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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

#431

Post by xeckr »

csallen wrote: post #429
xeckr wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you train a GenAI on an image, legally speaking you're training it on a COPY of that image. If you intend to train a GenAI on a copy of an image I own the rights to (perhaps because I created it), then you have to negotiate with me. If you don't, then you are violating my copyright.

That's not how copyright works. Copyright law limits creating copies of a work, not interacting with copies of a work lol. Which means it doesn't apply to training. What you're describing is some totally new law that doesn't exist anywhere on earth, because it would make no sense. Imagine if an aspiring artist who's training by studying a copy of another artist's drawing, or by listening to a copy of another artist's…

>Copyright law limits creating copies of a work

When you are downloading someone's copyrighted music to train your GenAI with, the act of downloading it creates a copy of the work that now exists on your computer.

The essence of copyright law is to give the owner the right to decide how copies of their work are used, which you have violated if you did the above without their consent. Incidentally, this is why pirating music is a copyright violation.

Your argument is based on falsely equating the process of a human getting inspired by prior art to training GenAI on the same. If a human goes to an art gallery and gets inspired by some copyrighted work, he did not have to create a copy of that work for the inspiration to take place.

On the other hand, with GenAI training, the act of creating a copy is unavoidable (e.g by taking a picture of a painting, which is uploaded to your computer, which is piped into a training algorithm).

The human's mental representation of the painting does not count as a copy, but painting_photo.png does and the owner's rights fully extend to it.

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

#432

Post by xeckr »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #277
nologic01 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Should I be able to dedicate my life to some obscure thing that nobody cares to buy as a commodity? That argument is absurd, you don't HAVE to be an artist. You can be a talented person and dedicate your life to something else. Or you can be like everyone else and do it as a hobby in your time off because people don't find what you do creatively to be valuable. I demand I get paid for my playing video games, I think…

Do you listen to music?

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

#433

Post by csallen »

xeckr wrote: post #431
csallen wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how copyright works. Copyright law limits creating copies of a work, not interacting with copies of a work lol. Which means it doesn't apply to training. What you're describing is some totally new law that doesn't exist anywhere on earth, because it would make no sense. Imagine if an aspiring artist who's training by studying a copy of another artist's drawing, or by listening to a copy of another artist's…

>Copyright law limits creating copies of a work When you are downloading someone's copyrighted music to train your GenAI with, the act of downloading it creates a copy of the work that now exists on your computer. The essence of copyright law is to give the owner the right to decide how copies of their work are used, which you have violated if you did the above without their consent. Incidentally, this is why piratin…

Copyright law only gives owners limited power to decide how copies are used. Not unlimited power. They have the sole right to make, distribute, perform, or display copies of their work… but that's it. They can't forbid others from learning or training by viewing copies of their work. And there are also strong exceptions, notably Fair Use, which outlines situations that allow copyrighted works to be used without anyone's permission.

I'm not sure if you're a web programmer or not, but all images, audio, and video on the web work by copying. When you navigate to a website that displays images/audio/video, this works because your browser is automatically downloading those files from the server to your computer, i.e. creating copies.

Importantly, this process is identical, whether it's a human browsing the web or GenAI browsing the web. It is 100% unavoidable for both humans and AI to download copies of media that their browsers come across on the internet. 100% of us end up with painting_photo.png on our computers. That's just how browsers work. And that download counts as legal under Fair Use in every single country.

Furthermore, once that download has occurred, we all have the legal right to observe these files, to learn from them, to peek into them however we want. There is no law that makes this illegal for humans, nor for GenAI. It is theoretically possible to make a GenAI that illegal makes additional copies of files that the browser has downloaded, but that's entirely unnecessary, as they could simply train on the already-downloaded copy.

You have two options:

1. Re-interpret current copyright law in a way that would make it illegal to look at files automatically downloaded when browsing the web. This would make GenAI training methods illegal, but would also make humans browsing the web illegal, since they are identical.

2. Add a new law to the books that would specifically target GenAI and make it illegal for it to do something that is not currently illegal or in violation of any laws. In this case, I would ask you: why on earth would you want to go out of your way to create this unnecessary law that the world is just fine without?

I can't think of any reason, except wanting to protect the business model of current artists. Which is lame, imo. We should not be outlawing useful new technologies to protect the profits of people in any industry, including artists.

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

#434

Post by xeckr »

csallen wrote: post #433
xeckr wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Copyright law limits creating copies of a work When you are downloading someone's copyrighted music to train your GenAI with, the act of downloading it creates a copy of the work that now exists on your computer. The essence of copyright law is to give the owner the right to decide how copies of their work are used, which you have violated if you did the above without their consent. Incidentally, this is why piratin…

Copyright law only gives owners limited power to decide how copies are used. Not unlimited power. They have the sole right to make, distribute, perform, or display copies of their work… but that's it. They can't forbid others from learning or training by viewing copies of their work. And there are also strong exceptions, notably Fair Use, which outlines situations that allow copyrighted works to be used without anyon…

Yes, I am a web programmer, and I understand that anytime you are using the internet you are downloading a copy of whatever content it is that you are accessing. You don't even have to invoke fair use here, as the copyright holder gives you the right to access a copy by putting it on the open internet.

That does not mean that you automatically have a right to do whatever you please with this copy. If you want to redistribute the content, or use it as part of some commercial process, then you absolutely have to discuss this with the copyright holder, and they have every right to deny you if you cannot agree on the terms. That is the meaning of "all rights reserved".

Not all copies are equal. Feel free to enjoy a copy of "Oops!... I Did It Again" that you paid for on iTunes. But download the same file using P2P, and the record company might just have the book thrown at you. The two files are identical copies, but the difference is that the copyright holder gave you the right to listen to the first (in exchange for money) but not the second. Furthermore, downloading the song from iTunes gives you the right to listen to it, but not to play it on loudspeakers at the next conference that you are organizing. To obtain the right to use it for that purpose, you have to negotiate with the record label.

Note once again that these restrictions do not apply for works that are e.g. in the public domain, which you are free to use in any way you want. I am in no way arguing for "outlawing useful new technologies", anymore than I am for outlawing cameras because they can be used to create bootleg copies of the latest blockbuster movie. Feel free to train GenAI on copies of works that you have a right to use for that purpose: either because they are in the public domain, or because the copyright owner explicitly gave everyone the right to use a copy of the work to train a GenAI, or because you negotiated a licensing agreement with the copyright owner.

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

#435

Post by chankstein38 »

Filligree wrote: post #190
chankstein38 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm only guessing here but my thought is because a Pepsi logo just indicates that the input image was an ad, a Getty Images logo means that the input images were owned by Getty and likely used without their consent.

We know input images were used without consent. That’s not in question, it just also isn’t all that relevant.

But a watermark showing up indicates clear, undeniable ownership of those images by a massive company that seems to make most of their money selling licensing to their images.

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

#436

Post by Pent »

nirvdrum wrote: post #384
naasking wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've elaborated plenty in the post you literally just responded to. Nothing further needs to be said. Suffice it to say that your original claim was unjustifiable given what we currently know.

You didn’t elaborate on the points I asked about. You literally argued with the response from a chat bot. You can’t just say “QED, I win”. Until I get satisfactory definitions the rest of your response is unjustifiable.

as a third party observer, you never defined genuine creativity,

you've been called and it turns out your argument was merely a bluff

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

#437

Post by nirvdrum »

Pent wrote: post #436
nirvdrum wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn’t elaborate on the points I asked about. You literally argued with the response from a chat bot. You can’t just say “QED, I win”. Until I get satisfactory definitions the rest of your response is unjustifiable.

as a third party observer, you never defined genuine creativity, you've been called and it turns out your argument was merely a bluff

That’s quite alright. I’ve written amply about the topic of creativity in this thread in order to delineate it from “creative” meaning “something that creates”. If you don’t know what “genuine” means my Webster’s definition isn’t going to help anything. I’m not keen to have a debate over adjectives when I’ve more than explained my stance. I never claimed to be introducing some new term of art. If that somehow means I’m bluffing, so be it.

I viewed the curt demand I provide a definition as rude and a cheap tactic intended to disrupt a discussion. And the ensuing discussion with that particular person did nothing to convince me otherwise. Fortunately, I don’t owe them a reply and you don’t have to believe me. It’s all good.

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

#438

Post by antifa »

csnover wrote: post #339
raynr wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get that from the poster you're replying to. I agree with you that people will create because people are people and want to create. But people also have to eat, need shelter, want kids, have to take care of health issues, and so on. For that they need money. If they can't get money from their creations they'll spend less time creating and more time engaging in activity that generates returns.

> If they can't get money from their creations they'll spend less time creating and more time engaging in activity that generates returns. On the other hand, artists who adapt AI into their workflows will have vastly improved productivity, so the amount of time they need to create new works can also be much smaller for the same amount of output. There will still be some artists who can avoid using AI and make a livin…

> On the other hand, artists who adapt AI into their workflows

This will benefit people who spam garbage 100x more than it will benefit the natural human desire to create art.

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

#439

Post by snovv_crash »

corethree wrote: post #389
snovv_crash wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright holders aren't complaining about the training per se, they are complaining about the distribution and outputs of the models which in many cases directly regurgitate the training data.

In most cases it won't regurgitate the same training data. What happens is the model essentially models a full on continuous curve that best fits in-between the training data. The amount of points on that curve is 9999999x more then the training data and that 999999 is not an exaggeration. It's likely too small of a number.

I disagree, the size of the models are a lot smaller than the training data.

Just because I make an algorithm that linearly interpolates between two (copyrighted) values doesn't mean that it is creative or holds the wisdom between them.

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

#440

Post by rvz »

AwaAwa wrote: post #327
rvz wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think you've really thought this through. How would someone make millions off of that? If someone tried, the original author is still offering it for free. Why would someone pay for it? Tens of millions of fans of a living celebrity would pay for it and the fans do not care about the original author as long as it is the celebrity's name that is selling it and can claim it as their own. They don't need to gi…

Given a generation or so, a celebrity mostly won't have tens of millions of fans, because there will be tens of millions of celebrities. It's happening already but they are just called 'influencers, podcasters, youtubers' at the moment, with the line getting more blurred everyday.

My point still stands, depending on the price of say a book with the same text, etc which a celebrity with their millions of fans or tens of millions of fans can sell them and claim as their own.

Either way, they can make millions out of it, even if you are the original author and don't need to give you credit.

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