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An artist fights Midjourney

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#61

Post by stubish »

coolhand2120 wrote: post #12

If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool. If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Would…

You are arguing that Spotify should not pay royalties or license fees for songs, because it is the user might break the law by playing an unlicensed song.

Oh, wait. It isn't the user. Spotify and Midjourney are actually the guilty party in this scenario, for distributing copyrighted works and probably for storing them without permission in the first place.

Midjourney may be a tool, but it is a tool containing a large body of copyrighted and unlicensed images, including trademarks, and even illegal content. And that is what the court cases are going to be about.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#62

Post by cycomanic »

pylua wrote: post #55
cycomanic wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. Especially not to sell it after (or sell a service that paints other images).

Does us law prohibit selling machines or services that potentially can perform copyright infringement?

The NN has copyright material stored (maybe in compressed form) inside of it. That's quite literally the definition of copying, and if you do that without licence copyright infringement.

Note how software licences typically give you the licence to make a copy for running the program? That's because the act of copying the program from the medium (cd, USB stick, HDD...) is considered copying.

I really don't understand what's so difficult to grasp about this. And yes it is illegal to sell equipment whose purpose is circumventing copyright protections.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#63

Post by jdiff »

Glyptodon wrote: post #18
kingkawn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they’re making money producing images of IP then…

So if someone sketches Batman do you sue Bic?

Prompters aren't artists, and neither are image generators. The corporations that create these generators are responsible for the content they illicitly fed into them that they are now spewing out.

If you sell me an endless coloring book that occasionally spits out copyrighted content, that's on you.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#64

Post by stubish »

everforward wrote: post #11
vunderba wrote: post #5

I'm not sure this really qualifies as anything new. It's been well known for a long time that many generative AI models are capable of reconstructing copyrighted works (copilot, SD, etc.) from their original training data with nearly 100% fidelity, but until we have a definitive legal ruling it doesn't really matter.

Somewhat unrelated, but I wonder if it makes a legal difference if the AI acts like a browser and goes out, finds and image and downloads it. Basically the AI doesn't have a copyrighted image in its data set, but it will go grab YouTube screenshots or images from Google Images or something.

It would still be distributing copyrighted work, even if it doesn't store a copy at any stage. It would go the way of Napster.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#65

Post by stubish »

thrill wrote: post #41
stubish wrote: post #26

Quite similar to the New York Times lawsuit. If you can reproduce an original work, then use of the source material was obviously not transformative, and not covered under fair use. These systems can currently function like a lossy compression algorithm. This is going to be a mess until higher courts in the US or Europe make some rulings. Personally, I think they are going to favor the copyright holders. A few billio…

It's perfectly legal to paint a copy of another image.

It is not perfectly legal to have a machine paint a copy of another image. And in either case, you can't sell the work without ending up in court.

https://petapixel.com/2022/12/08/photographer-loses-plagaris... is one of the more recent applicable cases here, where the original artist failed to uphold their claim, which surprised most people.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#66

Post by felipeerias »

everforward wrote: post #11
vunderba wrote: post #5

I'm not sure this really qualifies as anything new. It's been well known for a long time that many generative AI models are capable of reconstructing copyrighted works (copilot, SD, etc.) from their original training data with nearly 100% fidelity, but until we have a definitive legal ruling it doesn't really matter.

Somewhat unrelated, but I wonder if it makes a legal difference if the AI acts like a browser and goes out, finds and image and downloads it. Basically the AI doesn't have a copyrighted image in its data set, but it will go grab YouTube screenshots or images from Google Images or something.

Midjourney claims that you own all of the images it creates for you.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#67

Post by cycomanic »

pylua wrote: post #30
felipeerias wrote: post #24

They know exactly what they are doing: “If You knowingly infringe someone else’s intellectual property, and that costs us money, we’re going to come find You and collect that money from You. We might also do other stuff, like try to get a court to make You pay our legal fees. Don’t do it.” https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service

Seems like you could easily add a couple of adjectives / adverbs to make a completely new scene from the movie and it may be considered fair use?

It's amazing to read what people think is fair use. Have a read of the wikpedia article, it's definitely not as straight forward as adding a slight variation and then I'm good.

If that was the case all of the following would be fair use (hint they typically are not).

- making a movie from a book (I mean it's a pretty big variation) - making a sequel/prequel to a book, movie using the characters of the book - making new comic stories using Mickey Mouse/Batman/Superman... - Making merchandise using redrawn characters from comic books... ...

Also it's important to note that one of the important aspects to judge fair use is commercial interest, i.e. what is allowed for an individual privately, might very well be copyright infringement for a company (like Midjourney) who sells a commercial product.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#68

Post by felipeerias »

stubish wrote: post #26

Quite similar to the New York Times lawsuit. If you can reproduce an original work, then use of the source material was obviously not transformative, and not covered under fair use. These systems can currently function like a lossy compression algorithm. This is going to be a mess until higher courts in the US or Europe make some rulings. Personally, I think they are going to favor the copyright holders. A few billio…

The main selling point of Midjourney is that you own the images that it produces for you.

If that is not the case, if Midjourney's output can not be copyrighted, that might destroy its business model.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#69

Post by boolemancer »

snickerbockers wrote: post #35
coolhand2120 wrote: post #12

If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool. If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Would…

> If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to. > In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke t…

> > If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does! > > in order for that analogy to even remotely be applicable, midjourney would have to be a program you run on your own computer and not a service running on midjourney's computers that does what you ask it to.

So your argument is that the tool running remotely as a service somehow makes it different from one running on your local computer?

So if someone copies the contents of a novel into Google Docs, Google is liable for their copyright infringement, but if they paste it into Word running on their computer, all of the liability is on them?

At what point does the liability shift? What if all of the functionality is implemented in JavaScript in the browser, rather than running on someone else's server?

What if they run all but the last layer of the model on the server, then finish the computation locally?

I don't think the situation is nearly as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#70

Post by pylua »

cycomanic wrote: post #67
pylua wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you could easily add a couple of adjectives / adverbs to make a completely new scene from the movie and it may be considered fair use?

It's amazing to read what people think is fair use. Have a read of the wikpedia article, it's definitely not as straight forward as adding a slight variation and then I'm good. If that was the case all of the following would be fair use (hint they typically are not). - making a movie from a book (I mean it's a pretty big variation) - making a sequel/prequel to a book, movie using the characters of the book - making n…

I am looking at it from the perspective of someone using mid journey to generate the image, not the company itself.

What if I want to use midjourney to reimagine a new scene between to scenes to prove whatever social issue I want to blog about. I then post the blog with the image.

Would there be a difference if I hand drew it? Is me describing the movie in the context of my social issue considered copyright infringement because it is a compressed memory?

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