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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

#121

Post by Vvector »

kranke155 wrote: post #75
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 yo…

"It's my property."

When you publish it, you lose some property rights. While under copyright, there is a short list of things that others are prohibited from doing (reproduce, distributed, etc.). And you lose all your rights once the copyright expires.

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

#122

Post by r2_pilot »

nirvdrum wrote: post #117
corethree wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The final decision made by this article is one I agree with with or without money and I have no incentive the game. Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.

And yet these systems are incapable of genuine creativity. If they were, they would be taught rules & techniques and set off to their own devices to draw, like humans. But, they can't and they're not. LLMs and humans don't learn or create in the same way. Moreover, there's no reason we should grant LLMs the full rights and privileges of humans.

And yet humans plagiarize all the time. And how do you measure genuine creativity? See the Chinese Room thought experiment. Also we generally don't make our tools able to "set off to their own devices" because that's silly. I agree with the substance of software operating differently from humans and that we should currently maintain a distinction between software and human rights. Of which I do not believe copyright is a fundamental one, merely a legislative one(and one I might add has been stolen from current living humans- I'm in midlife and I can't creatively revamp works that are twice as old as I am, how is that fair that I can't use nostalgia from my childhood commercially as an adult?).

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

#123

Post by AndrewKemendo »

corethree wrote: post #98
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #71

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 judge…

The final decision made by this article is one I agree with with or without money and I have no incentive the game. Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.

You seemed to miss the part where the judge said that the only things that can be claimed as copyrighted are those things that were submitted to the USPTO for specific narrow coptright

"The other problem for plaintiffs is that it is simply not plausible that every Training Image used to train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable), or that all DeviantArt users’ Output Images rely upon (theoretically) copyrighted Training Images, and therefore all Output images are derivative images"

This displays either ignorance as to how artists work and the extent to which they are involved or can be involved in the legal copyright system, or reflects incoherence around the copyright system.

In this case the Judge chose to say, in effect: unless you have explicitly copyrighted it, it's fair use

That is now a new precedent that negatively impacts individual artists who have no power in the market, and protects giant corporate interests which have tons of power in the market

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

#124

Post by laylower »

This is the first paragraph...

"The contentious issue of whether AI art generators violent copyright — since they are by and large trained on human artists’ work, in many cases without their direct affirmative consent, compensation, or even knowledge — has taken a step forward to being settled in the U.S. today."

Is it human-generated? Violent copyright?

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

#125

Post by lt »

kranke155 wrote: post #110
shkkmo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But you can't stop people from sitting and studying your painting and then painting stuff similar to it. One of the core assertions that is being decided in this case is if there is any actua…

I find the whole comparison "it´s just like a person learning" to be a tiring trope. It's demonstrably not. Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a Picasso. Can you make me a copy? Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not? Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation these companies are using to win this battle, so…

A diffusion model can't make a copy. That's the whole point. The original Picasso isn't in the model weights.

It has learned to make pixels a particular color to mimic that style, but that's it.

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

#126

Post by woodrowbarlow »

corethree wrote: post #98
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #71

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 judge…

The final decision made by this article is one I agree with with or without money and I have no incentive the game. Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.

it's interesting that you start from the assumption that a piece of software should be judged by the same measure as a human.

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

#127

Post by WithinReason »

kranke155 wrote: post #76
CrimsonRain wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

AI can't reproduce a Picasso exactly either. That's the main reason the lawsuit was dismissed according to TFA.

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

#128

Post by marcinzm »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #123
corethree wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The final decision made by this article is one I agree with with or without money and I have no incentive the game. Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.

You seemed to miss the part where the judge said that the only things that can be claimed as copyrighted are those things that were submitted to the USPTO for specific narrow coptright "The other problem for plaintiffs is that it is simply not plausible that every Training Image used to train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable), or that all DeviantArt users’ Output Images rely upon (theoret…

> In this case the Judge chose to say, in effect: unless you have explicitly copyrighted it, it's fair use

No, this has always been the case. The judge ruled nothing new.

You cannot sue someone for copyright unless you first register the copyright.

https://www.nycbar.org/get-legal-help/article/intellectual-p....

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

#129

Post by cmiles74 »

It seems like they focused too much on the details of how the model works and how data is encoded by the model.

"In his dismissal of infringement claims, Orrick wrote that plaintiffs’ theory is “unclear” as to whether there are copies of training images stored in Stable Diffusion that are utilized by DeviantArt and Midjourney. He pointed to the defense’s arguments that it’s impossible for billions of images “to be compressed into an active program,” like Stable Diffusion."

Perhaps future litigation will be more successful if they treat the model as a black box. Could an argument be made that a person's intellectual property was used to train the model without compensation and _that_ is the illegal act? From there one would only have to demonstrate that the output form the model is similar to a person's body of work.

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

#130

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

corethree wrote: post #98
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #71

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 judge…

The final decision made by this article is one I agree with with or without money and I have no incentive the game. Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.

This argument gets repeated often enough that it implies that there are a significant number of people who actually believe it. This is pretty depressing, as the only way you could think that a human is not fundamentally more capable of creativity than an LLM is if you are incapable of imagining anything other than a life of ‘consuming content’.
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