An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Jan 29, 2023, 3:20 PM UTC

SideQuark wrote: post #325

simiones wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at these images: > https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion/d... They were prompted with the text "Mona Lisa Smile". Would you not say that they are an extremely close reproduction of the Mona Lisa, with barely any kind of synthesis?

Look at the actual Mona Lisa. None of those other images are close to being a reproduction. I can hand paint a Mona Lisa like image that are this removed and be fine.

I can virtually promise you that, if the Mona Lisa were still copyrighted, and you were to try to sell art that you painted that looked like this, the Da Vinci estate would quickly shut you down.

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

#332

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Jan 29, 2023, 3:33 PM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #323

simiones wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"? Probably not, though even this may be debatable given the specific prompt and specific similarities (for example, if it generated the exact color and exact aspect ratio for a prompt like "Yves Klein IKB 79", I could see an argument for infringement; if it generated the same thing for a prompt like…

We are on the verge of "A picture is worth a thousand words" being deterministically quantifiable and testable. I think the politics of art are about to get very weird and interesting. Solid blue is superlative example, but I think the amount of creativity in different artworks has a HUGE amount of variance. You can kind of "score" any artwork using and AI Art engine in terms of "what is the minimum number of terms i…

Sure, the amount of entropy in a piece of art that is an interesting concept, but it is entirely irrelevant to the definition of copyright. Copyright rests entirely on whether you are copying someone else's artwork, regardless of how low entropy that art work is. The only place where entropy comes in is when discussing either specific non-copying claims (such as in my previous answer) or questions of what constitutes derived works.

Consider that even cooking recipes (the particular descriptions) are copyrighted, even though they are mostly technical descriptions of a simple process (the recipe itself is not copyrighted, the specific wording is).

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

#333

Post by tshadley » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #330

tshadley wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial definition was "like a super-humanly talented artist": this is very different from a human being who also happens to be an artist. Stable Diffusion does only art with text-prompting well, nothing else, and will take a very different "mental" route to creation as a human. But nevertheless it still creates "super-humanly talented" art because it is widely recognized as incredibly good, few artists can do thi…

> it is widely recognized as incredibly good, few artists can do this as well, probably none can do it with comparable range I very much disagree. Pretty much any halfway decent artist (say, anyone able to at least caricature recognizable people) is able to produce this kind of imitative art, when/if they are aiming for this type of copying. I've seen nothing coming out of SD that I couldn't expect to find on Deviant…

I'm assuming that you disagree specifically that few artists can essentially create derivative art (i.e avoiding plagiarization but being clearly influenced by artist X or paying homage to artist Y, etc.) as well as top SD models. Well, what about a blind test: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmvqm/an-ai-generated-artwo...

Now, sure, winning just 1 contest isn't going to settle the matter but I think it provides reasonable evidence that SD is heading to elite quality at a rapid pace. Above, the submitter Allen was responsible for directing and cleaning the results so deserves credit. However, Allen is also using a year-old MidJourney model that has likely improved dramatically already.

It seems uncontroversial that even if SD models aren't in the top-tier of imitative/derivative art (or "art from text" as that genre evolves) right now, they will be soon.

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

#334

Post by rpdillon » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 11:31 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #247

rpdillon wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those licenses only carry weight because of copyright.

I was talking about permissive licenses. They have very few conditions: https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib... Their weight is irrelevant. They would carry pretty much as much meaning in the complete absence of copyright. In the world of sensible defaults they wouldn't need to exist at all.

Software licenses exist because copyright enables author to dictate terms. Without that, there are no software licenses. This is where the "without copyright, there is no OSS" comes from.

> Their weight is irrelevant.

I think we're having different conversations. The only thing I'm talking about is whether terms can be legally enforced without copyright.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but it seems to be something like "Permissive licensing is basically like public domain." I don't agree with that line of thinking because of the attribution requirement in permissive licenses, but if that's what you're getting at, I get what you mean.

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

#335

Post by SideQuark » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #331

SideQuark wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the actual Mona Lisa. None of those other images are close to being a reproduction. I can hand paint a Mona Lisa like image that are this removed and be fine.

I can virtually promise you that, if the Mona Lisa were still copyrighted, and you were to try to sell art that you painted that looked like this, the Da Vinci estate would quickly shut you down.

Plenty of cases make this not so certain: Warhol's Prince photo transofrmation (court ruled making a photographers image into clearly Warhol style was transformative enough), Blanch v Koons, Cariou vs Prince (copied photos, minor changes). If you dig through copyright cases on art, these many well be transformative enough. Plenty of other quite similar art has been ruled not infriging.

And one could also try a parody angle - make enough of these of famous art and find some angle about mocking or parodying that art, and again it may well pass copyright muster.

A court could simply rule that these images are clearly not the Mona Lisa, and, if taken as a style, could be ruled transformative, just like the above cases.

The fact is these are transformative, with a different style than the original.

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

#336

Post by wokwokwok » Wed, Feb 01, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

pk-protect-ai wrote: post #327

wokwokwok wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s deeply disingenuous to say the U-Net is not trained on the images because it’s trained on the latent representations. Latents are a compressed representation of the source images that are fully recoverable. If you train a model on a compressed jpg of an image, or on any deterministic transformation of it, you’re still training it on that image. Any suggestion otherwise is only because someone is trying to put so…

bullshit. There is never exact copy of Mona Lisa. All reproductions with any similarities are the same as if human artist learned to paint and do a reproduction of Mona Lisa. No copyright infringement.

Sometimes, you're just wrong.

"Image diffusion models such as DALL-E 2, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion have attracted significant attention due to their ability to generate high-quality synthetic images. In this work, we show that diffusion models memorize individual images from their training data and emit them at generation time. With a generate-and-filter pipeline, we extract over a thousand training examples from state-of-the-art models, ranging from photographs of individual people to trademarked company logos. We also train hundreds of diffusion models in various settings to analyze how different modeling and data decisions affect privacy. Overall, our results show that diffusion models are much less private than prior generative models such as GANs, and that mitigating these vulnerabilities may require new advances in privacy-preserving training. "

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188

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

#337

Post by CrimsonRain » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 7:38 PM UTC

quadcore wrote: post #183

CrimsonRain wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can assure you I absolutely could. Myself to start with - and possibly better than you could :) Only a bodyless, artificial brain cant draw anything, blind.

Citation needed :)