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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

#71

Post by matheusmoreira »

haswell wrote: post #19
scotty79 wrote: post #2

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. This is incredibly disheartening. Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrest…

> Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrestricted without dealing with lawyer nonsense. These are orthogonal issues at this point. The one concern I do have is that the “lawyer nonsense” (read: AI companies playing fast and loose with current laws) will stack the regulatory deck against AI technology unnecessarily - essentially because o…

There should be no "AI companies" in the first place. This stuff should be running on our own computers. That way they cannot set any stupid limits on it.

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

#72

Post by usrbinbash »

antiterra wrote: post #57
aliqot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are all these self trained artists who learned their craft in a bubble, devoid of outside influence from other artists? Is it because there's a better paintbrush now, or is it because that paintbrush is not the 'real' way? This reminds me of the backlash against the wacom community on deviantart in the early days.

A computer program is not a person, so the argument that stable diffusion does what a person does is of limited relevance.

Is it?

The model learns concepts from images, not the images itself. It has developed general solutions explaining light, colors, composition, objects and their relation to one another, facial features and too many more concepts to even begin enumerating them.

How is this different from a human studying art, literature, music, etc. to learn concepts and then apply them in creating new pictures, novels or songs?

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

#73

Post by matheusmoreira »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #14
adamsmith143 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think creating art in the style of an artist is well covered by Fair Use.

Make a mouse cartoon in the style of Disney and tell me how well that goes down.

Here you go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuphead

> The game's creators, brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, took inspiration from the rubber hose style of the golden age of American animation and the surrealist qualities of works of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Fleischer Studios, Warner Bros. Cartoons, MGM Cartoon Studio and Walter Lantz Productions.

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

#74

Post by smoldesu »

dns_snek wrote: post #65
smoldesu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, a lot of these artists opted-in the moment they uploaded their art to the internet. Once you do that, much like uploading your source code or compiled binary, it's hard to reverse the consequences. All that really happened is that the consequences changed, and a lot of people weren't prepared for it. Yeah, it's disheartening. There's also no good way to fix it; the cost of storing copies of their art i…

> Artists will have to internalize what software developers realized decades ago; creating takes work, and copying is free. This is very dismissive, the scale is what makes the difference. You can get away with pirating all types of content for personal use. AI companies are essentially trying to legalize that, but in reverse - taking from small creators to enrich the shareholders of their billion dollar corporations…

Distinguishing between personal use and commercial use doesn't really work though. It lets you sue certain parties into the ground, for all the good it does you, but it doesn't stop people from deriving and profiting from your work. Probably more than half the Fortune 500 companies are in brazen violation of the GPL, does that stop them from abusing it and profiting from it? Not in the slightest.

Power ultimately belongs to whoever can wield it with the least friction. It's not fair or right, but it's the way they play in the business world.

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

#75

Post by kmeisthax »

>The complaint includes a section attempting to explain how Stable Diffusion works. It 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 output is just a mash-up of the training data.

I've seen the collage tool argument several times, and I don't agree with it. But I can understand why people believe it.

You see, there's a very large number of people who use AI art generators as a tracing tool. Like, to the point where someone who has never touched one might believe that it literally just photobashes existing images together.

The reality is that there's three ways to use art generators:

- You can tell it to generate an image with a non-copyright-infringing prompt. i.e. "a dog police officer holding a gun"

- You can ask it to replicate an existing style, by adding keywords like "in the style of "

- You can modify an existing image. This is in lieu of the random seed image that is normally provided to the AI.

That last one is confusing, because it makes people think that the AI itself is infringing when it's only the person using it. But I could see the courts deciding that letting someone chuck an image into the model gives you liability, especially with all of the "you have full commercial rights to everything you generate" messaging people keep slapping onto these.

Style prompting is one of those things that's also legally questionable, though for different reasons. As about 40,000 AI art generator users have shouted at me over the past year, you cannot copyright a style. But at the same time, producing "new" art that's substantially similar to copyrighted art is still illegal. So, say, "a man on a motorcycle in the style of Banksy" might be OK, but "girl holding a balloon in the style of Banksy" might not be. The latter is basically asking the AI to regurgitate an existing image, or trace over something it's already seen.

I think a better argument would be that, by training the AI to understand style prompts, Stability AI is inducing users to infringe upon other people's copyright.

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

#76

Post by simiones »

jerf wrote: post #50
quitit wrote: post #4

Interestingly it shows the tenuous nature of the plaintiffs case, even before getting into the plaintiff's large errors. Since reasonably simplified information about SD is available and/or the plaintiff could have involved an expert to review his claims - it does raise a question if the function of the lawsuit is more about rattling chains rather than the merits of their argument. I.E. A deliberate ploy to extract a…

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…

I think it's not going to be that hard to argue that the company is infringing the copyright of those whose images they are using. Especially once the judge is show how similar the output of SD can be to a particular artist's images with the right prompts (proving that SD has memorized a significant amount of those images).

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

#77

Post by ben_w »

sebstefan wrote: post #37

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.

I don't.

Information comes with many different rights: copy-right is the right to make copies; "moral rights" were mentioned in a few of my UK job contracts and that's "the right to be identified as the author of a work"; database rights are for collections of statements of fact that are not eligible for copyright but which were deemed to be worth protecting anyway for much the same reasons.

Even if copyright is totally eliminated from law by the mere existence of these AI[0], we may well retain the aforementioned "moral rights". And even if it is totally legal, there's also a strong possibility of it being considered gauche to use an AI trained on the works of those that don't like this.

[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...

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

#78

Post by angst_ridden »

idiotsecant wrote: post #69
dns_snek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do find it disheartening that it's opt-out instead of opt-in This is the crux of the issue for me. It's a different set of rules for AI companies than everyone else. If I started selling pirated copies of Nintendo games they would send an army of lawyers after me and this "opt-out" reasoning would not be a valid defense in court. These AI companies are trying to get away with stealing art and other content with a…

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…

I was sued back in the Palm Pilot days for writing a game that involved moving blocks. The company that owned Palm Pilot rights to Tetris® claimed I was violating their trademark, which was clearly frivolous and incorrect. But I was just a dumb guy who had coded an original game, and they were a company with lawyers on retainer.

It doesn't matter what the law says or what is "right." It comes down to who has the power and who doesn't.

(The other difference between what humans do and what AIs do is a matter of scale. A human imitates by spending many hours to duplicate a work of art. An AI can churn out millions in a second. That's a separate issue, though.)

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

#79

Post by simiones »

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 real function for a certain input. It is much much closer to "a giant archive of compressed images being used to interpolate between them" (though it's not that) than it is to a "superhumanly talented artist".

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

#80

Post by anigbrowl »

Great write-up. SD's removing the ability to imitate styles will probably go a long way to quell objections, though it will be interesting to see if there's a future legal split over the styles of living and dead artists. I don't imagine that anyone would object to 'autoseurat' for example.

I can see see a future dispute arising over outpainting (beginning with an existing copyrighted work) but there infringement and identity of the infringer (the user, not the toolmaker) is more clear.

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