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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

#91

Post by hehdhdhkf »

dns_snek wrote: post #49

> 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. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts…

Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data? I have a paragraph on the Internet that someone read and got an idea - I want my royalties.

These artists complaints are ridiculous, and are being made by people who don’t understand how things work.

If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing.

They either don’t understand how it works or they are just upset that a computer can make art as good as (or better than) they can in a fraction of the time.

All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck, but it would be great if we all could try to understand reality first.

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

#92

Post by matheusmoreira »

rafale wrote: post #35

I hope the law will converge to this: As a human, I don't need a license to look and get inspired by art. But I am not allowed to feed that same data to a machine as a training dataset without proper authorization from the owner.

I hope this technology will become so ubiquitous that laws and "proper authorization" won't matter.

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

#93

Post by matheusmoreira »

troyvit wrote: post #44
Karunamon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the exact opposite. AI, including AGI if we ever get there, cannot be allowed to be strangled in its crib by artificially limiting the information it can learn from in the name of IP maximalism. IP law already goes way too far, the line should be drawn here.

If you want new art you probably want some form of IP. What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines?

Who cares? Seriously. The technology is far more important than their little incentives. Copyright has already destroyed computer freedom and the internet. It can't be allowed to destroy yet another awesome innovation.

I keep programming computers just because I like it. Maybe they'll keep creating too for the same reasons. Maybe they won't. It's irrelevant either way.

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

#94

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

There's a big difference between 'rework my drawing to look like it was painted by Goya' and 'render this drawing in the style of Lisa Frank' or any living visual artist famed for a specific identifiable style as opposed to a particular image.

Comics are one example of an area where individual artists might develop a large body of work in a very distinctive style. You probably know what a Tintin comic (by Belgian artist Hergé) looks like. And lots of Manga artists have very specific and instantly identifiable styles. Individual artistry is a little less obvious with popular western comics because the best-known titles tend to be superhero franchises where the characters/story world are owned by a corporation and individual artists come and go.

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

#95

Post by Animats »

That author makes the point that copyright registration (which you do online with the Library of Congress in the US)[1] is required for copyright enforcement litigation. And, quite possibly, it may be required for DMCA enforcement.

Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA takedown request without a copyright registration, but you can't enforce it in court without one.[2] This raises the question of, if you as a service receive a DMCA takedown request, should you ask the requestor to send proof of copyright registration, and if they don't, ignore the request?

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/registration/

[2] https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright...

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

#96

Post by haswell »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #71
haswell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For sake of argument, let's assume that the six-figure (seven, maybe?) price tag on the hardware was no longer a factor and it was possible to train the models locally, I think the sources of the content everyone is trying to train their local model against would quickly shut down the inundation of traffic they're receiving from the hundreds of thousands of individual computers all trying to build their own "unlimited" model.

The computing requirements enforce the current reality that the training of models will be centralized.

This places a larger ethical burden on those central entities, IMO.

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

#97

Post by dns_snek »

hehdhdhkf wrote: post #91
dns_snek wrote: post #49

> 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. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts…

Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data? I have a paragraph on the Internet that someone read and got an idea - I want my royalties. These artists complaints are ridiculous, and are being made by people who don’t understand how things work. If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing…

Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright?

> All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck

This is not a given. It's up to us and the copyright law. Real original work should be compensated appropriately unless you're proposing that we accelerate deployment of universal basic income and completely abolish copyright law.

I have a feeling you might not like the violent outcome if you effectively strip original creators of their copyright, give corporations the right to effectively generate infinite profit off the backs of their work and tell the creators (and other people whose jobs will be automated away) to pound sand when they ask how they're supposed to pay rent from now on.

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

#98

Post by idiotsecant »

dns_snek wrote: post #84
idiotsecant wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But it's not a person doing it. It's a machine learning model owned and operated by a company. It doesn't have capacity to "think", claiming otherwise is highly dubious since anyone truly "learning" from art wouldn't also replicate watermarks in their "original" work. More importantly, people have limited output capacity and it's why copyright was invented in the first place, i.e. scale. Current trajectory will only…

Your conflating a lot of issues here that just muddy the waters.

First, whether particular features like watermarks end up in the end product or not is not terribly relevant. The particular model implementation that produces that behavior doesn't understand that watermarks are not a desirable part of the transformed end products, whereas humans do. In that way, the AI is certainly a little more 'honest' about what it's doing. It would be trivial to make the AI understand this, and stop reproducing watermarks.

You claim that the model performing this work is somehow different because AI doesn't 'think' about problems, as evidenced by strange artifacts, whereas presumably humans do think about them because of the absence of these artifacts. I'm curious why this makes a difference. If a model was sufficiently advanced that you were unable to differentiate a painting made by a human along certain themes and an AI along certain themes would it be somehow less objectionable? Why or why not? If the end product is of identical quality why should it matter the route you take to get there, in the eyes of the law?

You bring up scale, but scale is also not relevant. Say that I create a school devoted to training legions of artists to produce paintings in the style of a particular artist, while maintaining a transformative aspect. Is this illegal because I'm doing it at scale? No. If that's not illegal, why is it illegal to do it with code? Because it's more efficient? In what other domain is producing creative work more efficiently by transforming existing work illegal?

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

#99

Post by rebuilder »

Animats wrote: post #95

That author makes the point that copyright registration (which you do online with the Library of Congress in the US)[1] is required for copyright enforcement litigation. And, quite possibly, it may be required for DMCA enforcement. Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA ta…

Is this requirement to register specifically a feature of the DMCA? It seems quite surprising if, as the article claims, “people who don’t have registered copyrights cannot enforce their copyrights in court.”

That would mean that the vast majority of artwork posted online is essentially free to exploit in the USA, since I’m sure most people do not routinely register their works with the copyright office before posting them.

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

#100

Post by mcbits »

Animats wrote: post #95

That author makes the point that copyright registration (which you do online with the Library of Congress in the US)[1] is required for copyright enforcement litigation. And, quite possibly, it may be required for DMCA enforcement. Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA ta…

Unless they're legally obligated to show proof of copyright registration for the takedown notice to be a valid, it would be risky to assume they didn't register it just because they didn't show proof.
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