Am I the only one who thinks this just isn't defined well enough to be decided by the judiciary? It should be legislated. My opinion is that ML training should be distinctly different from human learning.
An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
271–280 of 337 posts
Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would kill research. Why pay for R&D when a gazillion other companies will instantly clone it?
And yet the list of the most important inventions there are no inventions created by companies. All tax funded. Corporations R&D is great at one thing, making things cheaper to produce and thus more widely available. And that's wonderful. But actually we want corporations to steal that tech from each other because then the consumer benefits the most.
What about a simple basic item like Velcro? Or the printing press? Or the copier? Telegraph?
Your claim is… simply utterly untrue.
Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So if you dilute inputs enough then you can ignore the rights? Yes! Always and only! If you are a songwriter then your inputs are a certain ordering of words and sounds. If you dilute those inputs to the point where it indistinguishable you have created a new song!
> If you dilute those inputs to the point where it indistinguishable you have created a new song! No, that's not the right criterium. You can create a new song but it may (not will) be classified as a derived work. Note that in audio it is fairly easy to prove that a part was sampled and unless your samples are pure noise you would most likely not get away with this. Plenty of artists are more than happy to give perm…
Those samples are very recognizable, are they not?
Also, from my time working in the music industry I know for a fact that kick drums and other sounds are taken from songs and used in other songs without permission or attribution all the time and it is done in a manner that is completely kosher because no artists think their artistry extends to someone trying to make the crack of a snare snappier in a mix. The lawyers think otherwise of course. Recognizable bass line? I mean, I guess pay up, but it’s not like the bass player who wrote that bass line in the session will see a dime. He never even got a publishing credit and why would he?
Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you dilute those inputs to the point where it indistinguishable you have created a new song! No, that's not the right criterium. You can create a new song but it may (not will) be classified as a derived work. Note that in audio it is fairly easy to prove that a part was sampled and unless your samples are pure noise you would most likely not get away with this. Plenty of artists are more than happy to give perm…
Those samples are very recognizable, are they not? Also, from my time working in the music industry I know for a fact that kick drums and other sounds are taken from songs and used in other songs without permission or attribution all the time and it is done in a manner that is completely kosher because no artists think their artistry extends to someone trying to make the crack of a snare snappier in a mix. The lawyer…
Sure, but now you're making the argument that the legal basis may be there but that to you it doesn't matter. A court isn't going to be very receptive to such an argument I'm afraid.
It's pretty thin ice, and if you mess up it will get costly especially with something that sees high rotation.
Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an interesting discussion, sorry for editing my other comment extensively, I tend to 'think while writing' and that upsets the thread a bit. You can take that as proof that this isn't GPT-3 output. The burden is on the accuser but the accuser has been 'shredded' and that makes them all but anonymous. So if you dilute inputs enough then you can ignore the rights? There is a close equivalent to this in music sa…
> But the rules don't say anything about how long those samples are: even the tiniest sliver would have to be accounted for: you would need permission. That’s just silly. If no one can hear the difference then who cares? Why would it even matter what song I was getting tiny snippets from? It’s like asking a specific poet for permission to use a certain word. > Ok, so I have this little piece of software here, it allo…
> If no one can hear the difference then who cares?
A court, your lawyer, and then finally, you. After all, if there is no audible difference that is exactly what this would hinge on and in the age of digital music it is fairly trivial to prove that something was sampled on snippets as short as a couple of 10's of ms. Whether that amounts to infringement or not is another matter, but to prove it is not all that hard from a technical point of view.
> Does it sound like the same song or not?
No, because the instrument would be changed, the timing could be changed (slowed down, sped up). Even a musician would have a fairly hard time associating a piece manipulated like that with their own work.
> You know, would someone listen to it and be able to recognize the melody?
We could use a melody that is itself in the public domain for this (say, a piece by JS Bach played by some famous pianist). The melody may be PD but the performance definitely is not.
> That’s what matters!
No, what matters is whether or not it crosses the bar for being recognized as an original work, and I don't think it does. But you've got me thinking about this because I've been toying for a long time with the idea to clean up some extremely bad historical recordings of absolute masterpieces and this is one of the reasons I've been holding back from that, the copyright situation around those would be quite murky.
It's 2:20 am here and I really should be getting some Z's, thank you very much for the interesting exchange, much food for thought.
Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
#276I've been saying this since it came out... Stable Diffusion is equivalent to hip-hop sampling in the 80s and 90s. The outcome is obvious.
I think there is a pretty big difference though. In the case of sampling you can play the original against the new media and show that they are 'the same'. I have no idea how you would go about doing something similar for Stable Diffusion. "Those three pixels look different when you remove image X from the training set" is probably not a convincing argument to anyone.
So the litmus test for IP theft is "efficacy of obfuscation"?
Remember, input is fundamentally required. Without that dataset, Stable Diffusion delivers exactly nothing.
Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those samples are very recognizable, are they not? Also, from my time working in the music industry I know for a fact that kick drums and other sounds are taken from songs and used in other songs without permission or attribution all the time and it is done in a manner that is completely kosher because no artists think their artistry extends to someone trying to make the crack of a snare snappier in a mix. The lawyer…
Sure, but now you're making the argument that the legal basis may be there but that to you it doesn't matter. A court isn't going to be very receptive to such an argument I'm afraid. It's pretty thin ice, and if you mess up it will get costly especially with something that sees high rotation.
It’s not thin ice because you can’t prove that a snare was added into a mix behind another snare and then pitched up a little and compressed a little. And artists hardly care much about it more than they care that someone has access to a certain vintage microphone. It’s just some sonic characteristic at that point.
I’m not talking about even noticeable sampling of a drum hit but the drum hit being used just to add to the existing drum track in the mix.
This is where transformative allowances come in as well, if not logically because no crime can be committed without any evidence.
I mean, IMO, copyrights on music samples are egregious. Hip hop is significantly transformative and was stymied by lawyers for decades. I’m sure that the best hip hop songs were never allowed to be made. I bet someone put together some absolute best of all time bangers with The Beatles, Micheal Jackson and Prince but they couldn’t get the rights. That trade isn’t worth it my opinion. Luckily the visual arts are more open minded. Richard Prince can be an artist by taking someone’s photo, doodling over it, and selling it for millions while owing nothing to the original photographer.
Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
#278Earlier 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…
Not everything JK pulled from is out of copyright. But generally Authors are allowed to reuse all sorts of things. Compare say Battle Royale to the Hunger Games. Writing a story about Kids fighting to the death doesn't give you a monopoly on that storyline.
See this link, lots of recent works in there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_influences_and_an...
Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems highly foolish from a marketing perspective for the artist too. I don't see how more people copying the artist style would not increase the value of originals. A smart artist here should promote that their style is staying in the dataset. It is as good free publicity as they will ever get.
It's not foolish at all. There's no value prop for an artist to advertise their work in the model as 1 of 400+ million. SD doesn't tell you anything about the art that inspired the output, no one will ever know the artists work was ever used, so this 'exposure' is as good as $0.
this isn’t quite true. i was playing around with sd, and whilst browsing styles on a site where different artists’ names were compared using the same prompt (“[artist name] painting of flowers”, for example), a particular artist’s style stood out to me. i ended up buying a print from them.
sd might not directly include this info in its outputs, but it really is free marketing for some (in fact, i suspect a lot of artists are probably flattered for being included by name in the dataset, but some are riding the waxing wave of outrage for the free media exposure)
Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off... > The US Copyright Office has rejected a request to let an AI copyright a work of art. Last week, a three-person board reviewed a 2019 ruling against Steven Thaler, who tried to copyright a picture on behalf of an algorithm he dubbed Creativity Machine. The board found that Thaler’s AI-created image didn’t include an element of “human authorship” — a nec…
I guess your point was so obvious that I missed it (and that's not to belittle it -- it's a good point). Machines are both created and operated by humans for human purposes. Humans are using a machine, created by humans, to create art for human consumption. Unoperated machines are not spontaneously creating art of their own motivation.
And thus my take on this...
The model behind Stable Diffusion (or Dall-E) is not infringing itself. It has the latent images it, but there is nothing that you can point to that says "that number there is infringing."
It takes a human action to pull together the parts of the model and select what is right and craft the prompt. Asking for "a picture of Mickey Mouse in the style of Pixar" is all sorts of infringing - by the person asking for that.
By itself, that image isn't a problem any more than the doodle in my notebook is. The question is what the human does with the image. If they publish it or try to sell it - yes, that's a problem. If they hang it in their kids room, yes, its infringing but unless you invite a Disney lawyer over for a play date no one is going to care (this also applies to if you drew it yourself rather than instructing a program to generate it).
My (I am not a lawyer) take is that the model isn't infringing. Use of the model may be infringing, and issues of infringements should be taken up with the human who created and published it them just as if it was done by a painter drawing heavy inspiration from a style or a photographer with a photograph of the Eiffel Tower at night.