What is the pay structure for the attorneys bringing this lawsuit? My guess is they will get about 40 percent of any monetary awards.
We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
421–430 of 473 posts
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Fractional bits makes perfect sense. Do you know how arithmetic coders work?
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you post a song on your website and I listen to it am I violating your copyright? If my parrot recites your song after hearing my alleged infringement, I record its performance and post it on YouTube is that infringement? Last one, if I use the song from your website to train an song recognition AI is that infringement?
If I host a song I don't have license to on my website I'm violating copyright by distributing it to you when you listen on my site. If my parrot recites your song after hearing it and I record that and upload to YouTube. I've violated your copyright. If a big company does the same(runs the song through a non-human process, then sells the output) I believe they're blatantly infringing copyright.
I should have specified the OP has legal rights to the song and the end user listening was under the same granted/implied license as a program doing the web harvesting, my bad.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#424Earlier 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.
So, is any sort of creation that relies upon copyrighted or patented works copyright infringement? Is any academic research or art that references brands or other creations illegal? This is such a clear case of fair use that it could be a textbook example.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
The training data set is indeed mandatory but that doesn't make the resulting model a derivative in itself. In fact the training is specifically made to remove derivatives.
Go to stablediffusionweb.com and enter "a person like biden" into the box. You will see a picture exactly like President Biden. That picture will have been derived from the trained images of Joe Biden. That cannot be in dispute.
So is your mental image of Joe Biden, unless you know him personally.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#426Earlier 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.
Olivia Rodrigo is a good case study here. Good For You was so heavily inspired by Paramore that Hayley Williams was given songwriter credit despite having no involvement in its making.
So humans can already run afoul of copyright this way, the bar for NNs might end up lower.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is why I pointed out both the scholarly exemption as well as the collage exception. There are arguments to be made for fair use--I'm just not sure the current crop of GPT falls under any of them.
But the point is that fair use is almost completely principles-based rather than rules-based. Besides the four factors in the statute and some judicial precedent it's pretty much at the discretion of the court.
So? Copyright is a social construct. Fair use is a social construct.
Social constructs are not computer programs. Social constructs concern messy, unpredictable computing units called humans.
Precedent and continuity are something that US courts normally try to value. Yes, the rules can be fuzzy, but the courts generally tried to balance the needs of the competing parties. Unfortunately, there will never be a purely "rules based" decision tree on this kind of "fuzzy" thing.
Of course, recent Republican court appointments have torn up the idea of precedent and minimizing disruption in preference to partisan principles, so your concerns aren't unwarranted.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#428Why don't they challenge openai or midjourney? But no, they decide to challenge one of the few open and moral alternatives out there.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell me how those are 'ideas?' I imagine there are plenty of people that prefer Autotune voices for some reason too. Doesn't mean everyone needs to agree that it's good in itself or for artists.
Whether we like it or not, technology will always make it worse for some people. And it's not a new phenomenon. The printing press made scribes nearly obsolete, cars led to a mass slaughter of horses (and all related professions), and so on wherever you look. Invention of photography nearly killed whole genres of art (and gave rise to impressionism, abstractionism etc.) Unfortunately, we can only judge the outcome of…
I think that's an excuse to not argue against (also, how many is 'some people?' Wiping out entire fields is not a tiny negative, much as it might be 'inevitable'). "Hey let's just wait and see shall we." There is no reason things cannot be judged as they arrive and of course those impacted more directly will judge more harshly (e.g. photo developers when digital photos arrived, digital art apps, etc).
I'm personally not against the idea of "AI as a tool to help." I just think with art, and the way the AI art software works, it's not a helping tool; aside playing around with it for fun, it's a "quick riches" type tool, more like faux leather/Pleather/PU leather.
The important question being, why would you pay for these tools? All I've seen are articles around how well they can create art 'in the style of X' as the exciting bit.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lossy compression isn't reversible but presumably the content when compressed tjis way is still covered by copyright.
Pedantically, yes, lossy compression is not 100 percent reversible. Practically, the usefulness of compression is that it does return the original content with as little loss as possible… so lossy compression is mostly reversible. All of my other points remain unchanged by this pedantry.
You can't rip something and compress it badly enough to not violate copyright when you sell it. The point of compression is to throw away information about the original in ascending order of importance.