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There's a missing step in this story it feels. He asked for them to be deleted. Their lawyers responded to say that the pictures are not stored and so they ca

by IanCal 4y ago

There's a missing step in this story it feels. He asked for them to be deleted. Their lawyers responded to say that the pictures are not stored and so they can't delete them and said if you try and make an unjustified copyright claim we can recoup the cost. He made some kind of claims in a letter that as far as I can tell isn't in the article - I guess he pushed forwards with making the claim about copyright and/or demanding they delete his pictures? What did he send? They responded saying well we told you it was unjustified and now we've incurred costs so as previously stated we're charging them to you. > while LAION continues to use his pictures. Are they using his pictures? What they have is a link to the picture, right?

actionfromafar 4y ago
The Pirate Bay guys said, "we are just linking to the pictures".
- croes 4y ago
  Valid reply
- redeux 4y ago
  This is actually a good analogy. TPB is just linking to copyrighted materials. It’s the user who is committing the infringement by downloading, using, reproducing, etc the material. In this case they’re both linking to the material and controlling the application that’s downloading, using, reproducing, etc the material. That seems like a material difference to me. (Pun intended)
- vintermann 4y ago
  Even the film industry might have had trouble getting the Pirate Bay guys if the pictures they were linking to were hosted by the film industry themselves.
- srslack 4y ago
  If we want to go down the rabbit hole where a hyperlink in a text file to a publicly accessible copyrighted photo on an artist's portfolio site/web server is "copyright infringement", or more accurately "assisting in making copyrighted content available", where the artist themselves is the one making those images is available publicly, then we're officially in clown world.
  - Riverheart 4y ago
    It would be more like abetting copyright infringement by making it easier for scrappers to find content to train their models on. LAION isn’t posting a single link on their twitter account for their followers. It’s clear what this dataset is being used for. Artists put content on the internet so you can look at it and share it with your friends and say “wow cool art” not so you can run it through an art generating model to put them out of job. That we never anticipated this possibility means you call fallback on the “fair use” argument but legal does not mean ethical, especially when the law has yet to catch up to changing times.
    - srslack 4y ago
      That assumes that using copyrighted works to train AI is copyright infringement. And that simply pasting a link to a publicly available file that the artist themselves made available is "abetting." I'm betting that using copyrighted works to train "AI" is fair use, just like a human learning from a photo would be fair use.
      - Riverheart 4y ago
        You’re right, I can’t claim that it is. I understand that the models do not contain the original work. But they are not simply sharing a single link and the “intent” is different. I personally feel that we should not treat human learning and AI learning the same. Unlike humans, the AI is essentially immortal and infinitely copiable.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The issue isn’t having a link the issue is selling a dataset to people with the intent for them to preform copyright infringement. Selling pipes, cellphones, igniters, and black powder is perfectly legal. Selling pre assembled pipe bombs filled with black powder and a remote detonators is going to very quickly get you into a great deal of legal trouble.
    - srslack 4y ago
- gwd 4y ago
  There's a difference: * In the Pirate Bay case, the copyright owners hadn't posted the copyrighted contend anywhere. Someone who was not the copyright owner posted an unauthorized copy, and the Pirate Bay were linking to that unauthorized posting. * In this case, the copyright owner has posted the content; and LIAON is linking to the copyright owner's authorized posting.
- zwily 4y ago
  The Pirate Bay links to pirated content. LAION links to the photographer’s own website.
- patates 4y ago
  Linked to the data that is illegally hosted by someone else. Here, they are linking to the data that is legally hosted with extra metadata. This is exactly how we wanted the www to work. Then again, Google guys said, we are just linking to the data...
- IanCal 4y ago
  If TPB was links to the original source videos as hosted by Disney, I don't think they'd have had such a hard time arguing it was OK. Your comparison would be more reasonable if LAION had an origin link and then a link to a copy of the file explicitly for the purposes of copyright infringement.
redeux 4y ago
Let’s be realistic here. They’re not training the model from a link to the image. Whether or not they’ve downloaded and stored the image seems irrelevant to the copyright claim. They’ve clearly used and reproduced his content without a license. Does this count as fair use? I don’t know, but to claim that they’re just storing a url is bogus.
- prepend 4y ago
  If the image is available publicly, without restriction, then what license is needed? If the artist doesn’t want people and algorithms to see the image, then put a password in front of it. Or add no-index to robots.txt. This is like driving around with a sign on your car and complaining that people are looking at it and imagining the image in ways you don’t like. If you don’t want people to see the image, don’t put it on a sign and drive around.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - viraptor 4y ago
    That's not how copyright works though. Whether you post an image publicly or not, it's covered by the standard copyright protection in most countries. It's not "without restriction" unless the author explicitly grants you such license. There's a bit of nuance in this case, but in general, yes, you need a licence.
    - fauxpause_ 4y ago
      That is how copyright works. If you put something in public, people are allowed to look at it. And learn from it. They just can’t distribute copies of it.
      - polotics 4y ago
        People are allowed to learn from it, but as far as law exists now, AI's are not explicitly allowed to learn from it are they? As I understand it, a copyright has to be explicitly granted.
awegio 4y ago
Here is the original post by the photographer in German: https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e-v-macht-ernst-schadensersatzforderung-an-urheber-fuer-ki-trainingsdaten/ https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e... He sent an initial demand that LAION declined. He did not want to give up, then he made his lawyer send a letter, then LAION paid a lawyer to answer, and the invoice is for the cost of the lawyer. What I find interesting is that the photographer admits in the comments that he sells thousands of AI-generated images, probably made with an AI trained on LAION's dataset. He only doesn't want links (with alt text) to his own images in the dataset.
polotics 4y ago
If the pictures have been integrated into the training data, then they have most definitely not been deleted: they are an integral part of the model IMHO. The only way to really delete them is to retrain the model, without the pictures.
- IanCal 4y ago
  LAION hasn't trained any models, the dataset they produce is a list of links to the original images essentially with some metadata and things like whether the image is probably nsfw.
davidktr 4y ago
Both lawyers and the photographer are not looking great, but the legal questions seem much harder to answer than it might appear at first. Keep in mind that German copyright law is quite different from its British or American equivalent. Also, IANAL. If I understand it correctly: 0. Laion uses WAT-files from Common Crawl to generate a list of suitable image-text pairs, including a URL to the raw image. [0] 1. Laion downloads the raw images for further processing. 2. Based on step 2, Laion creates a curated list of image-text pairs. The images themselves are uncurated. 3. Using [1], anyone can download the images. Tags such as `noai` are respected. -- Question 1: Under German law, is Laion allowed to do what they are doing? Maybe, but far from clear. The lawyers [2] point to § 44b UrhG [3], which is rooted in [7], and § 66d UrhG [4]. These norms state that you can use publicly available data for data mining, especially if you are doing it as part of scientific research. Copyright holders may prohibit such activities but must do it in machine readable form on the website. First, I am not positive that Laion's activities fall under the law's definition of "data mining". The law says data mining is an activity done in order to gain insight into "patterns, trends and correlations". But Laion does not even attempt to gain any insight from the data, it just wants to provide a data set for model building [0]. I don't think § 44b UrhG is applicable at all. Second, Laion cannot simply yell "it's for research". To use of § 66d UrhG, you (a) must qualify as a research organisation, and (b) there must not be any private organisation in the background directing the research. Whether or not Laion qualifies as such would have to be decided by the courts, but I think it's questionable. Overall I think the lawyers' position as outlined in [2] is not very strong. Perhaps they find better arguments when a court is involved. -- Question 2: Under German law, does the photographer have any claim against Laion? Difficult. The photographer asked Laion to remove his work from their dataset [5]. The lawyers replied that Laion does not store any photographies so there is nothing to remove. It seems that the photographer did not understand this correctly when writing the initial cease-and-desist letter. Does Laion infringe on the photographer's copyright if they mereley distribute links? The photographer argues that Laion admittedly does download raw images themselves, which pertains to Question 1. Aside from this, in German law there is a theory called "Störerhaftung" [6]. It means that if what you are doing enables copyright infringement you may be liable as well, even if you do not distribute the content yourself. If you get notified that you participate in any such infringement by a copyright holder you must cease and desist immediately. In some cases, distributors of hyperlinks to copyrighted material have been found to commit copyright infringement, though it has been rather the exception. I have no idea how a court would decide in the current case. One may argue that simply adding the equivalent of a `robots.txt` will suffice to end the infringement, but that is too simple. The photographer sells his work to a customer who may use it on their website, but does not want anyone else to use his work. However, the photographer cannot control whether or not the customer uses a `noai` on the website. [3] is opt-out, but for this to work, the photographer must have the opportunity to opt-out. It seems the law did not sufficiently appreciate this scenario. It also seems it did not foresee instances where content mining enables AI models replicating (parts of) the content they did mine. One plausible scenario is that the court denies the photographer's claims to Laion because he can contractually mandate clients to place a `noai` tag on their website. In any case, I think the photographer would have to demonstrate how specifically Laion cost him money as there are no punitive damages in German law. [0] https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/ https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/ [1] https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset [2] https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e-v-macht-ernst-schadensersatzforderung-an-urheber-fuer-ki-trainingsdaten/ https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e... [3] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html [4] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__60d.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__60d.html [5] https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/02/20/laion-verein-droht-urhebern-die-ihre-daten-aus-ki-trainingssatz-nehmen-wollen-mit-schadensersatzanspruechen/ https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/02/20/laion-v... [6] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B6rerhaftung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B6rerhaftung [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
frankreyes 4y ago
Pictures are stored in a different representation. Otherwise I could download the image, re encode using WebM, put it inside a zip file with other random files as well, and then there would be no single file with their copyrighted material. Because LLM keep their data on files. Unless we don't keep the data on files but on a Blob on a SQL database! Yay this is fun

by IanCal 4y ago

actionfromafar 4y ago

The Pirate Bay guys said, "we are just linking to the pictures".

croes 4y ago
Valid reply
redeux 4y ago
This is actually a good analogy. TPB is just linking to copyrighted materials. It’s the user who is committing the infringement by downloading, using, reproducing, etc the material. In this case they’re both linking to the material and controlling the application that’s downloading, using, reproducing, etc the material. That seems like a material difference to me. (Pun intended)
vintermann 4y ago
Even the film industry might have had trouble getting the Pirate Bay guys if the pictures they were linking to were hosted by the film industry themselves.
srslack 4y ago
If we want to go down the rabbit hole where a hyperlink in a text file to a publicly accessible copyrighted photo on an artist's portfolio site/web server is "copyright infringement", or more accurately "assisting in making copyrighted content available", where the artist themselves is the one making those images is available publicly, then we're officially in clown world.
- Riverheart 4y ago
  It would be more like abetting copyright infringement by making it easier for scrappers to find content to train their models on. LAION isn’t posting a single link on their twitter account for their followers. It’s clear what this dataset is being used for. Artists put content on the internet so you can look at it and share it with your friends and say “wow cool art” not so you can run it through an art generating model to put them out of job. That we never anticipated this possibility means you call fallback on the “fair use” argument but legal does not mean ethical, especially when the law has yet to catch up to changing times.
  - srslack 4y ago
    That assumes that using copyrighted works to train AI is copyright infringement. And that simply pasting a link to a publicly available file that the artist themselves made available is "abetting." I'm betting that using copyrighted works to train "AI" is fair use, just like a human learning from a photo would be fair use.
    - Riverheart 4y ago
      You’re right, I can’t claim that it is. I understand that the models do not contain the original work. But they are not simply sharing a single link and the “intent” is different. I personally feel that we should not treat human learning and AI learning the same. Unlike humans, the AI is essentially immortal and infinitely copiable.
- Retric 4y ago
  The issue isn’t having a link the issue is selling a dataset to people with the intent for them to preform copyright infringement. Selling pipes, cellphones, igniters, and black powder is perfectly legal. Selling pre assembled pipe bombs filled with black powder and a remote detonators is going to very quickly get you into a great deal of legal trouble.
  - srslack 4y ago
gwd 4y ago
There's a difference: * In the Pirate Bay case, the copyright owners hadn't posted the copyrighted contend anywhere. Someone who was not the copyright owner posted an unauthorized copy, and the Pirate Bay were linking to that unauthorized posting. * In this case, the copyright owner has posted the content; and LIAON is linking to the copyright owner's authorized posting.
zwily 4y ago
The Pirate Bay links to pirated content. LAION links to the photographer’s own website.
patates 4y ago
Linked to the data that is illegally hosted by someone else. Here, they are linking to the data that is legally hosted with extra metadata. This is exactly how we wanted the www to work. Then again, Google guys said, we are just linking to the data...
IanCal 4y ago
If TPB was links to the original source videos as hosted by Disney, I don't think they'd have had such a hard time arguing it was OK. Your comparison would be more reasonable if LAION had an origin link and then a link to a copy of the file explicitly for the purposes of copyright infringement.

redeux 4y ago

Let’s be realistic here. They’re not training the model from a link to the image. Whether or not they’ve downloaded and stored the image seems irrelevant to the copyright claim. They’ve clearly used and reproduced his content without a license. Does this count as fair use? I don’t know, but to claim that they’re just storing a url is bogus.

prepend 4y ago
If the image is available publicly, without restriction, then what license is needed? If the artist doesn’t want people and algorithms to see the image, then put a password in front of it. Or add no-index to robots.txt. This is like driving around with a sign on your car and complaining that people are looking at it and imagining the image in ways you don’t like. If you don’t want people to see the image, don’t put it on a sign and drive around.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- viraptor 4y ago
  That's not how copyright works though. Whether you post an image publicly or not, it's covered by the standard copyright protection in most countries. It's not "without restriction" unless the author explicitly grants you such license. There's a bit of nuance in this case, but in general, yes, you need a licence.
  - fauxpause_ 4y ago
    That is how copyright works. If you put something in public, people are allowed to look at it. And learn from it. They just can’t distribute copies of it.
    - polotics 4y ago
      People are allowed to learn from it, but as far as law exists now, AI's are not explicitly allowed to learn from it are they? As I understand it, a copyright has to be explicitly granted.

awegio 4y ago

Here is the original post by the photographer in German: https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e-v-macht-ernst-schadensersatzforderung-an-urheber-fuer-ki-trainingsdaten/ https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e... He sent an initial demand that LAION declined. He did not want to give up, then he made his lawyer send a letter, then LAION paid a lawyer to answer, and the invoice is for the cost of the lawyer. What I find interesting is that the photographer admits in the comments that he sells thousands of AI-generated images, probably made with an AI trained on LAION's dataset. He only doesn't want links (with alt text) to his own images in the dataset.

polotics 4y ago

If the pictures have been integrated into the training data, then they have most definitely not been deleted: they are an integral part of the model IMHO. The only way to really delete them is to retrain the model, without the pictures.

IanCal 4y ago
LAION hasn't trained any models, the dataset they produce is a list of links to the original images essentially with some metadata and things like whether the image is probably nsfw.

davidktr 4y ago

Both lawyers and the photographer are not looking great, but the legal questions seem much harder to answer than it might appear at first. Keep in mind that German copyright law is quite different from its British or American equivalent. Also, IANAL. If I understand it correctly: 0. Laion uses WAT-files from Common Crawl to generate a list of suitable image-text pairs, including a URL to the raw image. [0] 1. Laion downloads the raw images for further processing. 2. Based on step 2, Laion creates a curated list of image-text pairs. The images themselves are uncurated. 3. Using [1], anyone can download the images. Tags such as `noai` are respected. -- Question 1: Under German law, is Laion allowed to do what they are doing? Maybe, but far from clear. The lawyers [2] point to § 44b UrhG [3], which is rooted in [7], and § 66d UrhG [4]. These norms state that you can use publicly available data for data mining, especially if you are doing it as part of scientific research. Copyright holders may prohibit such activities but must do it in machine readable form on the website. First, I am not positive that Laion's activities fall under the law's definition of "data mining". The law says data mining is an activity done in order to gain insight into "patterns, trends and correlations". But Laion does not even attempt to gain any insight from the data, it just wants to provide a data set for model building [0]. I don't think § 44b UrhG is applicable at all. Second, Laion cannot simply yell "it's for research". To use of § 66d UrhG, you (a) must qualify as a research organisation, and (b) there must not be any private organisation in the background directing the research. Whether or not Laion qualifies as such would have to be decided by the courts, but I think it's questionable. Overall I think the lawyers' position as outlined in [2] is not very strong. Perhaps they find better arguments when a court is involved. -- Question 2: Under German law, does the photographer have any claim against Laion? Difficult. The photographer asked Laion to remove his work from their dataset [5]. The lawyers replied that Laion does not store any photographies so there is nothing to remove. It seems that the photographer did not understand this correctly when writing the initial cease-and-desist letter. Does Laion infringe on the photographer's copyright if they mereley distribute links? The photographer argues that Laion admittedly does download raw images themselves, which pertains to Question 1. Aside from this, in German law there is a theory called "Störerhaftung" [6]. It means that if what you are doing enables copyright infringement you may be liable as well, even if you do not distribute the content yourself. If you get notified that you participate in any such infringement by a copyright holder you must cease and desist immediately. In some cases, distributors of hyperlinks to copyrighted material have been found to commit copyright infringement, though it has been rather the exception. I have no idea how a court would decide in the current case. One may argue that simply adding the equivalent of a `robots.txt` will suffice to end the infringement, but that is too simple. The photographer sells his work to a customer who may use it on their website, but does not want anyone else to use his work. However, the photographer cannot control whether or not the customer uses a `noai` on the website. [3] is opt-out, but for this to work, the photographer must have the opportunity to opt-out. It seems the law did not sufficiently appreciate this scenario. It also seems it did not foresee instances where content mining enables AI models replicating (parts of) the content they did mine. One plausible scenario is that the court denies the photographer's claims to Laion because he can contractually mandate clients to place a `noai` tag on their website. In any case, I think the photographer would have to demonstrate how specifically Laion cost him money as there are no punitive damages in German law. [0] https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/ https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/ [1] https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset [2] https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e-v-macht-ernst-schadensersatzforderung-an-urheber-fuer-ki-trainingsdaten/ https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e... [3] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html [4] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__60d.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__60d.html [5] https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/02/20/laion-verein-droht-urhebern-die-ihre-daten-aus-ki-trainingssatz-nehmen-wollen-mit-schadensersatzanspruechen/ https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/02/20/laion-v... [6] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B6rerhaftung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B6rerhaftung [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...

frankreyes 4y ago

Pictures are stored in a different representation. Otherwise I could download the image, re encode using WebM, put it inside a zip file with other random files as well, and then there would be no single file with their copyrighted material. Because LLM keep their data on files. Unless we don't keep the data on files but on a Blob on a SQL database! Yay this is fun