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An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

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Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#141

Post by pessimizer »

l33tman wrote: post #135
sandworm101 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? If I read Harry Potter, then turn around a write a book about a wizard with a z-shaped scar? Who works at a school for wizards? With a pet owl? Who is an orphan? At some point I have started to violate intellectual property rules. (Ignoring all the Harry Potter material that was itself lifted from pri…

That wasn't the question. The question was if the learning process itself is violating any existing copyright laws.

That was part of the question, but it was immediately followed with a suggestion that things need to be virtually identical to be copyright violating.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#142

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

scotty79 wrote: post #2

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. This is incredibly disheartening. Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrest…

Strongly disagree, IP law (despite it's misuse by a certain mouse mascot'd company) is extremely important and protecting artists work and their livelihood.

The price floor on art commissions is already very low and AI effectively makes that cost zero, while providing zero compensation to the thousands of artists. Without their work, there's no Stability AI. From an ethical standpoint Stability is in the wrong, and from a legal one I think the class has a very strong case to recover damages.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#143

Post by williamcotton »

dns_snek wrote: post #49

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts…

> This reads like damage control to me in an effort to temporarily silence the loudest critics.

I think it is to avoid any common law wrongs related to the publicity rights of the defendants. It seems like something that a legal team would flag as an unnecessary risk for the product. Removing their names and images from the training data doesn't impact the usefulness of the model while at the same time creating a much smaller surface area for collecting subpoenas.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#144

Post by l33tman »

haswell wrote: post #125
stickfigure wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computational neural networks are modeled after biological brains. Anthropomorphizing them is not a fallacy; it's kind of the whole goal.

The fallacy lies in assuming that because of this similarity/modeling, the software resembles anything remotely close to a human brain, or should afford the software the status of an entity with human-like characteristics. Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord…

Any Fivr artist who get a $5 would gladly paint anything you ask them. The bulk of the paid "artistry" that's in the line of fire here is probably not the most ethical of the bunch.. Regardless, as with the status quo before, anybody who commissions or uses art in a commercial setting will have to consider the problems if they obviously plagiarise something even if it's not illegal, regardless of if a human or AI produces it, so nothing really changes for the "ethically sensitive" use-cases.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#145

Post by jacquesm »

williamcotton wrote: post #134
xeyownt wrote: post #101

I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the s…

> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? This isn't the kind of question that the lawyers of the defendants are going to ask the court. They'll more likely ask if it isn't clearly fair use similar to Sony v Universal and Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use. > It seems that violation wo…

> They'll more likely ask if it isn't clearly fair use similar to Sony v Universal and Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use.

Those were not cases about 'generators' but about 'aggregators', a completely different class of application.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#146

Post by km3r »

dns_snek wrote: post #124
thereisnospork wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright? Yes, much in the same way that I am glad I live in a future where scribes aren't required to put text on paper: There is a massiv…

I'm not against efficiency improvements, but the value created by these improvements has to flow back towards the society at large in one way or another. I'm not anti-AI, I'm just arguing that artists and other creative professionals should be compensated for their work before their work is included in a for-profit ML model. That's hardly radical. Current proposals don't have any intention of addressing that, they ju…

The comparison to scribes is a perfect analogy. The 'scribing' of translating the idea of painting to an actual painting is being made more efficient. The actual creativity is what the original idea is, not the skill to put it on paper.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#147

Post by mjhay »

sandworm101 wrote: post #140
mjhay wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human artists/writers are influenced by each other all the time. I really don't see how it is fundamentally different. Most of Harry Potter is derivative of previous fantasy work itself. Nothing is made in a vacuum. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WizardingSchool

But Rowling knew enough to pull from prior public domain works, not other recent authors. Wizard schools are public domain. An AI author would have to know which they are allowed to use, which they can use under fair use, and which they must ask to use. Humans can do that. I am doing that right now as I use the "Harry Potter" trademark here while posting to HN without the owner's permission. AI systems scraping the i…

Generally speaking though, any work created by such models does not copy any original work closely at all. Of course there could be slip-ups, but the same could be said of human generated works, which violate fair use on a regular basis.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#148

Post by [deleted] »

sandworm101 wrote: post #130
xeyownt wrote: post #101

I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the s…

>> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? If I read Harry Potter, then turn around a write a book about a wizard with a z-shaped scar? Who works at a school for wizards? With a pet owl? Who is an orphan? At some point I have started to violate intellectual property rules. (Ignoring all the Harry Potter material that was itself lifted from pri…

[deleted]

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#149

Post by stickfigure »

haswell wrote: post #125
stickfigure wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computational neural networks are modeled after biological brains. Anthropomorphizing them is not a fallacy; it's kind of the whole goal.

The fallacy lies in assuming that because of this similarity/modeling, the software resembles anything remotely close to a human brain, or should afford the software the status of an entity with human-like characteristics. Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord…

I humbly suggest you are committing the fallacy of anthropomorphizing humans. What's your definition of consciousness? How do you know that a (sufficiently complex) biologically inspired computer program doesn't have it? What's special about meat?

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#150

Post by N1ckFG »

benlivengood wrote: post #129
dns_snek wrote: post #49

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts…

The LAION-5B dataset is metadata and URI pairs; all the images are publicly accessible on the Internet. Stable Diffusion's U-Net is trained to remove noise from images in latent space, which the variational autoencoder (VAE) converts to and from pixel space. CLIP embeddings are used to improve the denoising step of the U-Net by using the correlations between human language descriptions of the pixel image to reduce la…

Afaik theoretically you could reproduce any image in the training set using the full weights (not a fraction of them) and the correct prompt. In practice since this is an extremely lossy process, some or most of them aren't reproducible. For this specific case, I suspect it'll come down to whether somebody in the class can pass a test like this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03860
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