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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

#71

Post by coldpie »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #65
coldpie wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

(I emphasize again, that I don't know where I stand on the issue. But for the sake of argument...) Well, I think my argument is that the mark is not invisible or undetectable. Simply by nature of being human, we impart something of ourselves onto things we create. For example, maybe by how you choose to compose the objects within a work, in a way the artist whose style you are mimicking would not have done, or the context in which you present it. Or maybe in how you hold the tools, where it creates an unintentional but different effect in the work. Whereas with an AI model, it will always create the same output for the given inputs.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#72

Post by ToucanLoucan »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #57
tiledjinn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reconcile your view with the case law on john carmack non-literally copying code

This case involved a guy under NDA working with a competitor to build similar product and included testimony from oculus that they used ZeniMax's code, literally, including copy pasted segments. My read on the case is that it happened, John made a big public outrage post, and then gradually after news interest died down, more facts were revealed that made it much more obvious that oculus was in the wrong but nobody c…

Nothing is analogous to making an ML model because making an ML model and training it are fundamentally different processes than both copying something (which is what copyright is built on which is why it probably isn't going to work to handle these issues) and from a person learning, because the most brilliant person on the planet cannot in timely matter digest and learn from over five thousand images and then reliably reproduce works based upon them.

This an entirely new schema and the endless slap fights between people trying to say "well the computer is just learning like a person does" is just, bafflingly, wildly wrong headed. No it's not. A person learns so they can accomplish a goal, and an ML algorithm by it's nature wants nothing, it is incapable of want, versus the people who are saying "well ML lets people copy other people" which is also wrong headed, because it isn't copies, it's remixes and re-imaginings of similar material are just not productive. On the one side people trivialize the act of learning how to art being just looking at shit and reproducing it, which is just wrong, completely wrong, and on the other side people think it lets the ML model copy artists, which it dooooooes, kind of? But that test also fails because they aren't strict copies and them being copies isn't the goddamn problem. The problem is the style, the vibe, the unique look of a given creative is trivialized into something you can get from stable diffusion after a few tries with the right prompt. This isn't a problem because Sarah Anderson lost a sale or whatever the fuck. It's a problem because it completely undermines the notion of the output of paid creatives having value, which is already a shaky proposition for most people and why tons and tons of prominent creatives cannot earn a living via their creations. This is going to make that situation even worse and no matter how many times this is explained to people, they just run back to this "well I wasn't going to buy things from them anyway" and the entire thing makes me want to fucking scream.

All that to say: AI is not AI, it's ML. ML is not learning like a person does, it's fundamentally different, stop equivocating. If you're so determined to cheer on as silicon valley knocks already struggling creative professions down a hill with systems that COULD NOT POSSIBLY EXIST without their pre-existing output to exploit, without permission, fundamentally unethically, if you just don't give a shit about that and are going to gleefully cheer that process on, then all I really ask is you be honest about that. Just say "I know this is fundamentally corrosive, unethical, and undermines an entire segment of the economy, but now I can get as many over-tuned generic shitty pieces of art as I want, and that's just more important to me." Just say it, and stand by it.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#73

Post by tsukikage »

SLSMan wrote: post #63
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…

> 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.

It's a little unclear quite what it means for a work to be protected if you don't actually have any recourse when infringement occurs.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#74

Post by ghaff »

coldpie wrote: post #43
TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yes, but I'd counter that by saying the difference is in its reproducibility. Given the same inputs to the machine (AI model, [copyrighted] training data, prompt, seed), you will get out the exact same output. It's a mechanical derivation of the original works, and therefore, a copyright violation. On the other hand, humans do not work that way, you can't point humans at the same works and get identical outputs. I'm…

>And a good counter to that is that a translation of a book into another language is still considered a derivation of the original work, not its own work, despite requiring a whole lot of creative human input on the part of the translator.

At the end of the day, it's all about legislation and case law--and judges making calls on the borderline cases, which creates new case law. It even plays into whether models themselves are copyrightable which, in turn, depends partly upon whether certain doctrines (like "sweat of the brow") apply under current copyright regime.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#75

Post by brookst »

marcinzm wrote: post #69
brookst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Copyright has always been about the reproduction of works. Copyright lawsuits about scraping, etc, are about the use of scraped data. That’s why EULAs, which are not copyright, are often used to try to further restrict rights.

None of that covers the idea that observing a copyrighted work is a violation of copyright only made acceptable by an implicit license. As the link you posted notes, that’s not what an implicit license is.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#76

Post by belorn »

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…

The difference in training an AI compared to training a human is that an AI is not a human. Law makes differences between humans and non-humans all the time. AI drivers vs human drivers is a prime example.

If the question is in how biologically we learn compared to and AI, the answer is that humans don't learn by calculating math in order to determine how pixels relate to each other. Humans uses chemical signals between neurons and neuron activiation among other things in order to approximate the concept of what we consider to be learning.

I find a similar and equal important question when asking whats the difference between an AI learning and a human learning, is to ask whats the difference when a computer remembers information by storing it on a file compared to a human remembering information by storing it in long term memory.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#77

Post by RyanAdamas »

alexwebb2 wrote: post #60
RyanAdamas wrote: post #34

Copyright is new age nonsense that denies the chain of influence and inspiration that exists between all people. If you can create something sell it. If it can be easily recreated (or stored digitally) then it isn't yours. Bits are not a bug.

If we go that route, then doesn't that remove almost all financial incentive to produce new content that could be digitally stored / copied / recreated? Because as soon as you create it and try to sell it for $1, someone else will recreate it instantly and put it up for $0.50, and so on until the value of all non-physical works is effectively $0 the moment after creation. Feels like that would result in way less huma…

If you create a painting someone else reproduces instantly with ease then it would imply the quality was not high enough to command the price. If incentive falls then supply would fall and either find a new equilibrium price or demand would remain and prices would rise.

Seems more like quality would matter. Hard copies would matter; perhaps the disc you issue your media on is rated to last 100 years, whereas someone's digital copy can be deleted with a keystroke.

Copyright is bullshit in a market of perfect reproducibility.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#78

Post by spywaregorilla »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #72
spywaregorilla wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This case involved a guy under NDA working with a competitor to build similar product and included testimony from oculus that they used ZeniMax's code, literally, including copy pasted segments. My read on the case is that it happened, John made a big public outrage post, and then gradually after news interest died down, more facts were revealed that made it much more obvious that oculus was in the wrong but nobody c…

Nothing is analogous to making an ML model because making an ML model and training it are fundamentally different processes than both copying something (which is what copyright is built on which is why it probably isn't going to work to handle these issues) and from a person learning, because the most brilliant person on the planet cannot in timely matter digest and learn from over five thousand images and then relia…

Humans can learn without wanting to do things all the time.

I don't find the rest of this readable tbh

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#79

Post by leereeves »

tsukikage wrote: post #73
SLSMan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. It's a little unclear quite what it means for a work to be protected if you don't actually have any recourse when infringement occurs.

You do have recourse available, but registering the copyright is a required step in seeking that recourse, and must be done before suing.

> Title 17 U. S. C. §411(a) states that “no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until ... registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title.”

> ... however, a copyright owner can recover for infringement that occurred both before and after registration

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-571_e29f.pdf

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#80

Post by bee_rider »

gosub100 wrote: post #42
bee_rider wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand the argument here anyway (although, as your typical commenter, I am reading this before actually reading the article). Every day, I commit a huge number of non-criminal actions. So as long as I have some non-crimes, and I guess it doesn’t even need to be the majority under this standard, I’m fine to commit a bunch of crimes?

No, that is not the precedent set here. A legal claim was brought against the defendant, but (the judge found) that some of the evidence didn't have a specific property (copyright). Also the case was done in civil court, which has different rules and procedures than criminal court. This case is not about what one person did during the day.

That doesn’t seem to fit with the quote, though. The phrasing “not plausible that every training image used to train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted” makes it pretty explicit, I think, that what is protecting the data-set is the presence of non-copyright images, not the absence of copyright ones.
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