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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

#341

Post by MacsHeadroom »

Filligree wrote: post #321
cmiles74 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who do the work should be compensated when their work is used to generate income for someone else. This is the way it's worked for as long as I can remember: I get paid to do some work, the company then gets my output. What we have here is someone hoovering up copyrighted and protected content, from all over the internet, and using it to generate income. They then are turning around and claiming that they do n…

Is Stability actually making any profit? They trained the AI, and released it for free, and- I'm still confused as to their business model.

They build private enterprise AI solutions for big bucks and use their free models as advertisement of their ability. StableDiffusion is marketing.

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

#342

Post by csallen »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #198
csallen wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise the underlying belief here. That belief that the only reason people create art is based on desires for fame and monetary gain. Which is so demonstrably incorrect that it boggles my mind. This is where centuries of copyright law have gotten us, brainwashing people into thinking ideas are property ("intellectual property") and should be treated as rivalrous goods, and that the only reason to be an artist is t…

... but you do have a rent to pay for? You know that artists also have to live somewhere? Why do we have stars on github? Maybe not for fame, but it is a good indicator of how somebody is good. Fame is important. We do not make github repositories for "stars", but I think it is a good motivator for people to continue what they're doing. If there is an author who spent years of his life into producing some kind of mus…

- The vast majority of art created is done by people who don't have a full-time job creating art. So why does art have to pay the rent?

- Lots of art still does pay the rent in ways that aren't threatened by AI. I haven't seen any convincing arguments that AI will be the death of commercial art, but moreso a new tool used by many commercial artists.

- Business models change. There have been countless industries and skillsets that have been made obsolete by various technological innovations that have automated what previously required skilled workers to do. Society adapts. Why should we make this particular technological progress illegal, just so we can freeze a particular business model in time? We don't do that with other professions. Why can't artists adapt and find new ways to make money?

- Similarly, why do methods of getting famous for art, or being motivated for art, need to stay consistent and unchanged over time? Why can't artists figure out new ways to get famous or get motivated? Why should we freeze or outlaw technology just so artists don't have to change from what's always worked?

- Copyright violation is not theft. Theft is when you take a rivalrous good from someone else who owns it. If you grow an apple, and I take it, that is theft, and it's wrong because you no longer have that apple. Copyright violation is not theft. If you draw a picture, and I copy it, that picture has not been stolen, and you have not been deprived of it. This is a crime very different than theft, and the laws behind it are very different than the laws behind theft, as is the reasoning behind those laws. So it would behoove you to stop equating it to theft.

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

#343

Post by panta »

theonlybutlet wrote: post #333
panta wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: avo…

What you propose is just a different small set of monopolistic players. Copyright has always been a trade off between the creator and society. It should be enforced the exact same way as it currently is. Fair use is fair use. By your same logic, what is the difference between an AI or a very productive human? Where do you draw the line?

Fair use by a machine is a concept which has hardly been studied by legislators. Personally I'd draw the line at the human/machine boundary.

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

#344

Post by csallen »

nologic01 wrote: post #216
csallen wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise the underlying belief here. That belief that the only reason people create art is based on desires for fame and monetary gain. Which is so demonstrably incorrect that it boggles my mind. This is where centuries of copyright law have gotten us, brainwashing people into thinking ideas are property ("intellectual property") and should be treated as rivalrous goods, and that the only reason to be an artist is t…

You are going on an irrelevant tangent (whether people enjoying being creative - which is obviously true at least for some) instead of answering a very clear and simple question: how, in your evolved and less broken universe, will talented people dedicate their life to produce something that society does not acknowledge or reward but simply appropriates.

Why do we as a society need to answer that question?

When automobiles were popularized, entire generations of families and people devoted to horsecraft suddenly found their business model obsolete. Did we as a society need to come together to ask how talented people in the horse industry might be able to continue to profitably dedicate their lives to that task? No, we just let the market figure it out, and allowed change to occur.

Our take an alternate thought experiment. Imagine a world where recipes were patentable. The first person to make mac-and-cheese could patent that, claim ownership of mac-and-cheese, and ban every other person and restaurant from making and selling mac-and-cheese. There would, of course, be an entire industry devoted to this. There would be restaurant chains that own the idea of pizza, burgers, etc., and stop any and everyone else from making that. There would be small and boutique recipe crafters creating and profiting from their unique recipes, too. And of course, people in this industry would ferociously sue anyone who "stole" the recipes that they "owned." And they would ask the same questions you're asking: "What ever would we do in a world where recipe owners don't get to uniquely monopolize their creations because they're allowed to be appropriated by others?" And the answer is: that business model wouldn't simply exist, and the world would be just fine without it.

It's not clear to me why any particular profession or business model needs to be protected into existence. The world will be just fine if some business model that always worked gradually ceases to become viable. I have sympathy for the people in those professions, but it happens all the time, and is a necessary consequence of technological innovation and progress.

In the 1800s, the Luddites smashed up factory equipment and tried to make it illegal, because they wanted to protect labor jobs. Thankfully they lost, and now we have a world with better jobs, which they could not have imagined.

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

#345

Post by johngher »

nologic01 wrote: post #134

Can somebody explain how this will not kill any incentive to publish anything? Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever? This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade betw…

It's a parlor trick, but I'm going to use it anyway: your own comment refutes your point.

You put work into posting this comment: thought about the situation and crafted sentences you wanted to publish. I've absorbed them, learned from them, they'll inform my own output in the future. And respectfully, I won't remember your name or give credit.

So why did you publish your comment? People can't avoid creating data. We do it passively. And you'll continue doing it, for your entire limited lifespan, even if you get neither laid nor paid for it.

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

#346

Post by treyd »

mistrial9 wrote: post #320
treyd wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone ran a print shop and printed out my articles into a book called "Collected works by Trey on HN" or something and didn't give me a cent then yeah I'd be thrilled, because it's a validation of my work. I already published the articles, they're doing all the work to put them into print, what right do I really have to claim part of the sales? But if they claimed that they wrote the content then they would be d…

you would throw out hundreds of years of copyright law on a whim. This is economic suicide for independent creatives. The most tragic part of this is that creatives themselves, immersed in creativity, see no rhyme or reason to stop the flow. Over time, those that grow old or weak are discarded with no rights to their own work. Yes, it is that bad.

Have you listened to artists and creatives talk about copyright recently? Especially ones that publish on newer, digital distribution platforms like YouTube? There's numerous more thorough critiques of copyright law and calls to abolish it from across the political spectrum.

You're mischaracterizing me by suggesting that it's "economic suicide", as I said in my original comment in this thread:

> 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.

Sure it would be disruptive if we snapped our fingers and said "no more IP starting tomorrow", there should be a gradual phasing out of these unfair protections and effort put into sustainable pro-creative models.

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

#347

Post by MacsHeadroom »

kranke155 wrote: post #311
EnergyAmy wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're wishing for won't achieve what you want. You'd then be complaining because OpenAI bought one copy of every book, and authors can't survive on one sale alone. It doesn't really matter though. The models that exist today aren't going away, and future work will just be built on top of their output, tainting every model forevermore from your perspective. I suggest you adapt to the new way of things and enjoy…

We are discussing a court case that has the potential to shape future endeavours in the area. Buying one copy is certainly better than 0. But I doubt rights holders would be satisfied with that.

Rights holders would be in the wrong to be dissatisfied. This entire issue has been done to death in the courts over scanned library books and dozens of other media used after first sale.

Copyright is archaic and holding humanity, and especially creatives, back.

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

#348

Post by [deleted] »

raincole wrote: post #115
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…

> how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? You just answered it? One is a ML system and one is a human? I'm really, really baffled why people keep using this argument. Like you guys know machines are not humans, right? ...right? Humans are special cases in laws. Always have been and always will be (until AGI). A pedestrian is treated differ…

[deleted]

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

#349

Post by unsui »

theonlybutlet wrote: post #334
raincole wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? You just answered it? One is a ML system and one is a human? I'm really, really baffled why people keep using this argument. Like you guys know machines are not humans, right? ...right? Humans are special cases in laws. Always have been and always will be (until AGI). A pedestrian is treated differ…

In law there is such a thing as legal person as opposed to natural person. When it comes to commercial law, its provisions tends to relate to legal persons.

legal personhood (such as corporate personhood) are tools/frameworks which facilitate certain economic actions, such as the creation of charters for specific initiatives.

Like any useful force amplifier, legal personhood has effectively been co-opted to benefit those entities which stand to gain from it (e.g., corporations, large-money political donors, etc).

Thus, it probably won't surprise anyone when AIs are granted legal personhood, to bypass the detrimenal effects they will inevitably have on natural persons.

That said, it is likely a good thing to keep meatspace in some kind of privileged legal category, lest the rights of legal persons outweight those of natural persons (which seems to be the inevitable conclusion, and goal, of all this).

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

#350

Post by czl »

mithr wrote: post #234
czl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

The issue at hand isn't actually directly about how the output images contained the Getty logo; the lawsuit isn't saying "you're showing our logo on your output, which isn't a Getty image, and we take issue with that". It's whether Getty images can be ingested into the training set without consent or compensation to Getty. The reason the distorted logos matter is because they make it much more difficult to claim that…

> they make it much more difficult to claim that Getty images were not ingested and used for training

Was that claim put forth? Why then does making this difficult matter?

> they make it much more difficult to claim that these source images were only used as "inspiration" for the generative algorithm and thus fall under fair use — if they're only used for "inspiration", how come they generate/copy easily-recognizable parts of the original images

If artists created works of art containing warped logos etc as elements in their art would they be infringing copyright because of these warped logos? But if an artists uses a computer to create the same art instead of real paint that becomes infringement? Because copyright depends on the method of production not just the produced result?

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