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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

#341

Post by nhtsamera »

baxtr wrote: post #301
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…

One idea I had was to try to recreate the original using a prompt. If you succeed, it should be obvious that the original was in the training set?

This is quite easy to do, but the results can be off in funny ways. For example, try putting this into SD with Euler a sampling and a cfg scale of 10:

"The Night Watch, a painting made by Rembrandt in 1642"

It generates a convincing low-res imitation about half the time, but it also has a tendency to make the triband flag into an American flag, or put an old ship in the background, or replace the dark city arch with a sunset...

If you keep refining the prompt, you can get closer, but at that point you're just describing what the painting should look like, rather than asking the model to recall an original work.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#342

Post by galleywest200 »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #214
jaapbadlands wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Couldn't I just add a few non-sense bytes into my images to change the hash/fingerprint?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#343

Post by turtleyacht »

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

Aren't they different?

Stable Diffusion is about closed to open.

Copilot is about open to closed.

The Stable Diffusion version of Copilot would be something like

"Give me a cart checkout algorithm in the style of Carmack, secure C style."

And that's fine, if the destination code license were just as open--or even less restricting--than the source codes' license (relicensing rules permitting).

What could be the issue is the generated source becomes even more closed or proprietary, which defeats the original source intent.

Is that right?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#344

Post by zowie_vd »

huggingrear wrote: post #323
bsder wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? If you take that tack, I'll go one step further back in time and ask "Where is your agreement from the original author who owns the copyright that you could use this image in the way you did?" The fact that there is suddenly a new way to "use an image" (input to a computer algorithm) doesn't mean that copyright magically doesn't also apply to that usage. A can…

My assumption would be 'fair use'. Artists themselves make use of this extremely often, like when doing paintovers on copyrighted images (VERY common), fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common). The are often done for commission as well. AFAIK, downloading and learning from images, even copyrighted images, fall under fair use, this is how practically every artist today learns how to draw. Sta…

> when doing paintovers on copyrighted images (VERY common)

What are you talking about? I've been doing drawing and digital painting as a hobby for a long time and tracing is absolutely not "VERY common". I don't know anybody who has ever done this.

> fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common)

This is true in the sense that many artists do it (besides confusing trademark law and copyright law: the character designs are copyright-protected, trademarks protect brand names and logos). However, it is not fair use (as far as I'm aware at least, I'm not a lawyer). A rightholder can request for fanart to be removed and the artist would have to remove it. Rightsholders almost never do, because fanart doesn't hurt them.

There's also more examples of it reproducing copyright-protected images, I pulled the "bloodborne box art" prompt from this article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03860.pdf But I agree with you that reproducing images is very much not the intention of Stable Diffusion, and it's already very rare. The way I see it, the cases of Stable Diffusion reproducing images too closely is just a gotcha for establishing a court case.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#345

Post by ifdefdebug »

XorNot wrote: post #251
ifdefdebug wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK so let me encrypt a movie and distribute that. Then you tell people they need to invoke additional data to watch the movie. Also give some hints (try the movie title lol).

If you distribute a random byte stream, and someone uses that as a one time pad to encrypt a movie, then are you distributing the movie? The answer is of course not, and the same principle applies if someone uses Stable Diffusion to find a latent space encoding for a copyright image (the 231 byte number - had to go double check what the grid size actually is).

I think it boils down to one question: can you prompt the model to show mostly unchanged pictures from artists? Then it's definitely problematic. If not, then I don't have enough knowledge of the topic to give a strong opinion. (my previous answer was just an use case that fits your argument)

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#346

Post by derangedHorse »

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…

“any fractional bits would be in there if you want to look.”

What do you mean by this in the context of generating images via prompt? “Fractional bits” don’t make sense and it’s more misleading if anything. Regardless, a model violating criteria for being within fair use will always be judged by the outputs it generates rather than its composing bytes (which can be independent)

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#347

Post by jseliger »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #11

So what is the end goal of this? For copyright to transfer every step? That precedent happens, then what? Licensing schemes get set up and any piece of media that is put into these systems will result in the artist getting some kind of payment in return. Cool, that sound great. Except... who's paying? The conglomerates who already have a bunch of IP they can feed into those systems, who can afford to purchase or thro…

So what is the end goal of this?

For lawyers to make money. That is the goal of much litigation.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#348

Post by mensetmanusman »

Xelynega wrote: post #291
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real tragedy is being marketed to so heavily that we construe enforcing copyright on llm/diffusion companies with shutting down an AGI. I blame companies like openai purposefully marketing themselves poorly since nobody is going to enforce false advertising laws on something they don't understand.

That could be a funny movie.

Special agents from the MPAA sent to assassins an Android who can spew out high quality art.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#349

Post by Atheros »

Xelynega wrote: post #293
astrange wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lossy compressor isn't just like a lossless compressor. Especially not one that has ~2 bytes for each input image.

So it's fine to distribute copyrighted works, as long as they're jpeg(lossy) encoded? I don't think the law would agree with you.

If I compress a copyrighted work down to two bytes and publish that, I think that judges would declare it legal. If it can't be uncompressed to resemble the copyrighted work in any sense, no judge is going to declare it illegal.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#350

Post by grandmczeb »

Imnimo wrote: post #339

They've got a copy of a figure from the original diffusion paper, showing a diffusion process on a spiral dataset. They seem to completely misunderstand it. The figure does not show image diffusion, rather it shows a diffusion process in which each data item is a 2D point. The figure is showing diffusion on an entire dataset and demonstrating that it can approximately reconstruct the spiral-shaped distribution. I'm s…

Wow, not only do they get this wrong, it’s the core example they use to demonstrate copying.
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