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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

#61

Post by spywaregorilla »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #54
spywaregorilla wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not contain compressed "copies" of the image. It contains a synthesis of the image.

And the synthesis was created with material that the AI company did not license and did not have permission to use for this purpose. I have ZERO issue with image generators on their own. They're quite cool technology. The only thing I and tons and tons of other people have requested is they not use images without permission to train them, that's literally it. That's my sole, single, solitary objection and yet every A…

It's not unreasonable to ask for permission.

It's also not unreasonable to look at and learn from things that people have put on public display.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#62

Post by brookst »

judge2020 wrote: post #31
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…

This is the crux of the issue. If courts find that AI draws like a human (at least for the purposes of copyright law), then you can only claim it infringed upon your work if it actually looks like your work was de-facto "traced"/copied by the AI and the output image only has small imperfections that don't qualify for fair use.

Copyright law does not care about how an infringing work was produced. It can be traced, or memorized and recreated, or described to a confederate over the phone, or whatever. It is only the actual work that is judged as infringing or not.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#63

Post by SLSMan »

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…

The terminology can be confusing, but "copyrighted" is often used interchangeably with "registered". Copyright in a work exists from the moment it's the work is created, but it's not "copyrighted" in the sense the judge is using until the work is registered with the Copyright Office. Registration is a requirement to sue for infringement. So a work is protected by copyright as soon as it's created, but it needs to be registered before one can sue for infringement. That can be done after the infringement occurs. For example, if a work is created in 2020 and someone infringes on the copyright beginning in 2021, the work can be registered in 2023 and the creator can sue for the past infringement (though not all of the same remedies are available).

The issue here is that the artists are making broad claims that DeviantArt infringed all of their works (by letting them be used as training data), even though they didn't register all of their works. Only some of the artists that are suing registered their works, and they may not have registered all of the works they are suing over. That's what the first sentence in the next paragraph is about: "[E]ven if plaintiffs narrow their allegations to limit them to Output Images that draw upon Training Images based upon copyrighted images..." The judge didn't misspeak here.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#64

Post by coldpie »

BestGuess wrote: post #37
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…

Yeah, I am equally confused and I fear the law is going to royally bungle this one and we'll be stuck with something really stupid for some arbitrary number of decades or generations. It just seems obvious to me that "human made thing to transform some set of things into a composite+transformation of those things" is fair use if fair use is to make any sense at all. Since analogously, like you said, in the same way y…

> It makes zero sense to me at all that it's suddenly a problem that art is derived if, instead of artist directly painting something, artist sets up some device that paints something.

I think a big difference in how this tech makes people feel is the amount of effort required. It's a problem we see with technology in other areas, too: it's not (much of) a problem if a cop sits outside a suspect's house for a few hours to monitor their behavior. Most people think it would be a problem if the cops pointed a camera at the house 24/7 for months. Pretty much everyone agrees canvassing society with cameras and creating a public space surveillance panopticon is bad. Where's the line?

Similarly, if some artists spend years learning the craft and mimicking a couple of styles with a relatively small output, it's not a huge problem. The scope is small. But if everyone on earth can do it to anyone on earth at massive scale just by typing "in the style of ..." to an AI, does that start to be a problem?

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#65

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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…

So your argument boils down to the idea that humans impart a magical, invisible mark on their own artworks, and though no one can measure this mark nor see it, the fact that it exists within your own imagination exempts them from overburdensome rules that you would mercilessly apply to one of the most exciting innovations of not only the 21st century, but even the 20th century before it?

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#66

Post by ghaff »

BestGuess wrote: post #28
officialchicken wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Furthermore, but even if a human creates something directly, they've still "trained" on all sorts of things that include copyrighted images--and, yes, if they create something too close to one particular copyrighted image, they can be found to have infringed copyright.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#67

Post by belorn »

"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.”"

Five billion images in compressed lossy format can easily fit into an active program. The only variable is quality. Five billion images in the original format and quality is a different matter, but then that requirement for copyrightable would be drastically insufficient.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#68

Post by alexwebb2 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #54
spywaregorilla wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not contain compressed "copies" of the image. It contains a synthesis of the image.

And the synthesis was created with material that the AI company did not license and did not have permission to use for this purpose. I have ZERO issue with image generators on their own. They're quite cool technology. The only thing I and tons and tons of other people have requested is they not use images without permission to train them, that's literally it. That's my sole, single, solitary objection and yet every A…

If I take a copy of your art to hang on my wall, I've violated your copyright.

But if I "copy" the experiential knowledge of your art into my brain by viewing it, I'm not violating your copyright. My brain doesn't contain a copy of the art, it's just been influenced by viewing it, and I might be more capable of producing art that mimics your style.

What these models are doing feels, to me, vastly more like the second case.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#69

Post by marcinzm »

brookst wrote: post #55
marcinzm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you’re proposing two big expansions to copyright: 1) that it covers what an observer can do, and 2) that everything is illegal unless explicitly made legal. I don’t think I want to live in that world.

I'm proposing nothing, as far as I know that is how it is now. A browser viewing a web page is making a copy of the web page which is governed by copyright. Except by making a web page you give people the right to make that copy. Lots of interesting lawsuits around that regarding bots, scrapping, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#70

Post by bensecure »

belorn wrote: post #67

"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.”" Five billion images in compressed lossy format can easily fit into an active program. The only variable is quality. Five billion images in the origin…

Assuming stable diffusion is ten gigabytes, that's 2 bytes per image. 2 bytes would be too small for a short textual description of the image, let alone a scaled copy of the image.
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