Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
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Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
#2Current US copyright law is not clearly in a place to view model training as infringement. Courts have a long history of permissiveness in the face of copyright challenges to new tech (e.g. the image search engine cases, Google v. Oracle and smartphones, Sony v. Universal and VCRs) and I predict it will happen again with AI. The cat is out of the bag and judges know that finding training to be infringement of each training example will have a negative impact on a new product category. If training was more obviously infringement then that permissiveness would be harder to sell, but in my opinion it's really difficult to argue that a "copy" of an example has been made during training (aside from the copy made to process the example).
Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
#3Current headline: "Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators"
Tail end of the article:
>However, the judge allowed Andersen’s complaint that her 16 copyrighted works were used without her authorization to move forward.
I'm not loving this headline.
(edit: stamped comment w/ the current headline to be safe)
Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
#4Am I wrong that this seems like a not-good precedent for artists/content creators and the future (much less present) of training data?
Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
#5Seems like a good table-setting measure. Judge is saying "what you claimed isn't how it works; if you want to amend your claim to say how it actually works (and why that's infringing), you can do that now."
Judge is also letting the 'unauthorized use' charges move ahead.
To me, this feels like the right way to make sure the questions at the heart of the trial are satisfied by the results of the trial. SOP, for sure, but it definitely could have gone the other way, with the judge just throwing it out altogether, so I'm glad this is moving in this direction, instead.
Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
#6Current headline: "Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators" Tail end of the article: >However, the judge allowed Andersen’s complaint that her 16 copyrighted works were used without her authorization to move forward. I'm not loving this headline. (edit: stamped comment w/ the current headline to be safe)
That's a pretty low bar though, no? Everyone just updates their T&Cs and laughs their way to the bank with free training data - the real meat of the claims was what was dismissed.
Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
#7As a non lawyer my understanding is that it is no longer necessary to copyright images to be protected as creator of a work, but it seems you need actually to copyright work if you want to sue.
Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
#8Current headline: "Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators" Tail end of the article: >However, the judge allowed Andersen’s complaint that her 16 copyrighted works were used without her authorization to move forward. I'm not loving this headline. (edit: stamped comment w/ the current headline to be safe)
Yeah; headline leaves out the pretty salient bit that the plaintiffs can amend their claims to be more accurate, which will only make the case more logistically sound. Headline makes it seem like the case is over, when it's not.
Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
#9Headline is quite a bit more definitive than the actual ruling:
> The three artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz — immediately ran into problems as two of them — McKernan and Ortiz — did not register their works with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Two of them got bounced, Anderson remains.
> Judge Orrick writes that it is “unclear” as to whether Stable Diffusion holds “compressed copies” of the images and points to the defense’s argument that the training dataset, which contains five billion images, can “not possibly be compressed into an active program.”
Once again, regulation that's needed is complicated by the fact that people in power do not understand how this shit works.
However:
> The judge has offered the plaintiffs an opportunity to amend and clarify their theory as to how Stable Diffusion operates its training data.
And:
> However, the judge allowed Andersen’s complaint that her 16 copyrighted works were used without her authorization to move forward.
So the case is still developing.
However, this is frustrating:
> The problem for the artists is that the training data for these programs is a black box. Outside of LAION, very little is known about what exactly went into training AI image generators but it is widely assumed that the companies did an almighty scrape of images on the internet which included taking copyrighted and copyrightable pictures.
I'm not sure if the publication stated "widely assumed" here because of legal reasons or because the author doesn't understand this either, but the entire crux of Anderson's case here is that if you include the proper prompts, you get comics out of these generators that strongly resemble hers, in both style and content, which are copywritten. That an generator can do that basically requires that a good amount, and I mean a LOT of her comics were pushed into the training data, and not only that, but were tagged explicitly as her work. Given how much of LAION is scraped from social media, this is not surprising.
In order for the generator to know what Sarah Anderson's style looks like, her comics must be in the data set. Period, paragraph.
Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators
#10To those who read the head line rather than the article:
> However, the judge allowed Andersen’s complaint that her 16 copyrighted works were used without her authorization to move forward.
So there is that and Stability is already having another lawsuit with Getty with obvious watermarked images as well.