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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

#81

Post by ghaff »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #51
sidewndr46 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright does at least in theory lapse, depending on the nature of the work. I don't think I've seen any AI companies claiming all their training dataset is pre-copyright however.

In what way is training "copying"? This is just an attempt at a landgrab by idiot copyright maximalists.

Name-calling doesn't help your argument.

But I do suspect that there are two overlapping schools among the most vocal supporters of this technology.

- Those who think that generative AI is so wonderful because they have a vested interest and/or have bought into the most breathless hype

- Those who more or less think copyright shouldn't exist in any case

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#82

Post by leereeves »

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.

In short, the judge ruled that McKernan and Ortiz hadn't followed proper procedure for a lawsuit of this type, because they did not register their works with the U.S. Copyright Office before filing the lawsuit.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#83

Post by ghaff »

leereeves wrote: post #79
tsukikage wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 infr…

It's possibly an interesting wrinkle given that, especially for certain types of works, the vast bulk of material is likely copyrighted but not registered.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#84

Post by BestGuess »

coldpie wrote: post #64
BestGuess wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hou…

The line is pretty simple for me, because it's the same line that applies to people. It doesn't matter what the training set is so long as it is not reproducing either the same thing or too similar to the thing it's trained from. Somebody else linked that you can't generally copyright style for instance, and if I recall you can't copyright algorithms or things of general knowledge either. So you can copyright "a specific instance of a thing", but not "the general idea of a thing". Here, near as I can tell, these algorithms generate some general idea of the things it's trained on and produce something specific different from the specific things. What should matter is only if it is different enough, same as it matters for people.

We've got much bigger problems though but if we, we as people generally not specifically you, can't even agree on something I see as so fundamentally basic bringing up things I think are problems would start war

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#85

Post by [deleted] »

brookst wrote: post #38
zozbot234 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> 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. This is a huge leap that would change copyright law dramatically, even for humans. Youre asserting that copyright doesn’t just protect from reproduction, but from use as an example to learn from. I think this would break copyright altogether. What music…

[deleted]

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#86

Post by SkyBelow »

coldpie wrote: post #48
SkyBelow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can a different person copy the style of copyrighted work so closely that it violates the copyright of the original artist? I feel like this is a question that must be answered before we add AI into the discussion.

Generally no, styles are not copyrightable, but as with all things in the world of IP, it's fuzzy. Here's the first thing I found on a web search: https://www.thelegalartist.com/blog/you-cant-copyright-style

I think one of the problems is that it is fuzzy. If we can't draw the line with humans, AI is going to increase the scale of the problem. Now, instead of a few artists getting close to the fuzzy area of acceptable or not and being able to be judged partially on intention, AI allows for magnitudes more to get into the fuzzy area. Perhaps we were too lax in allowing the fuzzy to remain fuzzy due to such a low number of cases, but now technology has increased the intrusions into this fuzzy space far faster than the law can keep up.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#87

Post by belorn »

bensecure wrote: post #70
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.

Assuming they don't need to use all Five billion images, the bytes per image will be larger. They can also use composites and filters to remove duplicates and images similar enough, or generative series.

One do not need 2 bytes per images if one million of images are blank, even if they are uniquely of different sizes. The amount of bytes to represent one million blank images in code is very few. One only need to store the unique aspects of the images, and if one compresses the images then the range of uniqueness drops based on the quality required.

Very unique images will naturally have larger footprint, based on the quality that one want to retain.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#88

Post by alistairSH »

gumballindie wrote: post #47
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…

[flagged]

I'm not missing that at all.

Put another way, if I create a Rube Goldberg painting machine, what copyright law applies? Why is that different than if I create/train/prompt an AI to do the work? One is physical, one is digital, but both require a human to create and initiate. And in both cases, every decision that human makes is made based on their life's experiences. No art exists in a vacuum. All art is derivative.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#89

Post by coldpie »

BestGuess wrote: post #84
coldpie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hou…

The line is pretty simple for me, because it's the same line that applies to people. It doesn't matter what the training set is so long as it is not reproducing either the same thing or too similar to the thing it's trained from. Somebody else linked that you can't generally copyright style for instance, and if I recall you can't copyright algorithms or things of general knowledge either. So you can copyright "a spec…

> so long as it is not [...] too similar to the thing it's trained from

Aye, there's the rub ;) How do you define "too similar"? If I invert the colors of Munch's The Scream, is that an original work? What if I pass it through a computer program I wrote to swirl it around in a spiral? I think those are clearly derivative works--you put the image in as input, put it through a mechanical transformation process, and get the same output for the given input. That description also applies to AI.

> these algorithms generate some general idea of the things it's trained on

Well, be careful here. AIs don't generate ideas. They take inputs, do some mechanical work on them, and output something derived from the inputs. There are no "ideas" involved here, it's a(n extremely complicated) mechanical transformation.

(To repeat myself, I don't know where I stand on the issue. I think there's good arguments on both sides.)

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#90

Post by wanderingstan »

BestGuess wrote: post #84
coldpie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hou…

The line is pretty simple for me, because it's the same line that applies to people. It doesn't matter what the training set is so long as it is not reproducing either the same thing or too similar to the thing it's trained from. Somebody else linked that you can't generally copyright style for instance, and if I recall you can't copyright algorithms or things of general knowledge either. So you can copyright "a spec…

> It just seems obvious to me...

> The line is pretty simple for me...

When things seem so obvious and simple, it can be a good mental exercise to try to put yourself in the shoes of the "other side" for whom it also seems obvious and simple.

While never my main thing, I've worked as a professional artist and know people for whom art is their livelihood. The holy grail in that world is to create a unique style that will command a premium: an art director decides your style is perfect for their new campaign, a building designer decides your style fits the lobby of the new building, etc. This style is the result of years and years of refinement, false starts, watching trends, etc. And this style is why they get paid, and how they feed their family.

When you tell such an artist that now any schmuck can create art in their style just by writing "In the style of..." you should understand that —especially to a non-technical person—the end result is just a slight deviation of from a copy machine. To them it seems "pretty simple" and "obvious" that this is just a fancy way of stealing.

(And I'm not taking sides here, just saying that step one is to realize that the issue is not simple, and is thus super interesting.)

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