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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

#281

Post by dragonwriter »

williamcotton wrote: post #158
pessimizer wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no artwork included in Stable Diffusion. You might as well say that there's no artwork included in a .jpg, just data that can be used to recreate a piece of artwork using a carefully crafted interpreter.

There's no artwork in the 1s and 0s. There's an artwork when you render it to a screen. It is not a copyright infringement I go to Disney's website, download a JPEG, convert that JPEG to 1s and 0s, print just a bunch of 1s and 0s and not the image and not ascii art of the image, just like a printing press made up of just [1] and [0] character blocks, and sell that. Yes, the 1s and 0s are mathematically derived from t…

> It is not a copyright infringement I go to Disney's website, download a JPEG,

Only because of applied license.

> convert that JPEG to 1s and 0s, print just a bunch of 1s and 0s

Yes, there is, barring context that maked it fair use (which is an exception that applies to things that would otherwise be violations), this is a fixed exact copy in an alternative form jist as much as a .zip or a lossless .png converted from the .jpg would be, and violates exclusive rights in copyright.

> Anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s.

That’s an argument against damages, not against it being unauthorized copying.

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

#282

Post by Maursault »

okwhateverdude wrote: post #258
Maursault wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

Now hold on a second. You seem very certain of "individual", what it is, and what it is not. I am not so sure that we're not actually creating an individual here or at least parts of an individual as snapshots of qualia and being able to recall or "hallucinate" them. Does no amount of mimicry bring a program closer to an individual? What if we made a really clever model that learns on the fly via constant streams of…

I sure hope you're wrong, because what you're describing is terrifying and horrendously cruel.

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

#283

Post by BeefWellington »

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…

> Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use.

The problem as I understand it is in all the likely "precedent" cases for this, what was being done with the scraped data was in some identifiable way different than the purpose of the source data itself. Authors Guild v Google for instance, the argument was that Google wasn't reproducing whole texts, it just used that data to make the texts searchable. Meaning the purpose of the consumption of the text by Google was to essentially make a searchable index, rather than to reproduce a book, and thus that isn't harming the authors.

In this case, it would seem a very key difference is that this is Art being consumed and Art being produced, with no different purpose.

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

#284

Post by jerf »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #224
jerf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, this is just something that has to be solved with legislation, not a court case. It's too novel a setup for a court case to deal with under existing frameworks. I think one issue is just that of scale. I personally tend to agree that there's something icky with just slurping up literally everyone's content, then producing a tool that will then proceed to put them out of business en masse . But proving tha…

Even in the strictest possible strengthening of IP law, where you need the artists written permission before feeding their data into a neural network, I think the market for artists is doomed. Disney can train a model from every frame of their video library as well as whatever they can find which is unambiguosly public domain. Then they could hire a few hundred artists to draw whatever the model is bad at by the end…

I agree, actually. There are interests enough in having something like this that someone will even pay artists to make the art to feed the model, and as the models improve, they'll probably need increasingly less training data, too. A human artist does not need thousands of samples to copy Picasso's or Monet's style. They need extensive training and practice to get to the point they can copy anybody's style at all (I'm completely incapable of it for all practical purposes, for instance), but once they have the training they can do a passable job of copying a style off of just a single sample. Skilled artists who have studied history and go beyond the surface of the art can even do a more-than-passable job.

e.g., there's copying Dali's color tone, realism level, and general look, and then there's understanding the why of what he is doing and being able to translate that out with some skill. You may never 100% match Dali directly, but a human doesn't necessarily need a lot of data to reach this level. And of course there will be a valid market in copying his tone, realism level, and general look even without a deeper level of semantic copying. A lot of the AI art is already this, but the person crafting the prompt and then performing a conscious selection of the result can bring their own semantics to the art in the process, it is not strictly speaking necessary to have copied them from the original artist.

This is actually part of what is going through my mind when I expect this will be solved via legislation. Well... for a given value of "solved". I expect whenever Congress gets around to this, any law they will end up passing will have HN up in arms and I expect to be armed with a torch & pitchfork myself, such is my confidence in Congress on this front. But even given that Congress is going to royally mess it up, it may yet be less messed up than the inevitable hodgepodge of conflicting precedents that will precede Congress' efforts, because while in my opinion there is no coherent legal principle that will hold the decisions together, the lawsuits will arise, the decisions will be made, and the precedents will be set. The mere inability to retain logical coherence does not stop our legal system.

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

#285

Post by pcthrowaway »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #221
cycomanic wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this take interesting. So would you also argue that saving an image into computer memory is the same as memorizing an image for a human? Those processes are viewed very different by the law, but if we anthropomorphize computers should we not view them the same? Also I wonder where you get the view that future ML systems will not require large amounts of learning? I don't see any development in current systems…

> Those processes are viewed very different by the law, but if we anthropomorphize computers should we not view them the same? Not only do I think the two processes are essentially the same, but I can't think of any laws in my jurisdiction (the UK) which actually distinguish between them. E.g. we are allowed to make copies of digital media for personal use.

I didn't realize it's OK to record a film in a theater in the UK

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

#286

Post by riversflow »

haswell wrote: post #255
theRealMe wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll be honest, this sounds like you have made a decision on your stance and now you’re building false distinctions to reinforce your own bias. You said a lot of words, but I believe your argument comes down to “computers are super powered compared to humans doing the same thing”? Is that accurate? Because magnitude of ability, to me, makes no difference at all. It’s perfectly acceptable for a human to study the artw…

Tone aside, thanks for the feedback. It doesn't excite me to hear my comment came across that way, but I'm trying to clarify what was a misinterpretation of what I was trying to say. > I believe your argument comes down to “computers are super powered compared to humans doing the same thing”? Is that accurate? No, that doesn't really touch it. The speed/power disparity between humans/computers at certain tasks are ce…

> why would it be the same for an automated process?

It's perfectly acceptable for a human being to drive a a car, but driving one drunk is completely unacceptable. Conversely, there is no rule against creating or consuming art while intoxicated.

So to answer your question, because it is not a matter of life and death. Take your argument and apply it to mass produced goods that were once the realm of only skilled craftsman.

> Is a human sitting on a neighborhood bench in view of your house the same thing as a surveillance camera on a nearby telephone pole?

If a person never leaves and keeps notes, yes, it is exactly the same. I'd call the police for stalking. The issue here is privacy, which is tangential to AI reproducing the styles of known individuals.

> The AI software has only "learned" in the sense that it has operated on the input data such that it can now provide outputs that are of convincingly high quality to make it appear to "know" what it is doing.

Completely disagree with you about the nature of learning here. If a person produces art in the style of an individual, they have no idea the internal machinations of the original artist, they just "appear to 'know' what they are doing".

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

#287

Post by v3ss0n »

dns_snek wrote: post #114
pixl97 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to live in a future where anything 'original' an artist creates has now blocked anyone else on the planet for the next 99 years and you must pay them royalties? Because we already have Disney now and they suck quite a bit. I honestly want to live in a world where this 'worrying about paying for rent' is not a problem that we're concerned with, and a world with AI that can create and make we far more apt t…

> Do you want to live in a future where anything 'original' an artist creates has now blocked anyone else on the planet for the next 99 years and you must pay them royalties? No I don't want that but there's a very clear distinction between people who are truly inspired by each others' work and produce an average human output that maybe covers their bills and AI that can pump out billions of replicates per day to dro…

SD is not big tech since you can run on 4gb gfxcard and opensource

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

#288

Post by marchenko »

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.

The claim that the real value in art is in the idea rather than the execution seems to be as true as the claim that the real value in a startup is in the idea. Artists are constantly in dialogue with their tools to produce and define their idea, and to discover new ideas and capabilities along the way, in the same way the Intel head Andy Grove advised technologists to be involved in the engineering & production processes.

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

#289

Post by lodovic »

acomjean wrote: post #18

>"The output represents the model’s understanding of what is useful, aesthetic, pleasing, etc. and that, together with data filtering and cleaning that general image generating AI companies do,2 is what the companies consider most valuable, not the training data.3" This didn't make any sense to me. Without the curated training data (images) how are they making the models? No matter what, putting images into your mach…

I compare it to reading a big stack of comic books and then trying to create your own, painstakingly reproducing the layout, color palettes and character styles. Or listening to (eg) Pink Floyd and then making a song that really matches their music. YouTube is full of those, it's really similar to SD images. But still not the same as sampling as that requires actually duplicating parts of the original.

The reason we have copyright for a limited time is to promote the arts, not to give people a monopoly on a specific style so they can milk it. (although that is what seems to be happening)

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

#290

Post by tshadley »

simiones wrote: post #79
tshadley wrote: post #31

"[The complaint] argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the outp…

> Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How can you claim with a straight face that this is a better explanation of what an NN is? An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the…

> An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input.

Right, but that equally fits a biological NN if you zoom in that close. You'll need more than wikipedia to appreciate what deep-neural-networks are doing here, it's dimensional space that's key. What DNNs do that is similar to the human brain is that they order "concepts" in high-dimensional space. Colors, textures, shape and hierarchies of same are organized and cross-referenced with text in an incredibly complex connectome. It would be useless to memorize images with their textual descriptions as that would be horrendously inefficient/ineffective during inference. Rather, the model must do what we do and understand what makes an image a "landscape" or a "portrait" or a "cartoon". It needs to understand what is an artist's style and how to perform it on a work never before created.

"Understanding" can only mean ordering meaningless letters and pixels in multidimensional space so that they line up with human understanding (and human 'understanding', in turn, can only mean ordering meaningless sensory perceptions in the brain's multidimensional connectome such that reality turns out to be approximately predicted and controlled). The only systems that work this way efficiently are neural networks, biological and artificial.

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