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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

#101

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

ghaff wrote: post #81
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I still believe a little bit in Jefferson's vision. It's just that that has so little to do with copyright that we're probably not even talking about the same thing. He envisioned copyright as being an incentive to create and do new things, to learn new things.

And here, as it would be used, it would shut down new technologies and quash new ideas. Clearly, such people are doing copyright wrong. I am not religious, I do not believe in "sin", but if that word did have any real use, it might be strong enough to describe those who would misuse copyright.

In any event, Jefferson was granting a very limited privilege and not describing a fundamental human right. This privilege was granted by the people, and the people do have the right to revoke that privilege if it continues to be misused. This, I think, is all the warning the misusers deserve. A comment that will be read by hardly anyone, that they will surely never see, and which will give them no headsup at all.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#102

Post by BestGuess »

wredue wrote: post #95
gattilorenz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Prove it. Fundamentally, AI image creators stitch together images, then try to apply an art style. You might call it “unique” because it stitches things together wrong (hello 10 fingers on one hand), but it is still fundamentally just copying, pasting, and then deforming lines together. People claiming that AIs understand what they’re doing and that what AIs do is not fundamentally copying and pasting are the ones wh…

>but it is still fundamentally just copying, pasting, and then deforming lines together

That's called "photobashing", very common to see used by concept artists. Also, it's fair use.

So now you've got a bigger problem in that almost all concept artists are engaged in theft I suppose? Since they are "only" copying, pasting, and then deforming things together?

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#103

Post by bee_rider »

bee_rider wrote: post #80
gosub100 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, just to follow up, I think the crucial element here is:

> The judge has offered the plaintiffs an opportunity to amend and clarify their theory as to how Stable Diffusion operates its training data.

Since they are allowed to amend part of their claims, it seems more like the judge is just asking them to be a little more specific about which copyright works were included.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#104

Post by dragonwriter »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #97
ghaff wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> interesting wrinkle Far more then that, it's an absolute show-stopper for any potential lawsuits, as it's really unlikely any potential litigant will be able to prove that even a large majority of the images have been registered, and thus eligible for a lawsuit.

All they have to do is register their works that they are claiming were specifically infringed, and they are fine.

Well, with the registration issue. They still have to prove us of an exclusive right and overcome any argument that the other side puts up that the use involved fell under fair use, but they'll have dealt with the threshold issue of “are we allowed to sue over the works we are alleging were used".

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#105

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> In what way is training "copying"?

In the way in which you literally must make a copy of the dataset to use it in training, and that literal copy if not excused by fair use analysis including consideration of the downstream purpose, is a violation of copyright.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#106

Post by dragonwriter »

marcinzm wrote: post #27
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 can argue that artists given an implicit license for people to copy art into their own brains while viewing it.

You can, but it would be more correct to argue that memories in a human brain are not copies under the law at all, and so need no license (or fair use analysis) in the first place. This has different results than an implicit license argument, especially when there is an explicit denial of license or an explicit license which is also explicitly bounded to exclude any rights not explicitly licensed.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#107

Post by belorn »

ghaff wrote: post #99
catapart wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to remember exactly what my problem with it was, but if you look up the original filing and read what the artists claim is being done with their images, you can clearly seem some invalid assertions on their part. That's why I even took an interest in the case, in the first place. I like Anderson and I think what she's aiming for is a good goal, but when I read the case I was like "oh shit, this is doomed to…

The IP lawyers I've talked to about this at length—and who don't have a particular axe to grind—are pretty skeptical in general outside of a specific output being a derivative work of a specific copyrighted work. The argument against generative AI seems (IANAL) to rest on there being some sort of collective copyright (across many different creators and even including works that are not actually copyrighted at all) wh…

Collective copyright-like arguments do look strange but they were the core argument in the pirate bay trial. The founders were found guilty of assisting in infringement of copyright where the specific case of infringement and the specific copyrighted work is both unknown and deemed unnecessary to define.

The argument as it went went like this. Is the theory that no infringement has occurred believable, or can it be said as a forgone conclusion that over the course of the operation that some specific copyrighted work has been infringed on at some point in time and that the operator knowingly were aware that such cases was likely to have happened.

It is true that many lawyers and legal experts thought that the pirate founders were immune to such claims since usually one need to produce specific cases of specific copyrighted works in order to find someone guilty of assisting. The case however illustrated that such requirements are not always needed, and the Swedish supreme court did not feel it necessary to analyze it further.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#108

Post by ghaff »

belorn wrote: post #107
ghaff wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IP lawyers I've talked to about this at length—and who don't have a particular axe to grind—are pretty skeptical in general outside of a specific output being a derivative work of a specific copyrighted work. The argument against generative AI seems (IANAL) to rest on there being some sort of collective copyright (across many different creators and even including works that are not actually copyrighted at all) wh…

Collective copyright-like arguments do look strange but they were the core argument in the pirate bay trial. The founders were found guilty of assisting in infringement of copyright where the specific case of infringement and the specific copyrighted work is both unknown and deemed unnecessary to define. The argument as it went went like this. Is the theory that no infringement has occurred believable, or can it be s…

>The argument as it went went like this. Is the theory that no infringement has occurred believable, or can it be said as a forgone conclusion that over the course of the operation that some specific copyrighted work has been infringed on at some point in time and that the operator knowingly were aware that such cases was likely to have happened.

Though in this case, I assume that a great many lawyers would argue that it's hardly a foregone conclusion in this case.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#109

Post by dragonwriter »

gumballindie wrote: post #100
alistairSH wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let’s try something radical: not putting it any way. A machine has no rights, and it doesnt learn as humans do. I know the cult leader, altman, wants you to think otherwise, but no, stealing people’s work to make ai viable is not OK.

Nah, Altman doesn't really want you think machines are like humans and have rights either, because if the law thought that, it would also think Altman was aspiring to be the greatest slaver in all of history.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#110

Post by bee_rider »

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…

You only have to make that leap if you suppose that machine learning algorithms actually learn and then become capable of creating their own original works, rather than producing mechanical transformations of their inputs.

Which, I don’t think that’s an inherently absurd statement. I mean, at some point humans physically exist, so a sufficiently complex artificial being could exactly replicate our physically processes, and it would be hard (imo) to argue that such a thing isn’t a person.

But I don’t see the non-big-leap option. Either we admit that machines can actually perform creative works which are their own ideas, or we call the thing they do a derivative work, and we admit that we can’t just eyeball the difference between an original work and a derivative work anymore. That there’s something intrinsically special about having a human in the loop.

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