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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

#231

Post by TylerE »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #83
TylerE wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You understand that completely kills OSS as a concept, right?

So what? Free software was literally created in reaction to copyright protections getting extended to software. They make no sense in a world without copyright. By the way, it would also kill proprietary software as a concept. Source code leak? It's no longer a crime to use it. We'd never have to read licensing nonsense ever again.

It would kill research. Why pay for R&D when a gazillion other companies will instantly clone it?

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

#232

Post by theRealMe »

Maursault wrote: post #228
Maursault wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're both barking up the wrong tree. A person, and even an animal, possibly even a plant or members of other kingdoms and domains, sees. A computer does not see any more than a lens sees, or to the extreme, a computer can not see any more than an empty paper towel roll can see. The computer, lens and empty paper towel roll have no "I," no ego. In order to see, there must be something, or more accurately, so…

I should have known my comment was doomed for downvoting. Many coders here. Many among them believe Strong AI is attainable. Everyone has self-bias, tends to believe their beliefs are correct and true. Anyone that believes Strong AI is attainable will evaluate that belief as correct, even with insurmountable evidence to the contrary. It is not a deficiency of programming that Strong AI will never be achieved, rather,…

I didn’t downvote you(tbh I don’t even know how to downvote). But I didn’t respond to you because I don’t understand the relevance of what you are saying. You said we’re both wrong and then went on to talk about how inanimate objects can’t see? It just doesn’t make sense to me what you’re trying to say.

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

#233

Post by l33tman »

haswell wrote: post #205
l33tman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

I think it's still an apples/oranges comparison. Whether or not it is superficially similar, the barrier to entry and the upper ceiling for infringement have both drastically changed overnight. AI is not an independent entity that has entered the game, it is (currently) a power to be wielded by anyone regardless of their background. It can only be used as ethically as the person sitting at the keyboard, who most like…

Yeah, I do agree with you on these points. What to do about it though, if anything... I'm fairly liberal personally, and I guess this is where pure political subjective desires will come into play. In the US you'd trust people to wield semi-automatic weapons on the streets but you wouldn't trust them to run a program that generates anime furry images of their favorite characters? Granted that was an extreme example but still :)

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

#234

Post by lofaszvanitt »

theRealMe wrote: post #226
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as this way: in order to create 5 very different illustrations you need to talk with 5 people. in the end 5 people will get money when they finish with their work. an AI consumes these artists past output and instead of paying to these artists it will gather income to the owner. So by using the output of 5 people who have spent decades on perfecting their craft, the AI generates income by stealing their w…

Throughout history almost all skills have been learned/copied from other people. Especially things like art are learned by studying previous work. What specifically is the defining reason that people can learn by copying other peoples styles but ai cannot? Are we supposed to halt technological progress to avoid antiquated job destruction?

For a human it takes time, it takes effort, in order to copy/learn someone's style. And the outcome is not guaranteed to be a success. There is no problem with AI, but if you generate an image with words, something like: make a painting in the style of "X artist", then maybe compensate people for their work and everybody else included, whose expertise was used during the creation of given art.

So you want an image? For 5 bucks? You get an image that's worth 5 bucks, but not an image that costs 1000 dollars to make in real life.

The problem here is you giving a simpleminded person access to an AI, and for a few bucks, this person can generate something that uses thousands of man years of expertise for that given work.

I hope you see the potential slippery slope here.

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

#235

Post by km3r »

halfnormalform wrote: post #133
epistemer wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same stupid argument that Mp3 will destroy music instead of embracing the new marketing opportunities it represents. IMO an artist that wants their name out of the dataset is a moron. In the end , people copying an artist style over and over will just send the price of originals through the roof. This is completely obvious.

Just like when Napster resulted in musicians becoming super rich by selling their originals to people who found their music for free? Those things don't happen in real life.

The music industry is the biggest its ever been... so yes?

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

#236

Post by jacquesm »

williamcotton wrote: post #216
jacquesm wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been the plaintiff in a case like this in Dutch court where the counterparty first tried to argue that since my code is 'visible to all' a fair use exemption should be granted, when that fell through they tried to argue that they did not take my code from my site but from another site which presumably took it from my site and which didn't have any attribution so that they were free to use it. Then that fell thro…

What makes "commercially significant non-infringing use" such a great doctrine is that it lets there be some objective measurement of how generally useful a given practice is towards the benefit of the public good. The doctrine does this by establishing that the tool can be used for a myriad of ways that in no way directly compete with the original work in the marketplace. For example, when Stable Diffusion is being…

Well, I didn't say that opt-out was the way to go, but that it would be better than nothing, which is what they have right now.

You seem to be making a very convoluted argument that eventually boils down to 'because it is useful it must be right', aka an argument from utility. But copyright law has time and again been proven to be highly resilient against such arguments. You either have rights or you don't and in a moment of clairvoyance the people that came up with the current incarnation decided that it is such an important thing that it gets bestowed upon creation. No registration required (though it can help). Just making something and boom you have a bunch of rights which you can only contract out of.

I don't think any utilitarian argument that results in the creation of new works based on the works of others will make those rights go away.

I've read your other comments and I see that this tool is useful to you but don't be persuaded so easily by the utility: If I stole your work and passed it off as my own it might be very useful to society, especially if I re-licensed it under more permissive terms or even placed in the public domain. But I would be clearly infringing on your rights. You may in fact not be in a position to claim these works as your creation.

The fact that 'my' work has a few hundred or even a few thousand such inputs rather than just one does not change the principle: I did not create the work, and that is the bit that really matters, unless you are creating a work it doesn't matter if you have the equivalent of a bitcoin tumbler for art at your disposal to pretend that you have created a work. You did not. The fact that you used a tool that obfuscates attribution and overrules the licensing terms of the original copyright holders does not mean that you can claim your hands are clean: you know exactly what is going on behind the scenes.

Personally I won't go within a mile of these tools to create work that I put my name under .

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

#237

Post by scotty79 »

hooverd wrote: post #82
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 "artists" are commissioners in my view. If the learning and creating is done by the model, the model is the rights holder. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

But AI companies are paying AI artists with electricity and computing power so they are buying copyright from AI artists. ;)

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

#238

Post by scotty79 »

dns_snek wrote: post #84
idiotsecant wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a different set of rules, just not in the way you're depicting it. This is not piracy. The whole point is that the AI is using this work in a way that is transformative, just like a person would. It's not copying, it's breaking down work to it's foundational features and recombining those features with others to make new things. Literally exactly what humans do when they make art. If a person was doing what the…

But it's not a person doing it. It's a machine learning model owned and operated by a company. It doesn't have capacity to "think", claiming otherwise is highly dubious since anyone truly "learning" from art wouldn't also replicate watermarks in their "original" work. More importantly, people have limited output capacity and it's why copyright was invented in the first place, i.e. scale. Current trajectory will only…

> It's a machine learning model owned and operated by a company.

How's that different from a human artist shackled to a company by some secret agreements in which he's not the stronger side?

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

#239

Post by Maursault »

theRealMe wrote: post #232
Maursault wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have known my comment was doomed for downvoting. Many coders here. Many among them believe Strong AI is attainable. Everyone has self-bias, tends to believe their beliefs are correct and true. Anyone that believes Strong AI is attainable will evaluate that belief as correct, even with insurmountable evidence to the contrary. It is not a deficiency of programming that Strong AI will never be achieved, rather,…

I didn’t downvote you(tbh I don’t even know how to downvote). But I didn’t respond to you because I don’t understand the relevance of what you are saying. You said we’re both wrong and then went on to talk about how inanimate objects can’t see? It just doesn’t make sense to me what you’re trying to say.

The crux of it is that it is a false assumption, or more accurately a wrong headed assumption, to suggest that Stable Diffusion sees anything or to equate or compare what Stable Diffusion does do with biological sight. Only an individual, whether that be a person, animal, plant, etc., can see. A program, no matter how complex, no matter how advanced its hardware, will never be an individual, an ego, something that sees. It can only mimic and fool us into believing something there is seeing, but we should know better.

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

#240

Post by blackbear_ »

stickfigure wrote: post #119
haswell wrote: post #109

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? The fundamental issue with this line of argument is that it equates the process of human vision and the consequences of that with that of a computer program ingesting that image and the consequences of that . This anthropomorphization seems like a form of deep fallacy when considering the nature and im…

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

Modern neural networks as used in language diffusion models have absolutely nothing to do with biological brains. That was just a vision of the early pioneers 70 years ago.
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