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Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

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Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#21

Post by bertil »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #18
sandworm101 wrote: post #13

>> He wrote that the sheer size of the LAION database may protect the company because 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) copyright training images.” This is where I think the judge misspoke. "Copyrighted" does not mean registered . Copyrights attach at c…

> This is where I think the judge misspoke. "Copyrighted" does not mean registered. Copyrights attach at creation and does not require anything of the creator. What the judge is referencing is the fact that registered copyrighted works are given additional protections, notably the award of attorney fees in disputes. Aren’t there visual art in the public domain? INAL but the judge’s ruling seems technically correct, s…

> Aren’t there visual art in the public domain?

Yes, photos taken by people working for the government for example, and anything shared with Wikipedia should have a license for free use (typically CC0) [0] That’s an important, valuable part of all images, but a very small segment overall.

The vast majority of images (holiday photos, posts on social media, Deviant Art, etc.) are not in the public domain, even if they are online.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy#:~:....

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#22

Post by officialchicken »

alistairSH wrote: post #15

This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I produce will, in some small way, be based on the totality of my life experience, including any copyrighted material I've encountered along the way? How is training an AI any different than "training" a human? In the human case, isn't any court case really based on…

> I feel like I'm missing something (obv IANAL).

The human did it.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#23

Post by coldpie »

alistairSH wrote: post #15

This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I produce will, in some small way, be based on the totality of my life experience, including any copyrighted material I've encountered along the way? How is training an AI any different than "training" a human? In the human case, isn't any court case really based on…

It's not a dumb question at all, that is one of the most central questions in this whole debate. I think there's a reasonable argument that humans add their own "stamp" on every artistic output (that isn't a direct 1:1 copy) which would make it a unique work even if closely inspired by another artist. A machine would not add its own "stamp," it's purely a mechanical derivation of others' works.

I don't know where I fall on the issue myself, I think there's many good arguments on both side, both in pure IP terms and economic ethics terms.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#24

Post by wavemode »

alistairSH wrote: post #15

This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I produce will, in some small way, be based on the totality of my life experience, including any copyrighted material I've encountered along the way? How is training an AI any different than "training" a human? In the human case, isn't any court case really based on…

I think the detail that makes it tricky is that, in theory, an AI could just have a single neuron and simply output verbatim the image it was trained on. In which case we obviously wouldn't say that the image it outputs is a new work and freed from copyright.

So clearly there is some threshold of "transformativeness" which an AI must possess in order to be trained on one image and produce a different one that is considered a new work. Where exactly that threshold lies is difficult to define from a legal perspective.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#25

Post by gattilorenz »

wredue wrote: post #19
alistairSH wrote: post #15

This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I produce will, in some small way, be based on the totality of my life experience, including any copyrighted material I've encountered along the way? How is training an AI any different than "training" a human? In the human case, isn't any court case really based on…

You are actually the one doing something though. If a line appears on the page, it’s because that’s your intent. For an AI, when a line appears, that is always someone else’s intent. AI can only copy. I mean. Do we really need to go over all the reason why an art scanner that copies art and maybe paints it differently is fundamentally not the same as a human learning to create art?

> AI can only copy.

That's just plain wrong. AI can generate things that are not in the training set, hence it can not "only copy" (on the other hand, I could understand trying to argue that AI can only create pastiche, or that it "uses" training examples in a fundamentally different way than we do).

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#26

Post by zozbot234 »

bertil wrote: post #21
nobodyandproud wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is where I think the judge misspoke. "Copyrighted" does not mean registered. Copyrights attach at creation and does not require anything of the creator. What the judge is referencing is the fact that registered copyrighted works are given additional protections, notably the award of attorney fees in disputes. Aren’t there visual art in the public domain? INAL but the judge’s ruling seems technically correct, s…

> Aren’t there visual art in the public domain? Yes, photos taken by people working for the government for example, and anything shared with Wikipedia should have a license for free use (typically CC0) [0] That’s an important, valuable part of all images, but a very small segment overall. The vast majority of images (holiday photos, posts on social media, Deviant Art, etc.) are not in the public domain, even if they…

Most images found on Wikimedia sites actually require attribution to the original author, including for derivative works. So if you wished to include such images in training, you would also need an explainable AI that could tell you exactly what training inputs are influencing its output. (SVM is one machine learning method that can easily do this, but I'm not sure if it's ever been applied to image generation.)

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#27

Post by marcinzm »

alistairSH wrote: post #15

This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I produce will, in some small way, be based on the totality of my life experience, including any copyrighted material I've encountered along the way? How is training an AI any different than "training" a human? In the human case, isn't any court case really based on…

You can argue that artists given an implicit license for people to copy art into their own brains while viewing it. The same way websites give an implicit license for a browser to copy the page to display it. That does not necessarily mean they given an implicit license for someone else to copy the work as part of AI training.

Separate to that is the issue of producing new works that are too similar to existing works you've seen. If you do that as a human then you're liable for copyright infringement.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#28

Post by BestGuess »

officialchicken wrote: post #22
alistairSH wrote: post #15

This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I produce will, in some small way, be based on the totality of my life experience, including any copyrighted material I've encountered along the way? How is training an AI any different than "training" a human? In the human case, isn't any court case really based on…

> I feel like I'm missing something (obv IANAL). The human did it.

That doesn't make any sense to me as a line, as the human set up the machine to generate some way to generate images. The human still did "it", the "it" is just one step removed, and we've tons of things where some "it" is one step removed from the human where your line doesn't apply in law or people's concepts.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#29

Post by TeMPOraL »

coldpie wrote: post #23
alistairSH wrote: post #15

This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I produce will, in some small way, be based on the totality of my life experience, including any copyrighted material I've encountered along the way? How is training an AI any different than "training" a human? In the human case, isn't any court case really based on…

It's not a dumb question at all, that is one of the most central questions in this whole debate. I think there's a reasonable argument that humans add their own "stamp" on every artistic output (that isn't a direct 1:1 copy) which would make it a unique work even if closely inspired by another artist. A machine would not add its own "stamp," it's purely a mechanical derivation of others' works. I don't know where I f…

The thing with generative models is, it's hard to make them output anything from their training set verbatim. I don't know of a single case of that succeeding with SD or DALL-E or others. So it's not necessarily false to say that the models too always add their own "stamp".

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#30

Post by nsagent »

nnvvhh wrote: post #2

Current 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 tr…

I'm not so sure about this. I'm not saying courts in the US will rule one way or the other, I'm just saying it's certainly not a forgone conclusion that training is fair use. Even if it is, the companies might not have sone their due diligence.

Lots of data they trained on is available for purchase (e.g. artists often sell prints or reproduction rights, the books in books3 are widely available, etc). It's my understanding that companies like Stability and OpenAI did not attempt to determine if the data they trained on was available for purchase and then buy a legally purchased copy for training. That might cause them to run afoul of fair use doctrine in the US (not sure of other jurisdictions).

See these excerpts describing fair use for copying library materials [1] (many of these collections are being released by groups referring to themselves as libraries):

> Copying a complete work from the library collection is prohibited unless the work is not available at a “fair price.” This is generally the case when the work is out of print and used copies are not available at a reasonable price. If a work, located within the library’s collection, is available at a reasonable price, the library may reproduce one article or other contribution to a copyrighted collection or periodical issue, or a small part of any other copyrighted work, for example, a chapter from a book. This right to copy does not apply if the library is aware that the copying of a work (available at a fair price) is systematic. For example, if 30 different members of one class are requesting a copy of the same article, the library has reason to believe that the instructor is trying to avoid seeking permission for 30 copies.

> The copying, whether performed by the library or whether unsupervised by the library patron, cannot be for a commercial advantage. This means that the library (or a copying service hired by the library) cannot profit from the copying. In addition, the copying for the patron must be done for purposes of private study, scholarship, or research.

[1]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/academic-and-education...

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