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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

#171

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

astrange wrote: post #159
GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

StableDiffusion is not based on art commissions. You can search https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ and see what kind of nonsense it usually has trained on.

It most definitely is, LAION-5B contains a large amount of copyrighted works from DeviantArt, ArtStation, etc.

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

#172

Post by scotty79 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #110
scotty79 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This reads like you know what’s best for artists and takes their point of view completely for granted. I think I know that little better than lawyers do. Even if only because I had zero financial incentive when I formed my opinions. > As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and co…

AI gives an artist a ticket to a lottery that can strongly boost their name without doing any additional service. Fame has a very short half-life and unless you have all the licensing/contractual machinery in place beforehand, you probably won't be able to cash on that boost. The line of thinking you articulate here is extremely familiar to anyone who does creative work. It's the same argument that producers use to g…

> Fame has a very short half-life and unless you have all the licensing/contractual machinery in place beforehand, you probably won't be able to cash on that boost.

I'm not sure how did you manage to miss thousands of artists able to capitalize on sudden and accidental fame for decades without any prior arrangements. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's possible. Also to put this in context compare this with how often very popular artists get completely screwed by huge copyright behemoths earning a score of money but mostly for someone else, someone completely uncreative.

> https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure

Trying to buy something for exposure is absolutely abhorrent because you try to coax someone into doing work for no money. And for nothing basically because people who try to pay with exposure don't really provide any significant exposure 99.99% of times.

If AI people were forcing artist to create new art and paying them with the promise of exposure in their generated works I'll be completely on your side. However it requires zero work from artist to have their already published work to be used as learning material. That's why they never opposed it when other artists were learning from their art. That and of course that target of their wrath would be basically the entire rest of the art community which wouldn't make them very popular.

> Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. .... I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.

That's completely fine in my book. And if those generated stories get really popular so I learn about them I might do just a little bit of online marketing to inject my name in the discussions about them and publish new ones to my fresh new subscribers ahead of time. Heck, I could create my own generated and fine-tuned manually content and sell it just like that guy does since he's already proven a business model for me.

Compare now this with the world of strict copyright where this guy doesn't even know I exist, same goes for swaths of fans of ghost stories. Or let's assume he knows and wants to deal with me. Since he's the one with the money I'll be severely dependent of him and strongly disadvantaged in any deal. But let's assume we struck a deal that's nice for me. There's no way I'll be able to produce new ghost stories every day. Not to mention I wouldn't wish that workload on my worst enemy. So no business happens and many people have their love for ghost stories un-satiated, many didn't discover their love for ghost stories and I am 100% still poor struggling author who's known by nobody.

World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.

> The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.

And yet you vehemently defend the system that created this situation and refuse to even consider alternatives.

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

#173

Post by Animats »

mcbits wrote: post #100
Animats wrote: post #95

That author makes the point that copyright registration (which you do online with the Library of Congress in the US)[1] is required for copyright enforcement litigation. And, quite possibly, it may be required for DMCA enforcement. Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA ta…

Unless they're legally obligated to show proof of copyright registration for the takedown notice to be a valid, it would be risky to assume they didn't register it just because they didn't show proof.

Most of this revolves around the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. That is, doing a takedown without authenticating the ownership of the copyright provides immunity against being sued for contributory infringement. But to actually win such a lawsuit, the purported copyright owner would have to show proof of registration.

This suggests an online process which looks like this:

* US Service provider offers web page for DMCA notices.

* Web page requests that the user enter copyright registration info.

* If user fails to provide registration info, web page offers links to various national copyright registration sites to register a copyright. A payment receipt for copyright registration is acceptable as temporary proof of registration, but must be followed up within some period of time by actual proof of registration.

* Temporary proof of registration is enough for a takedown, but the material will go back up if full proof is not submitted later.

This would put a big dent in nuisance DMCA claims. The service provider might get sued occasionally, but for big providers, it's probably worth litigating this once or twice. The companies that have valuable IP file copyright registrations. Disney will be able to show a copyright registration on all their movies.

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

#174

Post by wvenable »

EamonnMR wrote: post #166
wvenable wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Machines aren't people. There's no reason why that is the significant detail. Why does it matter? If you can look at millions of images over your lifetime and faithfully reproduce famous works of art by hand, aren't you just as wrong?

Humans can be trusted not to do that thing, and get in trouble if they get caught.

Is it not humans giving the AI prompts to do these things? Why does the machine in the middle matter?

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

#175

Post by hnfong »

ben_w wrote: post #77
sebstefan wrote: post #37

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.

I don't. Information comes with many different rights: copy -right is the right to make copies; "moral rights" were mentioned in a few of my UK job contracts and that's "the right to be identified as the author of a work"; database rights are for collections of statements of fact that are not eligible for copyright but which were deemed to be worth protecting anyway for much the same reasons. Even if copyright is tot…

Moral rights is indeed "the right to be identified as the author of a work".

I don't think it means the author has a right to all similar styles. If I can legally ask somebody to paint me something in the style of a famous (living) artist, that person presumably having seen and studied their famous works for a while, why should I not be able to ask the AI to do the same thing?

(I understand there might be people who think even a human person emulating the style of another artist is morally wrong, but at least that's a consistent argument)

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

#176

Post by majormajor »

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…

> 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 same as actually copying.

With this sort of model's "creation" process, is something close to everything it generates derivative of everything it ingested, since had you ingested a different set of images you'd presumably have a different model with different weights?

That's kinda sorta analogous to human creation, but a human can much more actively choose what to think about, what to ignore, what to filter out.

The human process involves an explicit creative judgement step that I don't think the image-generation-by-model process can - and that creative transformation is key, legally, to a derivative work being able to itself be copyrightable and to not be infringing.

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

#177

Post by williamcotton »

jacquesm wrote: post #167
williamcotton wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no existing legal doctrine around "generators" and "aggregators" but there is around "commercially significant non-infringing use". Something like what you're saying would need to be established by the higher courts.

Of course there is. You can't infringe without publishing a work and to pass off the work of others as a new creation because it has been shredded and then sewn back together again . Those cases hinged on republishing works or significant parts of works as themselves , they weren't trying to pass them off as new, original works in their own right. And this is exactly what this court case is about, whether or not Stab…

> And this is exactly what this court case is about, whether or not Stable Diffusion ultimately is just another - complex - form of mechanical transformation or whether it creates original work.

No, it's not at all. This court case is about:

Plaintiffs Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz (“Plaintiffs”), on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated, bring this Class Action Complaint (the “Complaint”) against Defendants Stability AI Ltd. and Stability AI, Inc. (collectively “Stability”); Midjourney, Inc. (“Midjourney”); and DeviantArt, Inc. (“DeviantArt”) (all collectively “Defendants”) for:

1.) direct and vicarious copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501;

2.) violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201–1205 (the “DMCA”);

3.) violation of Plaintiffs’ statutory and common law rights of publicity, Cal. Civ. Code section 3344;

4.) violation of Unfair Competition law, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17200, et seq.;

5.) and declaratory relief.

So for each of those complaints the defense needs to establish that their actions fit a different narrative, one that is legally coherent and against the claims for damages.

So for copyright infringement they are going to go for a fair use defense. I'm sure they won't only reference VCRs and Google Books! I'm certain they won't talk about "aggregators" and "generators" because this is not a Supreme Court opinion. They're going to use the established legal doctrines. I'm sure that their lawyers have plenty of other relevant case law at their disposal.

As for DMCA and rights of publicity, this seems to be what motivated Stability AI to adhere to "takedown requests" as they probably had some lawyer whispering in their ear that they probably don't want to spend the time and money testing this in court if it doesn't really impact the marketability of their tool.

I haven't ready anything about the Unfair Competition law in California.

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

#178

Post by dns_snek »

km3r wrote: post #146
dns_snek wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None of that addresses anything I've said.

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

#179

Post by CrimsonRain »

quadcore wrote: post #160
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

Human artists/writers are influenced by each other all the time. The flaw in this argument is the word "artist". If you remove all the pictures from the data source, the AI isnt capable of generating anything. Because it's not an artist.

So if you were born blind, you can draw pictures?

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

#180

Post by tracerbulletx »

smoldesu wrote: post #22
healsdata wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand the point you're making. Its disheartening that artists can opt-out of having a computer algorithm make derivative versions of their creations? I'm probably on the opposite side of the fence. I do find it disheartening that it's opt-out instead of opt-in. The training set should be limited to public domain and CC-0 until such a time it can comply with attribution; then other CC works could b…

Unfortunately, a lot of these artists opted-in the moment they uploaded their art to the internet. Once you do that, much like uploading your source code or compiled binary, it's hard to reverse the consequences. All that really happened is that the consequences changed, and a lot of people weren't prepared for it. Yeah, it's disheartening. There's also no good way to fix it; the cost of storing copies of their art i…

Your last sentence makes no sense, you don't think artists have been impacted by digital copying until now? Every genre of artist from music, movies, tv, photographers, and visual artists have been involved in this problem ever since the moment those art forms were digitized.
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