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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

#121

Post by wredue »

anon291 wrote: post #115
wredue wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prove it. Train an AI just on a few techniques. Then a couple fundamental stock photos with nothing but the subject. Then have it generate things outside of the realm of the stock photos recombined in a general style. Let us see your completely unique and unpredictable results.

Can you explain in more detail what you want? If you undertrain a diffusion model it will produce meaningless gibberish. Which is still 'creative', just not what you expected. Training for a diffusion model is not 'inserting' images into a dataset. Rather you should view it as a 'taste' alignment.

>“If you under train a model, its results being copy and paste are fundamentally more obvious so I refuse to do that!”

Exactly dude.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#122

Post by wredue »

BestGuess wrote: post #102
wredue wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Funny how you declare photo bashing as “fair use” but a cursory glance at the actual legality shows that you’re lying and that it is also in a somewhat ambiguous grey area at the moment, with lawsuits pending.

It is also massively frowned upon in art sharing circles.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#123

Post by sandworm101 »

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.

You browser loads a website. That is copying. Your browser saves a copy on a hard drive: copying. You integrate an image into a database: copying. Your CD player reads a song from a CD into its memory buffer: copying. All of these debates have already been hashed out in various courtrooms. There is a huge body of law that carefully defines was is and isn't copying, what is actionable copying and what is de minimus or ephemeral.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#124

Post by bee_rider »

dragonwriter wrote: post #111
bee_rider wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 processe…

> 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. Why do you think humans can do that, and that what we call “original works” of humans are not just mechanical transformations of the human’s inputs. How, in a universe of deterministic physical l…

That seems pretty close to what I said in the next paragraph, just approaching from the other direction.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#125

Post by Ferret7446 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #26
bertil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

> 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.

That would be like requiring human artists to enumerate exactly every single influence on each piece of art they make. Did they see a painting by so and so at six years old that had a 0.1% influence on them? Better include it too.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#126

Post by belorn »

ghaff wrote: post #108
belorn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

The likelihood that no output has ever infringed any copyright will be an interesting argument. People are constantly testing and prompting different AI's to see if they can get them to reproduce known content, and there are a few known examples from copilot where such test has shown large amount of reproduced exact copies of comments and other identifiable segments. Similar things has been done with images, like the getty watermark.

AI developers has also started to add filters and other techniques to remove outputs that are too similar to existing works, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It shows that the tools do output such works (as otherwise they wouldn't need to filter it out), but also show that they are working to minimize it. Courts would have to look at it and decide if such efforts are an admittance of the issue or if the mitigations are enough.

In this specific case, I doubt such discussion will occur at this point since the main point that the judge brought up is that the copyrighted works need to be registered first at the copyright office before it can go any further (except for 12 works which already are registered).

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#127

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

coldpie wrote: post #71
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> 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.

You're one of those people who think that if you can imagine something and then describe it poetically, that this has any relevance to the real world that the rest of us inhabit.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#128

Post by pseudalopex »

BestGuess wrote: post #93
wanderingstan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

>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. I would if I could but as I keep tryin to explain I can't because it requires I believe something that's a contradiction. Just because it's a contradiction that makes ya more money don't mean it isn't a contradiction. Also I am that non-technical…

Laws are compromises. And fair use was never simple.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#129

Post by nnvvhh »

nsagent wrote: post #30
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 understa…

The availability of the copyrighted works is not determinative. Fair use in the US takes (at minimum) four factors into account, listed in the federal copyright statute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107.

That quote from Stanford's library is not discussing fair use doctrine in general, but rather is stating what is permitted in those specific circumstances. There are plenty of instances of fair use where the underlying work used was available at a fair price. That's the whole point of fair use law: some use of a work that is facially infringement escapes liability because the particular use is considered fair.

Re: Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

#130

Post by Kim_Bruning »

dragonwriter wrote: post #117
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of 'technical copying' actually is permitted by EU laws or US Fair use arguments. Think of browsing, caching, scraping, indexing, etc. AI companies argue that insofar as they are copying, they are only making ephemeral technical copies.

> A lot of 'technical copying' actually is permitted by EU laws or US Fair use arguments. US fair use analysis includes purpose, so copying which would be fair use for one purpose can cease to be when the purpose changes. Since this is a case under US law, and the US is not currently a member of the EU, EU law is somewhat tangential.

Ah sorry, I was trying to say two things at once referring to two different contexts. In both cases the only 'temporary copying' takes place.

- In the context of specifically training an AI-model under EU law: -

Article 5(1) of the Directive 2001/29/EC [1] is argued to apply. Of course, if sued, AI companies still need to show that their use is otherwise lawful (which should be fairly easy, since they actually do not retain anything remotely resembling a copy at all)

- In the context of specifically training an AI-model under US law: -

The purpose of the copy can be argued to be non-exploitative, incidental, for the purpose of enabling technology, and temporary.

By contrast: Google Books even argued that permanently retaining entire copies of books wholesale was fair use [2], provided they didn't provide copies of those books to 3rd parties.

OpenAI argues that there's no way they're doing anything even remotely close to that. [3]

Disclaimer: IANAL, YMMV.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

[3] https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_R...

See also:

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37879938 Previous thread where I looked up a bunch of sources.

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