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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

#381

Post by skissane »

b3morales wrote: post #365
skissane wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have they actually trained Copilot on their own source? If not, why not? People have posted illegal Windows source code leaks to GitHub. Microsoft doesn’t seem to care that much because these repos stay up for months or even years at a time without Microsoft DMCAing them-if you go looking you’ll find some right now. I think it is entirely possible, even likely, that some of those repos were included in Copilot’s tr…

The question is not whether there's some of their code that they don't mind being incorporated, but whether there's any at all that they wouldn't allow to be. And more importantly, not used for their own bot, but for someone else's. If licenses don't apply to training, then they don't apply for anyone, anywhere. If they do apply, then Copilot is violating my license.

IANAL, but they likely believe their unpublished source code contains trade secrets. They may believe that training a public model is okay on published source code (irrespective of its copyright license), but that doing so on unpublished source code containing trade secrets might legally count as a voluntary relinquishment of their trade secrets (if we are talking about their own code) or illegal misappropriation of the trade secrets of others (if they trained it on third party private repos)

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#382

Post by zowie_vd »

huggingrear wrote: post #372
zowie_vd wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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:…

>and tracing is absolutely not "VERY common" Paintover does not have to mean actual 'tracing', a LOT of artists use photos as direct references and paint over them in a separate layer, keeping the composition, poses, colors very close to the original while still changing details and style enought to make it transformative enough to be considered a 'new work'. Here are two examples of artist Sam Yang using two still f…

First of all, those are only two works in a very large body of works of an artist that seems to work almost entirely from imagination, which already counters the claim that this is a very common way of working, since even this artist would almost never work like that. Secondly, putting strangely much effort into a comment on Hacker News, I actually looked up the source frame of one of these: https://youtu.be/K6hOvyz65jM?t=236 It's definitely based on the frame but it's not a paint-over as you claim. I know this because there are too many mistakes with regards to proportion:

- Extending the slant roof in the background, it intersects with the left figure at around the height of the nose, but in the painting it intersects with the middle of her neck.

- Similarly the line of the fence on the left is at the height of her hairline, but in the painting it is at the height of the middle of the head, and also more slanted than in the frame.

- On the right side, the white part of the pillar is similarly too low compared to the figure.

- The pole in the background has a lot of things off with regards to size, thickness, or location too.

Essentially, everything is a bit off with regards to location, size and distance. It doesn't really make sense to paint over something and then still do everything differently from the base layer, so it was probably just drawn from reference the normal way -- probably having the picture on another screen and drawing it again from scratch, rather than directly painting over the frame.

I agree with regards to Warhol but that doesn't really establish it as very common amongst painters.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#383

Post by blueboo »

synu wrote: post #179
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.

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

One, of your compressor is specialised enough…so you can see how slippery this argument can be.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#384

Post by Ephil012 »

Ephil012 wrote: post #104

“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 recom­bined to derive other images.” This seems like it’s not an accurate description of what diffusion is doing. A diffusion model is not the same as compression. They’re implying t…

I should clarify a bit about how latent space works as I didn't in the original comment.

Stable diffusion has something called an encoder and decoder. What the encoder does is it takes an image, finds it's fundamental characteristics, and then converts it into a data point (for the sake of simplicity we will use a vector even though it doesn't have to be). Let's say the vector represents a black dog. If you took a similar vector, you would get another picture of a dog (say a white dog). These vectors are contained in what's called a latent space which is just a collection of items where similar concepts are close together.

Stable Diffusion uses this latent space because it's more computationally efficient. So what it does is it starts with a noisy image which is converted into latent space, then it slowly gets rid of noise. It does this entire process on the latent space representation as opposed to the actual image. This means it's more computationally efficient because it doesn't have to store an entire pixel image in memory. Once it finishes getting rid of the noise, it uses the decoder to convert the image back into a pixel image. What you'll notice is that throughout this entire process it's not just retrieving a compressed image from it's training set and then using it. Instead, it's generating the image through de-noising. This de-noising process is guided by it's understanding of different concepts that can be represented in the latent space.

I think where this lawsuit goes wrong is it implies that the latent space is literally storing a copy of every image in the dataset. As far as I am aware, this is not true. Even though the latent space representations of images are dramatically smaller, it's not small enough to fit the entire dataset in a 5gb file. The only thing Stable Diffusion is storing is the algorithm itself for converting to and from latent space and that's just for computational efficiency as mentioned above. I've heard that Stable Diffusion might store some key concepts from the latent space, but I don't know if that's true or not. Either way, it seems unlikely that the entire dataset is being stored in Stable Diffusion. To me, it seems that saying Stable Diffusion is storing the images themselves is like saying GZIP's algorithm is storing the compressed version of every file in existence.

Disclaimer: Not an ML expert and this is just based on my own understanding of how it works. So I could be wrong

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#385

Post by Aerroon »

codeflo wrote: post #148
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 seem to be under the impression that SD can only generate original art. However, it will literally recreate existing paintings for you if you just prompt it with the title. Identical composition and everything.

Photoshop can also recreate existing paintings if you just "prompt it with the correct input", no?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#386

Post by codeonline »

williamcotton wrote: post #329
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…

There's a key difference. A compression algorithm is made to be reversible. The point of compressing an MP3 is to be able to decompress as much of the original audio signal as possible. Stable Diffusion is not made to decompress the original and actually has no direct mechanism for decompressing any originals. The originals are not present. The only thing present is an embedding of key components of the original in a…

Lossy compression isn't reversible but presumably the content when compressed tjis way is still covered by copyright.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#387

Post by AbrahamParangi »

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…

I don’t know if it’s that they lack the understanding or they aim to avoid that understanding because it largely invalidates the lawsuit. In general taking abstract concepts and styles from things is acceptable, not protected by copyright, and crucial to creative exploration. The burden of proof is on those claiming SD is not doing this.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#388

Post by deely3 »

jdironman wrote: post #356
chongli wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 software itself is not at issue here. If they had trained the network on public domain images then there’d be no lawsuit. The legal question to settle is whether it’s allowable to train (and use) a model on copyrighted images without permission from the artists. They may actually be succ…

Then I think any work of art or media inspired by past sources would fall into this category. It's a very grey line, and I haven't seen anyone or any case law put it into proper terms as of yet.

Does "inspired" equal to "learned by software neural network"?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#389

Post by XorNot »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #345
XorNot wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I mean no, it doesn't. It's like drawing something in Photoshop which is a copyright'd work: the act of creating it is the violation, it doesn't prove that Photoshop contains the content directly.

The way SD model weights work, if you managed to prompt engineer a recreation of one specific work, it would only have been generated as a product of all the information in the entire training set + noise seed + the prompt. And the prompt wouldn't look anything like a reasonable description of any specific work.

Which is to say, it means nothing because you can equally generate a likeness of works which are known not to be included in the training set (easy, you ask for a latent encoding of the image and it gives you one): equivalent to a JPEG codec.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#390

Post by huggingrear »

zowie_vd wrote: post #382
huggingrear wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and tracing is absolutely not "VERY common" Paintover does not have to mean actual 'tracing', a LOT of artists use photos as direct references and paint over them in a separate layer, keeping the composition, poses, colors very close to the original while still changing details and style enought to make it transformative enough to be considered a 'new work'. Here are two examples of artist Sam Yang using two still f…

First of all, those are only two works in a very large body of works of an artist that seems to work almost entirely from imagination, which already counters the claim that this is a very common way of working, since even this artist would almost never work like that. Secondly, putting strangely much effort into a comment on Hacker News, I actually looked up the source frame of one of these: https://youtu.be/K6hOvyz6…

>that seems to work almost entirely from imagination

I very much doubt that.

>Secondly, putting strangely much effort into a comment on Hacker News

Note sure what you are implying here, could you elaborate ? The reason I know about these images is because they've been posted, alongside many other similar examples, in discussions regarding AI art.

>I know this because there are too many mistakes with regards to proportion:

Have you ever used programs like Photoshop, Krita et al ? You can start painting directly over a photo, and then easily transform the proportions of all components in the image, and since you draw them in layers, they can be done without affecting eachother.

Here they are, side by side:

https://imgur.com/a/tIbBkk2 https://imgur.com/a/K1fEPtu

I have no doubt that he started painting these over the reference photos, and then used the 'warp tool' in his painting program of choice to alter the proportions, a very common technique.

And this is PERFECTLY FINE, the resulting artwork is transformative enough to be considered a new work of art, which is true for practically every piece of art I've seen generated by Stable Diffusion, the only one I've seen that I'm doubtful about is the 'bloodborne box art' one, which is THE example that is always brought up as it such an outlier.

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