Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators

https://petapixel.com/2023/10/31/judge-dismisses-copyright-claims-against-ai-image-generators/

by PaulHoule • 3 years ago

46 140 3 years ago

nnvvhh2• 3 years ago

Current US copyright law is not clearly in a place to view model training as infringement. Courts have a long history of permissiveness in the face of copyright challenges to new tech (e.g. the image search engine cases, Google v. Oracle and smartphones, Sony v. Universal and VCRs) and I predict it will happen again with AI. The cat is out of the bag and judges know that finding training to be infringement of each training example will have a negative impact on a new product category. If training was more obviously infringement then that permissiveness would be harder to sell, but in my opinion it's really difficult to argue that a "copy" of an example has been made during training (aside from the copy made to process the example).

nsagent• 3 years ago

I'm not so sure about this. I'm not saying courts in the US will rule one way or the other, I'm just saying it's certainly not a forgone conclusion that training is fair use. Even if it is, the companies might not have sone their due diligence.

Lots of data they trained on is available for purchase (e.g. artists often sell prints or reproduction rights, the books in books3 are widely available, etc). It's my understanding that companies like Stability and OpenAI did not attempt to determine if the data they trained on was available for purchase and then buy a legally purchased copy for training. That might cause them to run afoul of fair use doctrine in the US (not sure of other jurisdictions).

See these excerpts describing fair use for copying library materials [1] (many of these collections are being released by groups referring to themselves as libraries):

Copying a complete work from the library collection is prohibited unless the work is not available at a “fair price.” This is generally the case when the work is out of print and used copies are not available at a reasonable price. If a work, located within the library’s collection, is available at a reasonable price, the library may reproduce one article or other contribution to a copyrighted collection or periodical issue, or a small part of any other copyrighted work, for example, a chapter from a book. This right to copy does not apply if the library is aware that the copying of a work (available at a fair price) is systematic. For example, if 30 different members of one class are requesting a copy of the same article, the library has reason to believe that the instructor is trying to avoid seeking permission for 30 copies.
The copying, whether performed by the library or whether unsupervised by the library patron, cannot be for a commercial advantage. This means that the library (or a copying service hired by the library) cannot profit from the copying. In addition, the copying for the patron must be done for purposes of private study, scholarship, or research.

[1] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/academic-and-education...

nnvvhh2• 3 years ago

The availability of the copyrighted works is not determinative. Fair use in the US takes (at minimum) four factors into account, listed in the federal copyright statute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107.

That quote from Stanford's library is not discussing fair use doctrine in general, but rather is stating what is permitted in those specific circumstances. There are plenty of instances of fair use where the underlying work used was available at a fair price. That's the whole point of fair use law: some use of a work that is facially infringement escapes liability because the particular use is considered fair.

oneepic• 3 years ago

Current headline: "Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims Against AI Image Generators"

Tail end of the article:

However, the judge allowed Andersen’s complaint that her 16 copyrighted works were used without her authorization to move forward.

I'm not loving this headline.

(edit: stamped comment w/ the current headline to be safe)

for1nner3• 3 years ago

That's a pretty low bar though, no? Everyone just updates their T&Cs and laughs their way to the bank with free training data - the real meat of the claims was what was dismissed.

catapart3• 3 years ago

Yeah; headline leaves out the pretty salient bit that the plaintiffs can amend their claims to be more accurate, which will only make the case more logistically sound. Headline makes it seem like the case is over, when it's not.

for1nner3• 3 years ago

I don't really see a way they can make their claims "more accurate" unless these models decide to open-source - and why would they ever do that?

for1nner3• 3 years ago

Am I wrong that this seems like a not-good precedent for artists/content creators and the future (much less present) of training data?

jstanley• 3 years ago

In what way is it not good? It means the stuff you create is less likely to get you sued, no?

pgeorgi• 3 years ago

If it turns out that passing a data set through PyTorch creates enough distance between the source material and the resulting data set to invalidate copyright protections, it will be interesting to see what happens when somebody does that to AI companies' assets.

With the "edge computing in AI" push (offline processing on phones and the like), we might see soon enough.

catapart3• 3 years ago

Seems like a good table-setting measure. Judge is saying "what you claimed isn't how it works; if you want to amend your claim to say how it actually works (and why that's infringing), you can do that now."

Judge is also letting the 'unauthorized use' charges move ahead.

To me, this feels like the right way to make sure the questions at the heart of the trial are satisfied by the results of the trial. SOP, for sure, but it definitely could have gone the other way, with the judge just throwing it out altogether, so I'm glad this is moving in this direction, instead.

dave333• 3 years ago

As a non lawyer my understanding is that it is no longer necessary to copyright images to be protected as creator of a work, but it seems you need actually to copyright work if you want to sue.

lightedman• 3 years ago

No, you copyright the work if you want to claim all the damages like punitive and such. You can still sue to prevent usage of your work without having formally filed a copyright.

ToucanLoucan5• 3 years ago

Headline is quite a bit more definitive than the actual ruling:

The three artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz — immediately ran into problems as two of them — McKernan and Ortiz — did not register their works with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Two of them got bounced, Anderson remains.

Judge Orrick writes that it is “unclear” as to whether Stable Diffusion holds “compressed copies” of the images and points to the defense’s argument that the training dataset, which contains five billion images, can “not possibly be compressed into an active program.”

Once again, regulation that's needed is complicated by the fact that people in power do not understand how this shit works.

However:

The judge has offered the plaintiffs an opportunity to amend and clarify their theory as to how Stable Diffusion operates its training data.

And:

However, the judge allowed Andersen’s complaint that her 16 copyrighted works were used without her authorization to move forward.

So the case is still developing.

However, this is frustrating:

The problem for the artists is that the training data for these programs is a black box. Outside of LAION, very little is known about what exactly went into training AI image generators but it is widely assumed that the companies did an almighty scrape of images on the internet which included taking copyrighted and copyrightable pictures.

I'm not sure if the publication stated "widely assumed" here because of legal reasons or because the author doesn't understand this either, but the entire crux of Anderson's case here is that if you include the proper prompts, you get comics out of these generators that strongly resemble hers, in both style and content, which are copywritten. That an generator can do that basically requires that a good amount, and I mean a LOT of her comics were pushed into the training data, and not only that, but were tagged explicitly as her work. Given how much of LAION is scraped from social media, this is not surprising.

In order for the generator to know what Sarah Anderson's style looks like, her comics must be in the data set. Period, paragraph.

spywaregorilla5• 3 years ago

It does not contain compressed "copies" of the image. It contains a synthesis of the image.

tiledjinn• 3 years ago

reconcile your view with the case law on john carmack non-literally copying code

ToucanLoucan5• 3 years ago

And the synthesis was created with material that the AI company did not license and did not have permission to use for this purpose.

I have ZERO issue with image generators on their own. They're quite cool technology. The only thing I and tons and tons of other people have requested is they not use images without permission to train them, that's literally it. That's my sole, single, solitary objection and yet every AI interested person, advocate, and company rep will do intellectual back-flips to explain why this is unreasonable.

It's not unreasonable to ask permission before you use something. It just isn't.

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

in both style and content, which are copywritten

The "style" certainly isn't copywritten because you can't copyright a style. Someone creating doodles in her style is absolutely allowed.

ToucanLoucan5• 3 years ago

SomeONE, not someTHING, and "creating" isn't the issue, "monetizing" is.

rvz• 3 years ago

To those who read the head line rather than the article:

However, the judge allowed Andersen’s complaint that her 16 copyrighted works were used without her authorization to move forward.

So there is that and Stability is already having another lawsuit with Getty with obvious watermarked images as well.

sandworm1014• 3 years ago

> He wrote that the sheer size of the LAION database may protect the company because it is “simply not plausible that every training image used to train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable) or that all DeviantArt users’ output images rely upon (theoretically) copyright training images.”

This is where I think the judge misspoke. "Copyrighted" does not mean registered. Copyrights attach at creation and does not require anything of the creator. What the judge is referencing is the fact that registered copyrighted works are given additional protections, notably the award of attorney fees in disputes. But the fact that a work was not registered, what the judge incorrectly describes as "copyrighted", does not mean it is outside copyright. All the same rules apply governing how the material may be used or not used. You just don't get as money when you sue over a non-registered work.

I would hazard that the vast majority of copyrighted works are not registered. Every holiday photo taken is copyrighted. Every word typed on HN is copyrighted. Virtually none are registered. That doesn't mean such things are public domain, free for use by whomever/whatever runs across them online.

nobodyandproud• 3 years ago

This is where I think the judge misspoke. "Copyrighted" does not mean registered. Copyrights attach at creation and does not require anything of the creator. What the judge is referencing is the fact that registered copyrighted works are given additional protections, notably the award of attorney fees in disputes.

Aren’t there visual art in the public domain?

INAL but the judge’s ruling seems technically correct, so what am I missing?

bertil4• 3 years ago

Aren’t there visual art in the public domain?

Yes, photos taken by people working for the government for example, and anything shared with Wikipedia should have a license for free use (typically CC0) [0] That’s an important, valuable part of all images, but a very small segment overall.

The vast majority of images (holiday photos, posts on social media, Deviant Art, etc.) are not in the public domain, even if they are online.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy#:~:....

sidewndr462• 3 years ago

Copyright does at least in theory lapse, depending on the nature of the work. I don't think I've seen any AI companies claiming all their training dataset is pre-copyright however.

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 3 years ago

In what way is training "copying"?

This is just an attempt at a landgrab by idiot copyright maximalists.

bee_rider5• 3 years ago

I don’t really understand the argument here anyway (although, as your typical commenter, I am reading this before actually reading the article).

Every day, I commit a huge number of non-criminal actions. So as long as I have some non-crimes, and I guess it doesn’t even need to be the majority under this standard, I’m fine to commit a bunch of crimes?

gosub100• 3 years ago

No, that is not the precedent set here. A legal claim was brought against the defendant, but (the judge found) that some of the evidence didn't have a specific property (copyright). Also the case was done in civil court, which has different rules and procedures than criminal court. This case is not about what one person did during the day.

SLSMan• 3 years ago

The terminology can be confusing, but "copyrighted" is often used interchangeably with "registered". Copyright in a work exists from the moment it's the work is created, but it's not "copyrighted" in the sense the judge is using until the work is registered with the Copyright Office. Registration is a requirement to sue for infringement. So a work is protected by copyright as soon as it's created, but it needs to be registered before one can sue for infringement. That can be done after the infringement occurs. For example, if a work is created in 2020 and someone infringes on the copyright beginning in 2021, the work can be registered in 2023 and the creator can sue for the past infringement (though not all of the same remedies are available).

The issue here is that the artists are making broad claims that DeviantArt infringed all of their works (by letting them be used as training data), even though they didn't register all of their works. Only some of the artists that are suing registered their works, and they may not have registered all of the works they are suing over. That's what the first sentence in the next paragraph is about: "[E]ven if plaintiffs narrow their allegations to limit them to Output Images that draw upon Training Images based upon copyrighted images..." The judge didn't misspeak here.

tsukikage• 3 years ago

So a work is protected by copyright as soon as it's created, but it needs to be
registered before one can sue for infringement.

It's a little unclear quite what it means for a work to be protected if you don't actually have any recourse when infringement occurs.

sandworm1014• 3 years ago

That is another hair to split, between "registered" at time of infringement and "registered" at time of lawsuit.

You need to register prior to bringing a claim. That isn't a big deal and can be done easily after any alleged infringement. But to get the attorney fees you need to have registered before the infringement occurred, something you cannot fix after you decision to sue.

Then to split hairs yet again, was the work registered at the time it was copied by the AI, or are you suing over infringement that occurred after a late registration? Are you claiming it was registered when the AI was trained on it, or are you claiming registration during the work's subsequent use by the AI after the training process? Maybe you can get attorney fees despite late registration if you can prove ongoing infringement after the pre-registration training process.

alistairSH2• 3 years ago

This might be a dumb question... I decide to try my hand at art. So, I take courses at the local college, where I'm exposed to copyrighted art. Anything I produce will, in some small way, be based on the totality of my life experience, including any copyrighted material I've encountered along the way?

How is training an AI any different than "training" a human? In the human case, isn't any court case really based on the output (my art looks like previous work), not the input (I saw some art somewhere)?

I feel like I'm missing something (obv IANAL).

wredue9• 3 years ago

You are actually the one doing something though.

If a line appears on the page, it’s because that’s your intent. For an AI, when a line appears, that is always someone else’s intent.

AI can only copy.

I mean. Do we really need to go over all the reason why an art scanner that copies art and maybe paints it differently is fundamentally not the same as a human learning to create art?

gattilorenz2• 3 years ago

AI can only copy.

That's just plain wrong. AI can generate things that are not in the training set, hence it can not "only copy" (on the other hand, I could understand trying to argue that AI can only create pastiche, or that it "uses" training examples in a fundamentally different way than we do).

judge20204• 3 years ago

If we could copyright every stroke in our paintings or every line in our artwork, nobody would be able to make anything new. Humans copy painting techniques, photography tricks, shot setups (angles, margins, etc) and make new pieces all the time that advance the world of art.

anon2914• 3 years ago

AI does not copy

Diffusion models are exposed to a blank canvas and then instructed to produce something. At no point are they looking into a database. They simply produce an image that will score highly in their aesthetic estimations.

officialchicken• 3 years ago

I feel like I'm missing something (obv IANAL).

The human did it.

BestGuess9• 3 years ago

That doesn't make any sense to me as a line, as the human set up the machine to generate some way to generate images. The human still did "it", the "it" is just one step removed, and we've tons of things where some "it" is one step removed from the human where your line doesn't apply in law or people's concepts.

coldpie6• 3 years ago

It's not a dumb question at all, that is one of the most central questions in this whole debate. I think there's a reasonable argument that humans add their own "stamp" on every artistic output (that isn't a direct 1:1 copy) which would make it a unique work even if closely inspired by another artist. A machine would not add its own "stamp," it's purely a mechanical derivation of others' works.

I don't know where I fall on the issue myself, I think there's many good arguments on both side, both in pure IP terms and economic ethics terms.

TeMPOraL• 3 years ago

The thing with generative models is, it's hard to make them output anything from their training set verbatim. I don't know of a single case of that succeeding with SD or DALL-E or others. So it's not necessarily false to say that the models too always add their own "stamp".

SkyBelow2• 3 years ago

Can a different person copy the style of copyrighted work so closely that it violates the copyright of the original artist? I feel like this is a question that must be answered before we add AI into the discussion.

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 3 years ago

So your argument boils down to the idea that humans impart a magical, invisible mark on their own artworks, and though no one can measure this mark nor see it, the fact that it exists within your own imagination exempts them from overburdensome rules that you would mercilessly apply to one of the most exciting innovations of not only the 21st century, but even the 20th century before it?

wavemode• 3 years ago

I think the detail that makes it tricky is that, in theory, an AI could just have a single neuron and simply output verbatim the image it was trained on. In which case we obviously wouldn't say that the image it outputs is a new work and freed from copyright.

So clearly there is some threshold of "transformativeness" which an AI must possess in order to be trained on one image and produce a different one that is considered a new work. Where exactly that threshold lies is difficult to define from a legal perspective.

brookst6• 3 years ago

That sounds a lot like music copyright, which also has a subjective threshold. It’s kind of a mess but it’s more or less worked for a century. Certainly better than any formula for rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic similarity would.

marcinzm2• 3 years ago

You can argue that artists given an implicit license for people to copy art into their own brains while viewing it. The same way websites give an implicit license for a browser to copy the page to display it. That does not necessarily mean they given an implicit license for someone else to copy the work as part of AI training.

Separate to that is the issue of producing new works that are too similar to existing works you've seen. If you do that as a human then you're liable for copyright infringement.

brookst6• 3 years ago

I think you’re proposing two big expansions to copyright: 1) that it covers what an observer can do, and 2) that everything is illegal unless explicitly made legal.

I don’t think I want to live in that world.

dragonwriter5• 3 years ago

You can argue that artists given an implicit license for people to copy art into their own brains while viewing it.

You can, but it would be more correct to argue that memories in a human brain are not copies under the law at all, and so need no license (or fair use analysis) in the first place. This has different results than an implicit license argument, especially when there is an explicit denial of license or an explicit license which is also explicitly bounded to exclude any rights not explicitly licensed.

judge20204• 3 years ago

This is the crux of the issue. If courts find that AI draws like a human (at least for the purposes of copyright law), then you can only claim it infringed upon your work if it actually looks like your work was de-facto "traced"/copied by the AI and the output image only has small imperfections that don't qualify for fair use.

brookst6• 3 years ago

Copyright law does not care about how an infringing work was produced. It can be traced, or memorized and recreated, or described to a confederate over the phone, or whatever. It is only the actual work that is judged as infringing or not.

bertil4• 3 years ago

You are not missing anything: you are asking the key question in that process. We don’t have an answer.

As a society, we agree that you, a human, copying art you’ve seen is original (or at least derivative enough that it warrants a new copyright).

We agree that a photocopy machine, or rather a human operating one, is copying art in a way that is not creative enough to warrant a copyright — so the human goes to jail.

As a society, we have not agreed upon how transformative a “work” from a generative AI has to be to count as original, or even if it can. A recent decision claimed that no machine work without human effort would count — ignoring the effort to find good prompts, pick an image and edit it further. An AI is different because no much was “trained” to make art before AIs: some animals were (elephants famously), and who owns their work is tricky — there’s a case of a photo, a selfie actually, taken by a macaque that is really interesting in that regard.

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

My recommendation would be to have a similar system to what we have for music (and I think plays) where there are two or three “authors”: the person who wrote the score, optionally the person who wrote the lyrics, and the interpret: the singer. It gets really fun when you have orchestras, animals involved in making music, or sound-sampling like in RnB.

We could have original human authors and AI adaptors, each paid based on use. If I like your work, I could commission OpenAI to make “a portrait in the style of alistairSH” based on your DeviantArt work, but of my mother (whom you’ve never met), using photos that I’ve uploaded of her. I can pay OpenAI, who would pay you. Style vs. theme could be separated with current AI technology, although that could get just as complicated as every intellectual property process very fast.

alistairSH2• 3 years ago

If I build a Rube Goldberg painting machine and somebody else "pulls the trigger" to start the machine, who owns the output? Me or the other person? In the case of today's AI models, I could see arguing that the creator of the AI or the creator of the prompt have some rights to a specific output, but not the AI itself.

The monkey case seems fairly cut-and-dry to me - the monkey didn't steal the camera (as often reported) - the photographer engineered a situation to get the result (he set up the camera, the tripod, and held onto the tripod so the monkey wouldn't steal the whole rig). It's his art. If the monkey actually stole the camera, then it's nobody's art - just a random occurrence.

If an artist orchestrates a group of humans to create art, the art belongs to the artist, not the group (as far as I know - I'd love to hear otherwise).

I guess for me, given today's technology, I don't see an "AI" as any different than a Rube Goldberg machine hurling paint at a wall. A human had to create the AI and a human had to prompt the AI, one or both of them own the art. And in all cases, the art is always based on something the human saw previously. No art exists in a vacuum.

And I agree that a system like music rights might be appropriate. The AI author, the AI prompter, and probably anybody involved in the training data, all have some right to the output. Then the question is what % to each, but that's solvable.

wanderingstan2• 3 years ago

Excellent point regarding the famous Monkey selfie, which I think points to the emerging issue of biological vs artificial agents.

It presents a sort of mirrored view of the GenAI issue: The human photographer does not get credit because the monkey is deemed to be the "agent of intent" rather than him, presumably because it's a living thing. If a photograph was triggered instead by a human tossing a rock onto the shutter, no one would claim that the rock now holds the copyright!

Interesting thought experiment to replace the monkey with other "organic agents" and some method for them to trigger a photo: A squirrel? A lizard? A cockroach? A slime mold? At what point is the organism so "simple" that you say it was just part of the system/mechanism?

Then on the artificial side, to replace the monkey with different mechanisms (as was your point): A photocopier seems quite different to a GenAI model. At what point does the human who set up the situation stop being the "agent"?

Relevant concept of the Intentional Stance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance

EDIT: Or at the far end of the spectrum, what about "art" that is made from DNA activity?! Does the copyright belong to the DNA? https://www.labiotech.eu/trends-news/gene-craft-laurie-ramse...

BestGuess9• 3 years ago

Yeah, I am equally confused and I fear the law is going to royally bungle this one and we'll be stuck with something really stupid for some arbitrary number of decades or generations.

It just seems obvious to me that "human made thing to transform some set of things into a composite+transformation of those things" is fair use if fair use is to make any sense at all. Since analogously, like you said, in the same way you are taking your experience including experience of copyrighted stuff as a set of things you are drawing upon producing something of your own. All art is derivative.

It makes zero sense to me at all that it's suddenly a problem that art is derived if, instead of artist directly painting something, artist sets up some device that paints something. In both cases "human takes inputs and produces something unique" (not a copy, not a scanner, in case that was not clear from context).

Unless I'm missing something too, but based on what I see so far I just feel like I'm from mars and don't belong here.

coldpie6• 3 years ago

It makes zero sense to me at all that it's suddenly a problem that art is derived if, instead of artist directly painting something, artist sets up some device that paints something.

I think a big difference in how this tech makes people feel is the amount of effort required. It's a problem we see with technology in other areas, too: it's not (much of) a problem if a cop sits outside a suspect's house for a few hours to monitor their behavior. Most people think it would be a problem if the cops pointed a camera at the house 24/7 for months. Pretty much everyone agrees canvassing society with cameras and creating a public space surveillance panopticon is bad. Where's the line?

Similarly, if some artists spend years learning the craft and mimicking a couple of styles with a relatively small output, it's not a huge problem. The scope is small. But if everyone on earth can do it to anyone on earth at massive scale just by typing "in the style of ..." to an AI, does that start to be a problem?

anon2914• 3 years ago

You're not missing anything. When humans do this it's fair use.

The question is... Is fair use an exclusively human right? For example, we have many rights that do not extend to our possessions. Animals have no protected right to life or liberty. The human rights enjoyed by their owner do not flow to them.

Similarly, just because a human has a right to fair use, do AIs?

belorn5• 3 years ago

The difference in training an AI compared to training a human is that an AI is not a human. Law makes differences between humans and non-humans all the time. AI drivers vs human drivers is a prime example.

If the question is in how biologically we learn compared to and AI, the answer is that humans don't learn by calculating math in order to determine how pixels relate to each other. Humans uses chemical signals between neurons and neuron activiation among other things in order to approximate the concept of what we consider to be learning.

I find a similar and equal important question when asking whats the difference between an AI learning and a human learning, is to ask whats the difference when a computer remembers information by storing it on a file compared to a human remembering information by storing it in long term memory.

RyanAdamas2• 3 years ago

Copyright is new age nonsense that denies the chain of influence and inspiration that exists between all people. If you can create something sell it. If it can be easily recreated (or stored digitally) then it isn't yours.

Bits are not a bug.

CaptainFever3• 3 years ago

And for funding models without copyright, many exist. A few examples are crowdfunding, patronage, commissions and live shows.

themaninthedark• 3 years ago

That doesn't hold though, especially the part about stored digitally as then every movie and TV show that is streamed would no longer be copyrighted.

As for easily recreated, it is not hard for anyone to make a wooden block and then use it to make prints but if you made a wooden block print of Campbells soup cans you would probably face a copyright claim from Andy Warhol depending on the "look" of the print.

alexwebb22• 3 years ago

If we go that route, then doesn't that remove almost all financial incentive to produce new content that could be digitally stored / copied / recreated?

Because as soon as you create it and try to sell it for $1, someone else will recreate it instantly and put it up for $0.50, and so on until the value of all non-physical works is effectively $0 the moment after creation.

Feels like that would result in way less human art being made.

RyanAdamas2• 3 years ago

If you create a painting someone else reproduces instantly with ease then it would imply the quality was not high enough to command the price. If incentive falls then supply would fall and either find a new equilibrium price or demand would remain and prices would rise.

Seems more like quality would matter. Hard copies would matter; perhaps the disc you issue your media on is rated to last 100 years, whereas someone's digital copy can be deleted with a keystroke.

CaptainFever3• 3 years ago

The copies are non-scarce, but the production effort is indeed scarce. That's why alternatives to copyright tend to focus more on funding projects before they are released, such as patronage, commissions and public funding [1]. There's also the comically named "hostage funding" where you have a finished project, but you only release it after a certain funding goal is met.

It's worth noting that copyright is rather destructive since it impairs people from building and innovating on previous works [2], so any benefits need to be weighed against that.

[1] https://youtu.be/mnnYCJNhw7w?si=UzmBasgylpxomUAt

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

This is really good news, I support artists but these short sighted individuals if successful in these claims will just build a world that harms artists as these tools wont cease to exist they'll just be put behind the paywalls of some of the richest companies in the world which then will be able to change what they want.

Like look how expensive AutoCAD is, why wouldn't Adobe charge that sort of money or more to access image gen if them and 2 other companies max can possibly provide it.

Sorry but at least with open models we all can benefit, you download it once and its FREE FOREVER you only pay for power used. It's petty and short sighted to try and take that away under the guise of "ethics".

belorn5• 3 years ago

"Judge Orrick writes that it is “unclear” as to whether Stable Diffusion holds “compressed copies” of the images and points to the defense’s argument that the training dataset, which contains five billion images, can “not possibly be compressed into an active program.”"

Five billion images in compressed lossy format can easily fit into an active program. The only variable is quality. Five billion images in the original format and quality is a different matter, but then that requirement for copyrightable would be drastically insufficient.

bensecure• 3 years ago

Assuming stable diffusion is ten gigabytes, that's 2 bytes per image. 2 bytes would be too small for a short textual description of the image, let alone a scaled copy of the image.

belorn5• 3 years ago

Assuming they don't need to use all Five billion images, the bytes per image will be larger. They can also use composites and filters to remove duplicates and images similar enough, or generative series.

One do not need 2 bytes per images if one million of images are blank, even if they are uniquely of different sizes. The amount of bytes to represent one million blank images in code is very few. One only need to store the unique aspects of the images, and if one compresses the images then the range of uniqueness drops based on the quality required.

Very unique images will naturally have larger footprint, based on the quality that one want to retain.

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