Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
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Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#2Good. Most claims got dismissed (although with leave to amend) with only the infringement on the input side really remaining. This lawyer is a clown
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#3Why is Midjourney completely off the hook while Stability AI is not?
I'm trying to pull up the original court document, but the PDF isnt loading.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#4Orrick also dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright infringement claims entirely.
Well, duh. The judge is helping out the plaintiffs in this case. A jury would have been easily convinced by the defense that no images produced by Stability's systems are visually derivative.
The key is indeed what follows:
The judge allowed Andersen to continue pursuing her key claim that Stability's alleged use of her work to train Stable Diffusion infringed her copyrights.
So unless there is some kind of summary judgement I would wager that this becomes the focus of both sides as this heads towards trial.
But that's it. As predicted by commentary from legal scholars, the outputs of Stable Diffusion are distinct from the model and are not infringing on copyright... at least for this complaint!
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#5This lawsuit was always weird because it was a much much weaker case than the GitHub Copilot lawsuit by the same firm: atleast with text you can point out exact infringement, but the Stable Diffusion lawsuit (https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/) seems mostly based on inaccurate technical memes like "diffusion is just compression" without examples.
The HN discussion back when this lawsuit was first announced was correctly pessimistic: the top comment was "Where are the copies?". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377910
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#6Why is Midjourney completely off the hook while Stability AI is not? I'm trying to pull up the original court document, but the PDF isnt loading.
For that count specifically, Stability was directly involved with creating and funding the LAION dataset, whereas Midjourney and DeviantArt were not.
The DeviantArt direct claim is because of how DeviantArt has been using Stable Diffusion for their DreamUp system, but the direct claim against Midjourney has been less clear from the plaintiffs about whether they're going against Midjourney using Stable Diffusion in one model (beta/test/testp) or their use of training data (like LAION)
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#7Intellectual property shouldn’t be a thing. If you still have it after I’ve supposedly stolen it from you, then it’s not real property. The easiest test of consistency is simply to ask about both piracy and AI training data. If you support IP in one case but not the other then you’re a hypocrite. There is no third option where your support of something depends not on what it is but who it benefits.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#8Why is Midjourney completely off the hook while Stability AI is not? I'm trying to pull up the original court document, but the PDF isnt loading.
Basically the judge said the idea AI images generated are infringing on copyright is so stupid it's thrown out.
The other part of the case is if the artists copyright was violated when training the AI and they have only claimed that Stability used their art to train.
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#9https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byprrngynpe/...
The dismissal of Deviant was inappropriate given that the case hasn't reached discovery yet. The dismissal was granted based on a substantive evaluation of the Defendant's assertions which is inappropriate at this early procedural stage of the case. (see e.g. page 10 where the judge evaluates the "plausibility" of alleged facts, and page 12 where he says "I am not convinced" about the plaintiff's theory, even though in a MTD this is not a determination he is supposed to make pre-discovery).
Moreover, even if plaintiff's language was "unclear", the appropriate procedure is to require them to amend their claim and dismiss Deviant if the plaintiff does not amend, not to dismiss a defendant and give the plaintiff leave to amend their claims.
With respect to Midjourney, the Plaintiffs failed to plead sufficient factual allegations to support their claim, so that dismissal was appropriate. (Pre-discovery, it's okay for the alleged/pleaded "facts" to be wrong, you just need to allege sufficient "facts" that you have a legal basis for a court case. Note that "facts" in the MTD context doesn't mean real world facts, it is a legal term of art that actually refers to an allegation of a fact that will later be determined to be true or false at the actual legal proceeding on the merits.)
Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI
#10Orrick also dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright infringement claims entirely. Well, duh. The judge is helping out the plaintiffs in this case. A jury would have been easily convinced by the defense that no images produced by Stability's systems are visually derivative. The key is indeed what follows: The judge allowed Andersen to continue pursuing her key claim that Stability's alleged use of her work to train S…
No, he dismissed McKernan and Ortiz because they didn't register their images for U.S. copyright, which is a foundational prerequisite for any copyright lawsuit (in the U.S.)
This simply means that they need to register their images for copyright before they can re-join the case. (https://www.gibsondunn.com/supreme-court-holds-that-copyrigh...)
EDIT: reading the linked PDF further, and it appears that McK and O's legal counsel stated that the two weren't asserting the copyright claims at all, which is why they were dismissed with prejudice. That means that they can't re-join the case by filing for copyrights for their images...Their lawyer fucked up pretty badly and if I were either of them I'd be filing a malpractice lawsuit.