surfacedetail

Oh god no, trust me, I'm an academic. I'd rather read an AI essay than the stuff some of my students write.

Fair use doesn't exist in the UK.

You can only copyright the actual expression of a recipe as a literary work, but the functional aspect, the cake let's say, isn't copyrightable.

I doubt these companies constantly downloading the full training set rather than keeping it in a database somewhere.

Precisely to argue for transient copies, they don't need to keep terabytes of data stored.

Hard to argue keeping a copy of some copyrighted work indefinitely counts as transient.

You're assuming that they're keeping the works indefinitely, which again is not the case.

But that's the issue, they're not serving copyright content to users in the UK because the outputs aren't derivative, the legal question is very narrow, it is about the training of the model.

There will be a separate trade mark question on the outputs, which wasn't part of the request to dismiss the case.

Can you imagine if you had no piracy occurring in the US when users download pirated content from a server in the Philippines and you could only handle the case under the Filipino legal system?

Your hypothetical is about actual distribution and communication to the public of copyright works, this is very different to what is at stake here.

I know, I'm a lawyer. Fair dealing is closed-ended, and the TDM exception doesn't apply to StabilityAI as they're not a research institution, their best defence is that the training didn't take place in the UK, or that any copies were transient.

Reciting common text or common license elements and commentary isn't necessarily copyright infringement.

The fair use excuses here are absolutely weak in Stability's case and this will only end with a licensing deal being made.

There's no fair use in the UK, and this decision is preliminary on whether the case should proceed.

I’m saying; if you’re covering a court case, don’t go off on a tangent and start saying things which are misleading or false with regard to the case.

This adds the caveat "as far as I can tell". That's a caveat that the capability to produce Getty outputs has been removed, it can be tested and amended if new information comes to light.

What people care about is what the court rules.

Courts also rely on experts and expert testimony, the judge here is even citing a law professor's opinion. The idea that judges never rely on legal experts and commentators is strange.

There is, to my knowledge, no mitigation of this that has been implemented, or even conceptualized by either stability or anyone else.

I've tried with newer models, and you can't produce outputs with Getty logos, if you use "getty images" in prompts it won't work. Even if you type "Getty" you don't get the logo, I remember reading a tweet by Emad that any reference to Getty had been removed as of 1.5, but I can't find it anymore, maybe deleted now?

So yes, this is a thing, feel free to try it for yourself.

Emad

Theft has specific meaning in law, and it's reserved for physical property (or unique digital assets and financial instruments like bonds).

Copyright uses infringement, which is not theft: it's non-rivalrous, and it contains a number of exceptions.

The defendants will evidently claim transient copying.

Derivative work has a specific meaning in copyright law, there has to be something in the output, and that's not the case here. Otherwise every single owner of 5 billion images could sue you for your "cat at a cafe" midjourney picture.

Judge Orrick in one of the US cases already called this idea 'nonsense", his words.

I'm finding it amusing that everyone immediately assumes infringement, OpenAI is a company that will not be inviting lawsuits.

We can't assume any licensing behind closed doors, my guess is that OpenAI has an agreement with Getty, take a look at the licensing in this Observer piece, it's been licensed by Getty, this would indicate that Getty are happy with scraping.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/20/ai-art...

Besides, this is not infringement in principle, the AI has been trained to think that high-quality news images have watermarks.

It's more difficult to trademark stuff like style, there are certain rules of what can be trademarked; long story short, non-graphical representations need to be clear, precise, self-contained, easily accessible, intelligible, durable and objective.

Trademark also gives a more limited protection in some ways.

Characters are different, as recognisable characters have copyright on their own (not all characters do). But let's say you're drawing a painting from memory, you may or may not be infringing copyright. The question is about substantial copying.

The Lightning Network? Really?

The UK academic titles are very specific: Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), Reader (short of US tenure), Professor. I can't call myself a lecturer unless I have been appointed to that title.

Law degrees are different as well, there's no direct equivalence. The levels are LLB (minor), practice diploma (sort of JD), LLM (masters), and Phd (graduate school). It's possible to write a PhD in law without having received a law degree, although it is common for law PhDs to at least have finished an LLM.

Sorry to be pedantic about this (I'm an academic), but the fact that he tutors and lectures doesn't make him a lecturer. A law lecturer is someone who has been hired and holds that title. I taught a lot while doing my PhD, and I wouldn't have dared to call myself anything other than a PhD student. If anything, my level of suspicion has gone up.

Agreed, something just doesn't seem right about the story.

I have some serious doubts about this story. Strathclyde Law School does not have Mark Leiser listed as a law lecturer. Searching for "Mark Leiser Strathclyde" produced a page that seems to indicate that he's a PhD student.

If he's not being truthful about this, then I for one would think that he might not be telling the entire truth. Easyjet have replied to this indicating that he might have been disruptive.

Reading this guy's twitter feed also is eye-opening, he comes across as a self-important prick.