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Available for free online is not a valid justification for copying under copyright law, though, right? You can’t distribute something just because you can see i

by dahart 4y ago

Available for free online is not a valid justification for copying under copyright law, though, right? You can’t distribute something just because you can see it. True for museums and magazines as it is for online content. > They don’t have the right to not allow people to learn from it, that’s just never been a part of copyright. Yeah this is true. Stable Diffusion and other neural networks are not “learning” from it they way humans do though, it’s remembering and remixing and interpolating pixels (fixed expression), which is a part of copyright. BTW compensation is not a very accurate summary of this problem. Machines that borrow someone’s style and copies and remixes without attribution is inherently problematic far beyond artists who live off selling their art, it dilutes both creativity and credit, in addition to undermining people who have to work much harder than the computer to produce images. These AI completely depend on being given human-created art to begin with, and the companies that are making them and using them are already making handsome profits, so it’s reasonable to expect some kind of return in addition to proper credit.

Supermancho 4y ago
>> Why do people think they need to be compensated for something they put up online for free? > Available for free online is not a valid justification for copying under copyright law, though, right? Legal and attribution and licensed are all terms that are usually involved, but the core assertion is more or less correct. eg Images on billboards are protected by copyright in a similar manner. Something displayed on a website does not invalidate the copyright of the author or indemnify the owner of the site (or downstream users) from licensing conditions.
pksebben 4y ago
it's not remembering pixels. for it to do that, it would have to have the pixels stored somewhere. It does not. The laion 5b dataset is in the neighborhood of 220TB. (1) That is how much storage space you need to remember the pixels. The stable diffusion 1.5 checkpoint is 7gb. (2) 1 https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/blob/main/dataset_examples/laion5B.md https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/blob/main/dataset_exa... 2 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/tree/main https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/tree/m...
- dahart 4y ago
  It is effectively remembering pixels, and we can prove it because it can regenerate some of the training images verbatim, close enough to violate copyright law. It doesn’t matter that it’s compressed.
- temp512345 4y ago
  It is exactly remembering the pixels. Just not all of them and it obviously fills in gaps (more hair as mentioned in a another post). You can consider the way it stores those pixels as a lossy compression format. If I copy a music sample but I store a compressed version of it (mp3 for example) you will not find the original bits in my database at all. I am still violating copyright.
  - pksebben 4y ago
    But it's really not, though. It's remembering something related to the pixels, yeah, but that's like remembering the shape a line can take or the color of the sky. To extend your musical analogy, it's remembering that many songs are in 4/4 time, and that major chords sound appealing. Also, were you to compress anything, an mp3 or a picture, in a lossy fashion, to that degree of compression (~10^-5), you would no longer have anything resembling the original. The audio would be glitchy noise, and the image would be a scattering of apparently random pixels a few pixels wide. Here's the thing - I empathize that this is disruptive in a very similar fashion to a tool that does store compressed copies of the work in question. It is capable of doing the same kind of damage. There's a conversation to be had there - but it's just not compression. That's not how the thing works.
    - dahart 4y ago
      In the case of an overfit image, which is the thing Stable Diffusion is being sued over, it is just compression, literally. The image data is stored in the network weights, and the image can be reconstructed. You’re drawing a distinction without a difference.
      - 4y ago

by dahart 4y ago

Supermancho 4y ago

>> Why do people think they need to be compensated for something they put up online for free? > Available for free online is not a valid justification for copying under copyright law, though, right? Legal and attribution and licensed are all terms that are usually involved, but the core assertion is more or less correct. eg Images on billboards are protected by copyright in a similar manner. Something displayed on a website does not invalidate the copyright of the author or indemnify the owner of the site (or downstream users) from licensing conditions.

pksebben 4y ago

it's not remembering pixels. for it to do that, it would have to have the pixels stored somewhere. It does not. The laion 5b dataset is in the neighborhood of 220TB. (1) That is how much storage space you need to remember the pixels. The stable diffusion 1.5 checkpoint is 7gb. (2) 1 https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/blob/main/dataset_examples/laion5B.md https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/blob/main/dataset_exa... 2 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/tree/main https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/tree/m...

dahart 4y ago
It is effectively remembering pixels, and we can prove it because it can regenerate some of the training images verbatim, close enough to violate copyright law. It doesn’t matter that it’s compressed.
temp512345 4y ago
It is exactly remembering the pixels. Just not all of them and it obviously fills in gaps (more hair as mentioned in a another post). You can consider the way it stores those pixels as a lossy compression format. If I copy a music sample but I store a compressed version of it (mp3 for example) you will not find the original bits in my database at all. I am still violating copyright.
- pksebben 4y ago
  But it's really not, though. It's remembering something related to the pixels, yeah, but that's like remembering the shape a line can take or the color of the sky. To extend your musical analogy, it's remembering that many songs are in 4/4 time, and that major chords sound appealing. Also, were you to compress anything, an mp3 or a picture, in a lossy fashion, to that degree of compression (~10^-5), you would no longer have anything resembling the original. The audio would be glitchy noise, and the image would be a scattering of apparently random pixels a few pixels wide. Here's the thing - I empathize that this is disruptive in a very similar fashion to a tool that does store compressed copies of the work in question. It is capable of doing the same kind of damage. There's a conversation to be had there - but it's just not compression. That's not how the thing works.
  - dahart 4y ago
    In the case of an overfit image, which is the thing Stable Diffusion is being sued over, it is just compression, literally. The image data is stored in the network weights, and the image can be reconstructed. You’re drawing a distinction without a difference.
    - 4y ago