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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

#71

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Having done way more corporate court than I want (patents, mergers, liquidation), I’m increasingly convinced that the judicial system is fundamentally flawed.

The reality is that the law in 2023 US is so obscure and opaque and how judges come to their ruling seems to be by their total whim with no actual philosophy other than maintenance of the system.

Further I’m extremely unimpressed with the vast majority of judges competence in display - such that contempt should be the starting position.

The fact that this is how laws are actually made (precedent of applications will always beat the letter) means that nobody who doesn’t have a warchest will be able to actually utilize the system coherently

As with everything now, courts are rules by those with the most money

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

#72

Post by treyd »

kranke155 wrote: post #65

This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from…

Intellectual property never really existed. Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. The production of culture has been slowly becoming more distorted as cultural assets that should be and historically were held in common accumulates under the umbrella of massive intellectual property holders (Disney, Universal, etc) after we took the legal concept that was meant to apply to a much more narrow context and applied it broadly. They benefit disproportionally from intellectual property than individual artists do. The (recent) past dominating the present, being ruled by abstractions, and all that.

Is it bad that this will be used to displace individual artists/creatives in the value chain of media production? Of course it is. But we shouldn't be responding to that by clinging harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness, we should be developing new models for funding production.

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

#73

Post by CrimsonRain »

kranke155 wrote: post #65

This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from…

There is no "taking data" going on. Nobody is going into your private locker and training on your painting, music or cooking recipes.

If you put your "work" out in the world, anyone who views it, is automatically training their brains on it. Viewing is training.

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

#74

Post by TotalCrackpot »

This is consistent with historically intellectual property being a construct that benefits owners of capital and not actual innovators. That's why I think it should be abolished, this is yet another mechanism to monopolize a space to profit through some kind of rent-seeking procedure.

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

#75

Post by kranke155 »

ballenf wrote: post #66

Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a de…

Let me change the argument around: Why is it assumed that because an artwork is freely available on the internet, you are allowed to train a machine to reproduce it, being in its totality or just details that are used in the creation of new works?

IE why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions.

So actually building a machine there, under the cover of darkness, that learns from your work so you can produce new work, why is that allowed in the first place? Certainly wouldn't be at a museum.

The key thing here is - if you want artists' data, you should ask for it. They didn't. This would be equivalent of training a Github CoPilot on every available piece of code in existence, ever, instead of what they had available. Why should that be allowed? So if I built some toy code in 1996, and happened to post it on usenet, and it's a great implementation of X, why the heck is CoPilot allowed to read it? It's my property.

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

#76

Post by kranke155 »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #73
kranke155 wrote: post #65

This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from…

There is no "taking data" going on. Nobody is going into your private locker and training on your painting, music or cooking recipes. If you put your "work" out in the world, anyone who views it, is automatically training their brains on it. Viewing is training.

Ok, so reproduce me a Picasso. You've seen one right?

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

#77

Post by panta »

ballenf wrote: post #66

Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a de…

It's a matter of scale. No human being can ingest ALL existing images. If it was the case that the average human artist was able to replicate any other work, without effort, probably we would have had two effects: first, we'd have much less works of art (because the gains would have been eliminated, so why bother), and second, copyright law would have been much more restrictive. This is exactly what we should do: avoid applying a law thought for human beings, and create a new more specific law, much more restrictive. Otherwise future art created by actual human beings will suffer greatly (without mentioning the loss of work and human abilities), to the economic benefit of a very small set of monopolistic players.

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

#78

Post by CrimsonRain »

ballenf wrote: post #66

Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a de…

No difference. Some people are just luddites or have vested interest against automation of their own field (but fine with other fields).

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

#79

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

ndiddy wrote: post #67

> Two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit have dropped their infringement claims because they didn’t register their work with the copyright office before suing. The copyright claims will be limited to artist Sarah Anderson’s works, which she has registered. I’m impressed that their legal team was incompetent enough that they didn’t bring this up as an issue before filing the lawsuit.

What makes you think the legal team didn't know? The plaintiffs wanted to sue, so they did

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

#80

Post by kranke155 »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #73
kranke155 wrote: post #65

This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from…

There is no "taking data" going on. Nobody is going into your private locker and training on your painting, music or cooking recipes. If you put your "work" out in the world, anyone who views it, is automatically training their brains on it. Viewing is training.

It's funny to me that we haven't reached AGI or anywhere near it, but when we talk about training Diffusion models, suddenly they're "just like a person" for legal reasons.

Same thing that happened on the construction of the "corporation as a person", built on top of rulings made to protect African Americans.

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