4 ms·

I understand that, but why is using copyrighted images to train a model be any more illegal than studying copyrighted paintings in art school? Copyright doesn't

by cheald 4y ago

I understand that, but why is using copyrighted images to train a model be any more illegal than studying copyrighted paintings in art school? Copyright doesn't prevent consumption or interpretation, simply reproduction.

joe_the_user 4y ago
If a student studied an older master in school and produced a painting inspired by that old master that included a copy of the signature of the old master, this would be more indication of intent to fraud than if they didn't include the signature. Copyright can be fairly flexible in interpreting what constitutes a derivative work. The Getty water is evidence that an image belongs to Getty. If someone produces an image with the watermark and gets sued, they could say "your honor, I know it looks like I copied that image but let's consider the details of how my hypercomplex whatsit work..." and then judge, say a nontechnical person, looks at the defendant and say "no, just no, the court isn't going to look at those details, how could court do that?". Or maybe the court would consider it only if you paid 1000 neutral lawyer-programmers to come up with a judgement, at a cost of millions or billions per case.
- filoleg 4y ago
  What if it was not the copied signature of the old master, but a new one with a similar style and placed in a similar spot on the painting, but with the name of the student instead and looking blurry/a bit different? Because that's what's happening here, and that doesn't sound quite like fraud. Another scenario, what if i create a painting of a river by hand in acrylic and also draw a getty-watermark-looking thing on top using acrylic? As for why, i would put it there as an integral part of the piece, to allude to the fact of how corporations got their hands over even the purest things that have nothing to do with them, with the fake watermark in acrylic symbolizing it. You can make up any other reason, this is just the one i thought of as i was writing this. It wont look exactly like the real getty watermark, it will be acrylic and drawn by hand, so pretty uneven with colors being off and way less detailed. Doesn't feel like fraud to me.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    My argument isn't really whether this is morally fraud. Maybe the device is really being "creative" or maybe it's copying. The question is whether the things supposed originality can be defend in court. What if i create a painting of a river by hand in acrylic and also draw a getty-watermark-looking thing on top using acrylic? As for why, i would put it there as an integral part of the piece, to allude to the fact of how corporations got their hands over even the purest things that have nothing to do with them, with the fake watermark in acrylic symbolizing it. A human artist might well do that and make that defense in court. For all anyone knows, some GPT-3-derived-thing might go through such a thought process also (though it seems unlikely). However, the GPT-3-derived-thing can't testify in court concerning it's intent and that produces problems. And it's difficult for anyone to make this claim for it. Edit: Also, if instead of a single work (of parody), you produced a series of your own stock photos, used the Getty Watermark and invited people to use them for stock photo purposes, then your use of the copyrighted Getty Watermark would no longer fall under the parody exception for fair use.
notahacker 4y ago
Because the copyright holder has granted you the right to look at paintings and hasn't granted you the right to store them on your server to perform the mathematical transformations necessary to facilitate an adaptation-on-demand service. Even if it was plausible to believe the mechanics of how human brains process art was particularly similar to a diffusion model or GAN, I don't see "but human brains are deterministic functions of their inputs too" as being a successful legal argument any time soon. You'd have to throw out rather more of the legal system than just copyright if those arguments start to prevail...
- karmasimida 4y ago
  > Because the copyright holder has granted you the right to look at paintings and hasn't granted you the right to store them on your server to perform the mathematical transformations necessary to facilitate an adaptation-on-demand service. You just described how modern browser cache images. The diffusion model is revolutionary at scale, but doesn't mean it is doing anything drastically different than what is allowed right now, e.g. any AI based image beautifying/denoise filter, just the scale changes everything.
pvaldes 4y ago
A better metaphor would be copying and then claiming that you created the original art. Studying can explain but does not replace the subject of study. Producing a painting based in previous paintings can create further problems. In art is very common that some author review their own work and made several paintings of the same subject. Artists made several attempts to conquer a panting, they draw studios or use different mediums. Photographers reproduce one portrait 20 years later to see how the subject changed. If you insert an IA image in the middle and copyright it, then any posterior painting on the same subject, even by the original author, would became derivative of the IA image that replaced it. This could even go so far as excluding the artists to review their most successful works.
Jevon23 4y ago
I'm not a lawyer and I can't say how existing copyright law applies to this situation, but, how is taking images and feeding them into an ML model different from taking library code and including it in your software? In both cases, you take a series of bytes (the image data / the library source code) that is ultimately crucial to the functioning of your software, combine it with your own original code you wrote (training / compilation), and end up with a new output (the trained model / the binary executable) that is distinct from any of the original sources. If you use a GPL'd library in your software, then it's uncontroversial to say that you have to follow the terms of the GPL. You can't say "well actually, the compiler is just reading your source code and learning what sort of binary it should produce, just like a human learns by studying source code, so I actually don't have to follow your licensing terms". No one would buy that. You clearly used that library, so you have to obey whatever terms come along with it. Why is it fine to ignore the licensing terms for image data you incorporate into your software, but not third-party source code that you incorporate?
- karmasimida 4y ago
  > If you use a GPL'd library in your software, then it's uncontroversial to say that you have to follow the terms of the GPL. You can't say "well actually, the compiler is just reading your source code and learning what sort of binary it should produce, just like a human learns by studying source code, so I actually don't have to follow your licensing terms". No one would buy that. You clearly used that library, so you have to obey whatever terms come along with it. What if I read the code, understand its concepts, and re-implements another library that provide similar functionality without directly linking to the original repository, that is not an infringement, and actually how open source community has always been operating, like MariaDB to MySQL, or any projects that markets themselves as 'open source alternative' of some commercial software. I would argue, the diffusion models are really good, it is possible that they capture the essentials of drawing that they learn no different than a human. Put in another way, it masters the imaging process at fundamental level
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    > What if I read the code, understand its concepts, and re-implements another library that provide similar functionality without directly linking to the original repository, that is not an infringement It might be… which is why famously wine developers don't look at leaked windows code.
sacado2 4y ago
The fact watermarked images are available for free doesn't necessarily mean you can do whatever you want with them. It depends on what the getty licence on watermarked images says exactly. I'm pretty sure they don't include something like "you can use these picture as data in automated processes". They are (I guess) available "for your eyes only".
- kiicia 4y ago
  iirc court already stated that you can crawl available net and use what you find there, it was after that company doing face recognition, wasn't it?

by cheald 4y ago

joe_the_user 4y ago

If a student studied an older master in school and produced a painting inspired by that old master that included a copy of the signature of the old master, this would be more indication of intent to fraud than if they didn't include the signature. Copyright can be fairly flexible in interpreting what constitutes a derivative work. The Getty water is evidence that an image belongs to Getty. If someone produces an image with the watermark and gets sued, they could say "your honor, I know it looks like I copied that image but let's consider the details of how my hypercomplex whatsit work..." and then judge, say a nontechnical person, looks at the defendant and say "no, just no, the court isn't going to look at those details, how could court do that?". Or maybe the court would consider it only if you paid 1000 neutral lawyer-programmers to come up with a judgement, at a cost of millions or billions per case.

filoleg 4y ago
What if it was not the copied signature of the old master, but a new one with a similar style and placed in a similar spot on the painting, but with the name of the student instead and looking blurry/a bit different? Because that's what's happening here, and that doesn't sound quite like fraud. Another scenario, what if i create a painting of a river by hand in acrylic and also draw a getty-watermark-looking thing on top using acrylic? As for why, i would put it there as an integral part of the piece, to allude to the fact of how corporations got their hands over even the purest things that have nothing to do with them, with the fake watermark in acrylic symbolizing it. You can make up any other reason, this is just the one i thought of as i was writing this. It wont look exactly like the real getty watermark, it will be acrylic and drawn by hand, so pretty uneven with colors being off and way less detailed. Doesn't feel like fraud to me.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  My argument isn't really whether this is morally fraud. Maybe the device is really being "creative" or maybe it's copying. The question is whether the things supposed originality can be defend in court. What if i create a painting of a river by hand in acrylic and also draw a getty-watermark-looking thing on top using acrylic? As for why, i would put it there as an integral part of the piece, to allude to the fact of how corporations got their hands over even the purest things that have nothing to do with them, with the fake watermark in acrylic symbolizing it. A human artist might well do that and make that defense in court. For all anyone knows, some GPT-3-derived-thing might go through such a thought process also (though it seems unlikely). However, the GPT-3-derived-thing can't testify in court concerning it's intent and that produces problems. And it's difficult for anyone to make this claim for it. Edit: Also, if instead of a single work (of parody), you produced a series of your own stock photos, used the Getty Watermark and invited people to use them for stock photo purposes, then your use of the copyrighted Getty Watermark would no longer fall under the parody exception for fair use.

notahacker 4y ago

Because the copyright holder has granted you the right to look at paintings and hasn't granted you the right to store them on your server to perform the mathematical transformations necessary to facilitate an adaptation-on-demand service. Even if it was plausible to believe the mechanics of how human brains process art was particularly similar to a diffusion model or GAN, I don't see "but human brains are deterministic functions of their inputs too" as being a successful legal argument any time soon. You'd have to throw out rather more of the legal system than just copyright if those arguments start to prevail...

karmasimida 4y ago
> Because the copyright holder has granted you the right to look at paintings and hasn't granted you the right to store them on your server to perform the mathematical transformations necessary to facilitate an adaptation-on-demand service. You just described how modern browser cache images. The diffusion model is revolutionary at scale, but doesn't mean it is doing anything drastically different than what is allowed right now, e.g. any AI based image beautifying/denoise filter, just the scale changes everything.

pvaldes 4y ago

A better metaphor would be copying and then claiming that you created the original art. Studying can explain but does not replace the subject of study. Producing a painting based in previous paintings can create further problems. In art is very common that some author review their own work and made several paintings of the same subject. Artists made several attempts to conquer a panting, they draw studios or use different mediums. Photographers reproduce one portrait 20 years later to see how the subject changed. If you insert an IA image in the middle and copyright it, then any posterior painting on the same subject, even by the original author, would became derivative of the IA image that replaced it. This could even go so far as excluding the artists to review their most successful works.

Jevon23 4y ago

I'm not a lawyer and I can't say how existing copyright law applies to this situation, but, how is taking images and feeding them into an ML model different from taking library code and including it in your software? In both cases, you take a series of bytes (the image data / the library source code) that is ultimately crucial to the functioning of your software, combine it with your own original code you wrote (training / compilation), and end up with a new output (the trained model / the binary executable) that is distinct from any of the original sources. If you use a GPL'd library in your software, then it's uncontroversial to say that you have to follow the terms of the GPL. You can't say "well actually, the compiler is just reading your source code and learning what sort of binary it should produce, just like a human learns by studying source code, so I actually don't have to follow your licensing terms". No one would buy that. You clearly used that library, so you have to obey whatever terms come along with it. Why is it fine to ignore the licensing terms for image data you incorporate into your software, but not third-party source code that you incorporate?

karmasimida 4y ago
> If you use a GPL'd library in your software, then it's uncontroversial to say that you have to follow the terms of the GPL. You can't say "well actually, the compiler is just reading your source code and learning what sort of binary it should produce, just like a human learns by studying source code, so I actually don't have to follow your licensing terms". No one would buy that. You clearly used that library, so you have to obey whatever terms come along with it. What if I read the code, understand its concepts, and re-implements another library that provide similar functionality without directly linking to the original repository, that is not an infringement, and actually how open source community has always been operating, like MariaDB to MySQL, or any projects that markets themselves as 'open source alternative' of some commercial software. I would argue, the diffusion models are really good, it is possible that they capture the essentials of drawing that they learn no different than a human. Put in another way, it masters the imaging process at fundamental level
- LtWorf 4y ago
  > What if I read the code, understand its concepts, and re-implements another library that provide similar functionality without directly linking to the original repository, that is not an infringement It might be… which is why famously wine developers don't look at leaked windows code.

sacado2 4y ago

The fact watermarked images are available for free doesn't necessarily mean you can do whatever you want with them. It depends on what the getty licence on watermarked images says exactly. I'm pretty sure they don't include something like "you can use these picture as data in automated processes". They are (I guess) available "for your eyes only".

kiicia 4y ago
iirc court already stated that you can crawl available net and use what you find there, it was after that company doing face recognition, wasn't it?