliberately, legally speaking with intent (prompt crafting to get a specific output demonstrates clear intent), trying to use Stable Diffusion to produce images that are highly derivative of and may or may not be declared legally infringing works of another artist, and the artists who’s works are being potentially infringed upon.

You can’t sue Canon for helping a user take better infringing copies of a painting, nor can you sue Apple or Nikon or Sony or Samsung… you can sue the user making an infringing image, not the tools they used to make the infringing image… the tools have no mens rea.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#247

Post by gfaregan »

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…

If something is useful, it will be used and developed. I certainly can't see where all this is going, but I doubt the resistance will be more than a speed bump.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#249

Post by cf141q5325 »

synu wrote: post #218
cf141q5325 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think this is overstretching it. That would be a checksum that can be parsed by humans and contains artistic value that serves as the basis for claims to copyright. An actual checksum no longer has artistic value in itself and cant reproduce the original work.

Which is why this is framed as compression, it implies that fundamentally SD makes copies instead of (re)creating art. Leaving out the issue of recreating forgeries of existing works, using the training data for the creation of new pieces should be well covered inside the bounds of appropriation. Demanding anything more then filtering the output of SD for 1:1 reproductions of the training data is really pushing it.

edit: Checksums arent necessarily unique btw. See "Hash collisions".

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#250

Post by andybak »

mbgerring wrote: post #233
andybak wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"right" in the informal sense or in some legal sense?

Legal

Can you clarify? My understanding is that it's very unclear whether there are any legal issues (in most jurisdictions) in scraping for training.

Obviously some fairy reputable organisations and individuals are moderately confident that there isn't otherwise they wouldn't have done it.

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