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Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

reuters.com

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Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#31

Post by czl »

gamblor956 wrote: post #15
artninja1988 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. How do you see the Getty v stability lawsuit going? That looks much worse for stability. Do you think they will just settle and stability will pay them some licensing fee?

Getty has a much stronger case, given that warped versions of the Getty logo have shown up in a number of SD-generated images, so it's obvious that there was impermissible copying. I'm not sure Stability will agree to a licensing fee, since part of the rationale for the last version of SD was to remove the infringing images from their training sets going forward.

> warped versions of the Getty logo have shown up in a number of SD-generated images.

If you create art that has a Pepsi logo on a depicted vending machine etc Pepsi has no copyright claim on your art does it? All it shows is the art was made with the knowledge of the logo and the logo was included as an element inside the art.

When logos are shown in a context that may cause confusion (about who made a product etc) there may be trademark infringement but trademark infringement is not being claimed here so why would warped logos matter?

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#32

Post by czl »

alphanullmeric wrote: post #7

Intellectual 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.

Say someone takes your written work (say your online comments, any articles, blogs etc) and claims it as their own. You still have a copy of your work but now your audience the authorship is in doubt. Would you be against this happening to you? What are your thoughts about plagiarism? How is this different from "copyright"?

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#33

Post by williamcotton »

gamblor956 wrote: post #10
williamcotton wrote: post #4

Orrick 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 l…

Re: EDIT

Another interpretation is that the plaintiffs were well aware of how weak their case was with regards to the outputs and basically planned on abandoning it from the start.

There's been more than a bit of showmanship from the plaintiff's counsel so I'm not surprised that the actual legal tactics differ from the rhetoric of the blog posts. It's also common to stack the complaint so that when the judge does start focusing on the key issues that maybe a little more ends up at trial than otherwise.

There's winning in the court of public opinion and then there's winning in a Federal court.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#34

Post by lsaferite »

gumballindie wrote: post #25
alphanullmeric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure then, by law I could have had slaves too. Glad you’re honest about the side of history you sit on.

The concept of intellectual property came about at the same time that slavery was fading away. Essentially at the time when people progressed into something better than basic primates that thought enslaving one another is a good idea. So technically speaking advocates for the abolition of copyright are projecting a reversal of progress. I want actual ai that actually learns and that doesnt rely on brute forcing simul…

I find this whole exchange silly, but I would point out that you said:

> The concept of intellectual property came about at the same time that slavery was fading away. Essentially at the time when people progressed into something better than basic primates that thought enslaving one another is a good idea.

Wouldn't that suggest that at the point in time where we move past IP we are _also_ progressing to a new stage in humanity?

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#35

Post by kstrauser »

gumballindie wrote: post #18
alphanullmeric wrote: post #7

Intellectual 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.

You do realise that if people’s intellectual work is not protected there wont be any intellectual work left, right? Why would i create something knowing you can just grab it and use it? Communism did the same to physical property, where you didnt own much and everything belonged to everyone. That didnt end particularly well because people inherently want to own things, especially the output of their own creation. Sur…

Thank god copyright came along and gave us Shakespeare, Bach, da Vinci, Chaucer, Beethoven…

And can you imagine life without the wheel? Too bad we didn’t invent patents earlier so that we could’ve gotten a head start inventing it and the spear.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#36

Post by simbolit »

zirgs wrote: post #22
gamblor956 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getty has a much stronger case, given that warped versions of the Getty logo have shown up in a number of SD-generated images, so it's obvious that there was impermissible copying. I'm not sure Stability will agree to a licensing fee, since part of the rationale for the last version of SD was to remove the infringing images from their training sets going forward.

I've never seen a getty logo in any of my generated images so I suspect that they used img2img or some weird prompt.

In the early stuffs, Stable Diffusion 1 (not XL 1!) and such, if you prompted for stock photo style images, you regularly (~30%) got something resembling the Getty stock photo watermark in the lower right.

Was quite annoying but adding "public domain, Creative Commons" to the prompt usually got rid of it (the model knows that public domain images have no watermark :-). Since SD2.0 I haven't seen this happening at all.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#37

Post by simbolit »

kstrauser wrote: post #35
gumballindie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realise that if people’s intellectual work is not protected there wont be any intellectual work left, right? Why would i create something knowing you can just grab it and use it? Communism did the same to physical property, where you didnt own much and everything belonged to everyone. That didnt end particularly well because people inherently want to own things, especially the output of their own creation. Sur…

Thank god copyright came along and gave us Shakespeare, Bach, da Vinci, Chaucer, Beethoven… And can you imagine life without the wheel? Too bad we didn’t invent patents earlier so that we could’ve gotten a head start inventing it and the spear.

Fire was copyrighted by humans, that's why the other apes can't use it.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#38

Post by simbolit »

anigbrowl wrote: post #24
alphanullmeric wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if there was no slavery we wouldn’t have any pyramids. I don’t care. You don’t have the right to an idea, a sound or a particular arrangement of pixels. That’s not communism because nothing is being taken from you. I don’t owe you any terms and conditions to something you don’t own.

Do you think the creator of a piece of art has any rights whatsoever? You're basically endorsing the idea that if you stumble across some original work that you're able to make a copy of, there's nothing wrong with falsely declaring yourself the author of it and collecting money from anyone you can trick into believing this.

What does the creator's right have to do with lying?

(1) Lying is bad.

(2) Lying and "collecting money from anyone you can trick" is fraud.

(3) Fraud is illegal, and that has nothing to do with copyright.

You are massively straw-manning here.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#39

Post by simbolit »

czl wrote: post #32
alphanullmeric wrote: post #7

Intellectual 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.

Say someone takes your written work (say your online comments, any articles, blogs etc) and claims it as their own. You still have a copy of your work but now your audience the authorship is in doubt. Would you be against this happening to you? What are your thoughts about plagiarism? How is this different from "copyright"?

You are straw-manning.

Imagine you encounter a public domain image (which by definition is not protected by copyright), you download it, and put it on your website.

Perfectly fine.

But if you write "I made this image" below it, you are a liar and a fraud. No copyright needed.

Re: Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

#40

Post by anigbrowl »

simbolit wrote: post #38
anigbrowl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the creator of a piece of art has any rights whatsoever? You're basically endorsing the idea that if you stumble across some original work that you're able to make a copy of, there's nothing wrong with falsely declaring yourself the author of it and collecting money from anyone you can trick into believing this.

What does the creator's right have to do with lying? (1) Lying is bad. (2) Lying and "collecting money from anyone you can trick" is fraud. (3) Fraud is illegal, and that has nothing to do with copyright. You are massively straw-manning here.

Copyright is literally the mechanism that allows creators to obtain a legal remedy for such actions. I have a lot of problems with the state of copyright, but am OK with the basic concept.

GP is arguing against any sort of IP rights, so these questions are reasonable. Lying isn't illegal, if there are no IP rights in a created work then anyone can legally claim authorship.

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