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Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

190 points by starshadowx2 3y ago

artninja1988 3y ago
Good. Most claims got dismissed (although with leave to amend) with only the infringement on the input side really remaining. This lawyer is a clown
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Why is Midjourney completely off the hook while Stability AI is not? I'm trying to pull up the original court document, but the PDF isnt loading.
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  Basically the judge said the idea AI images generated are infringing on copyright is so stupid it's thrown out. The other part of the case is if the artists copyright was violated when training the AI and they have only claimed that Stability used their art to train.
- starshadowx2 3y ago
  For that count specifically, Stability was directly involved with creating and funding the LAION dataset, whereas Midjourney and DeviantArt were not. The DeviantArt direct claim is because of how DeviantArt has been using Stable Diffusion for their DreamUp system, but the direct claim against Midjourney has been less clear from the plaintiffs about whether they're going against Midjourney using Stable Diffusion in one model (beta/test/testp) or their use of training data (like LAION)
- gamblor956 3y ago
  The plaintiffs apparently failed to plead sufficient factual allegations to support their infringement claim against MTD, which is a rookie mistake. Factual allegations at this point don't have to be correct (that's what discovery is for), but they do have to at least satisfy the legal requirements for each prong of a legal claim. In many legal pleadings, the plaintiffs will state, "upon information and belief, we [assert X factual allegation]" since they don't yet have the discovery to support a more specific factual allegation.
williamcotton 3y ago
Orrick also dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright infringement claims entirely. Well, duh. The judge is helping out the plaintiffs in this case. A jury would have been easily convinced by the defense that no images produced by Stability's systems are visually derivative. The key is indeed what follows: The judge allowed Andersen to continue pursuing her key claim that Stability's alleged use of her work to train Stable Diffusion infringed her copyrights. So unless there is some kind of summary judgement I would wager that this becomes the focus of both sides as this heads towards trial. But that's it. As predicted by commentary from legal scholars, the outputs of Stable Diffusion are distinct from the model and are not infringing on copyright... at least for this complaint!
- gamblor956 3y ago
  No, he dismissed McKernan and Ortiz because they didn't register their images for U.S. copyright, which is a foundational prerequisite for any copyright lawsuit (in the U.S.) This simply means that they need to register their images for copyright before they can re-join the case. (https://www.gibsondunn.com/supreme-court-holds-that-copyright-owners-may-not-sue-for-infringement-until-copyright-office-processes-registration/ https://www.gibsondunn.com/supreme-court-holds-that-copyrigh...) EDIT: reading the linked PDF further, and it appears that McK and O's legal counsel stated that the two weren't asserting the copyright claims at all, which is why they were dismissed with prejudice. That means that they can't re-join the case by filing for copyrights for their images...Their lawyer fucked up pretty badly and if I were either of them I'd be filing a malpractice lawsuit.
  - starshadowx2 3y ago
    Isn't that linked case because they started to file for copyright and then sued rather than waiting for it to be completed first? In this case they never filed in the first place, and it was dismissed with prejudice.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    I'll check PACER and read the actual ruling when I'm at work tomorrow, but yeah I'm interpreting "dismissed entirely" as "dismissed with prejudice". You're entirely correct that if it was dismissed without prejudice the complaints on copyright infringement on the outputs could be amended and refiled.
minimaxir 3y ago
This lawsuit was always weird because it was a much much weaker case than the GitHub Copilot lawsuit by the same firm: atleast with text you can point out exact infringement, but the Stable Diffusion lawsuit (https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/ https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/) seems mostly based on inaccurate technical memes like "diffusion is just compression" without examples. The HN discussion back when this lawsuit was first announced was correctly pessimistic: the top comment was "Where are the copies?". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377910
alphanullmeric 3y ago
Intellectual property shouldn’t be a thing. If you still have it after I’ve supposedly stolen it from you, then it’s not real property. The easiest test of consistency is simply to ask about both piracy and AI training data. If you support IP in one case but not the other then you’re a hypocrite. There is no third option where your support of something depends not on what it is but who it benefits.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  You do realise that if people’s intellectual work is not protected there wont be any intellectual work left, right? Why would i create something knowing you can just grab it and use it? Communism did the same to physical property, where you didnt own much and everything belonged to everyone. That didnt end particularly well because people inherently want to own things, especially the output of their own creation. Sure you can use it, but according to the terms and conditions of the owner. Same goes for owning objects. You can use my car if i let you use my car.
  - alphanullmeric 3y ago
    And if there was no slavery we wouldn’t have any pyramids. I don’t care. You don’t have the right to an idea, a sound or a particular arrangement of pixels. That’s not communism because nothing is being taken from you. I don’t owe you any terms and conditions to something you don’t own.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Well, by law, i do and you do owe me royalties. Hopefully these people hire better lawyers next time. Also people tend to get upset when their ownership of things is violated, pixels or otherwise.
      - alphanullmeric 3y ago
        Sure then, by law I could have had slaves too. Glad you’re honest about the side of history you sit on.
gamblor956 3y ago
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byprrngynpe/AI%20COPYRIGHT%20LAWSUIT%20mtdruling.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byprrngynpe/... The dismissal of Deviant was inappropriate given that the case hasn't reached discovery yet. The dismissal was granted based on a substantive evaluation of the Defendant's assertions which is inappropriate at this early procedural stage of the case. (see e.g. page 10 where the judge evaluates the "plausibility" of alleged facts, and page 12 where he says "I am not convinced" about the plaintiff's theory, even though in a MTD this is not a determination he is supposed to make pre-discovery). Moreover, even if plaintiff's language was "unclear", the appropriate procedure is to require them to amend their claim and dismiss Deviant if the plaintiff does not amend, not to dismiss a defendant and give the plaintiff leave to amend their claims. With respect to Midjourney, the Plaintiffs failed to plead sufficient factual allegations to support their claim, so that dismissal was appropriate. (Pre-discovery, it's okay for the alleged/pleaded "facts" to be wrong, you just need to allege sufficient "facts" that you have a legal basis for a court case. Note that "facts" in the MTD context doesn't mean real world facts, it is a legal term of art that actually refers to an allegation of a fact that will later be determined to be true or false at the actual legal proceeding on the merits.)
- artninja1988 3y ago
  Interesting. How do you see the Getty v stability lawsuit going? That looks much worse for stability. Do you think they will just settle and stability will pay them some licensing fee?
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    Getty has a much stronger case, given that warped versions of the Getty logo have shown up in a number of SD-generated images, so it's obvious that there was impermissible copying. I'm not sure Stability will agree to a licensing fee, since part of the rationale for the last version of SD was to remove the infringing images from their training sets going forward.
    - artninja1988 3y ago
hankchinaski 3y ago
This is like Michelangelo suing Caravaggio because he copied or better, was inspired by his work
soulofmischief 3y ago
A thought experiment: Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in the data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in violation of copyright. Now imagine that the right input suddenly turns the data into illegal or infringing material, after a transformation operation. And not just a single unique input such as a password which clearly represents a mapping function between two sets of data. But imagine if there were seemingly infinite possible inputs, each of which transformed the data into a different infringing blob of data. If these inputs exactly represented the novel, copyrightable or illegal aspects, but the blob itself was inert. What should be illegal here? The blob, which by itself is free of any questionable bits of data, or the inputs which transform it into something tangible? Both? Neither? Well, it has never been illegal to draw or paint something representing CSAM, for example. And it has never been illegal to draw or paint Mickey Mouse in your own home. What's often illegal is publishing said data. Ignoring the free speech debate around artificially produced CSAM, publishing it is already illegal in many territories. It is also illegal to violate copyright in many countries when publishing information. What's interesting is that it is not illegal to trace a drawing and hanging it up on your wall, instead of buying the the real drawing from its rights-holder. It's also not illegal to reproduce a tracing done by a friend. But the recording and film industries have been more successful in convincing us that it should be illegal to do the same for a song or film. That you should not be able to "trace" the data at home, and that you should not be able to share it with me, that I should not be able to trace over your tracing and bring home a copy for myself. I can understand, and support a copyright system which regulates the publishing of copyrighted material. Even copyleft paradigms lean on regulation for enforcement. But the film and music industry actively try to restrict individual freedoms in the name of corporate profits, while still screwing over their clients and employees with respect to profit-sharing. Back to the point: That blob should never be illegal. The activation functions should never be illegal. That is a basic extension of free speech. But publishing, that is a different story, and we already have laws offering such protections both with respect to illegally-produced or copyrighted content. Any attempt to regulate what kind of model I am allowed to run at home is a massive infringement on my rights as an individual, and is borne either out of gross ignorance of current copyright law from the same people crying, "But think of the copyrights!", or direct, insidious corporate greed. You can adjust this thought experiment so that instead of dealing with a magic blob, we are dealing with a program that makes it really easy to produce illegal or copyrighted works after a bit of human interaction. Is there claim here now? Are we basing the law on how much human involvement was needed to create the output? We've faced similar arguments around technological leaps such as the printing press or mechanical loom. Did we, as a society, reject these advances in technology in order to protect loom workers and scribes? Bottom line. You can pry my models out of my cold, dead or handcuffed hands. Times like these really shine a light on who is complicit in the system, and who suffers from it. If you are in the creative industry, you need to understand how things are going to change. As an engineer with decades of investment into my craft, I also have to face the rude awakening that is ahead in my own industry as automation creates a gap between highly-skilled professionals and newcomers. Being a paid software engineer might become as hard of work as becoming a famous professional artist. Lots of connections, insane specialization and a lifetime devoted to the craft. A lot of people in school for engineering right now might struggle to find employment in 20 years or less if they cannot cross this gap in time. Artists aren't the only tribe experiencing a huge industry shake-up over a technology that will one day be so ubiquitous that it's inside of your toaster.
sinuhe69 3y ago
Orrick dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright claims because they had not registered their images with the U.S. Copyright Office, a requirement for bringing a copyright lawsuit. That is the key.
Topfi 3y ago
Here is a direct link to the motion for those interested: https://scribd.com/document/681174239/Order-on-motion-to-dismiss https://scribd.com/document/681174239/Order-on-motion-to-dis...
aa_is_op 3y ago
Amazing how copyright law amazingly disappears when it's to the detriment of major tech companies and protecting smaller creators. Just amazing!
- gmerc 3y ago
  I’m not sure if here you are reading that. Have you read the article? The copyright infringement claim (for training) is left intact. It’s the other claims that had no basis in existing law (e.g. no copyright was registered, etc) that have been thrown out.
- flanked-evergl 3y ago
  > Amazing how copyright law amazingly disappears Can you elaborate in what way it disappeared in your opinion?
  - aa_is_op 3y ago
    [flagged]
- Spivak 3y ago
  It's really not, copyright is and always has been incredibly political and ebbs and flows with the whims of the existing power structures. And that's mostly to do with the fact that copyright, unlike say murder, is much less defined, has as many interpretations as people, and is something that is designed to be overbroad and selectively enforced where everyone in the world by the letter is constantly violating it. So this it pretty much expected and if it swings the other way the US/EU is going to hobble themselves in the face of any locality that gives zero shits about copyright. It's less about the art and more that the art enables these models to do real useful work and is better at it for having access to more data.
kranke155 3y ago
This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from 1,000,000 individuals, train your AI to replace them, compensate no one. You can do this in every area: driving, farming, cooking. Music. Just dispossess everyone of all their property by training an AI to copy all their work! What could be easier (and less morally right)…
- treyd 3y ago
  Intellectual property never really existed. Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. The production of culture has been slowly becoming more distorted as cultural assets that should be and historically were held in common accumulates under the umbrella of massive intellectual property holders (Disney, Universal, etc) after we took the legal concept that was meant to apply to a much more narrow context and applied it broadly. They benefit disproportionally from intellectual property than individual artists do. The (recent) past dominating the present, being ruled by abstractions, and all that. Is it bad that this will be used to displace individual artists/creatives in the value chain of media production? Of course it is. But we shouldn't be responding to that by clinging harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness, we should be developing new models for funding production.
  - rvz 3y ago
    > Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. Great! So given your articles are in the public domain on your website I can make millions out of it without given you a cent or direct credit and sources without paying you and can claim it all as my own then.
ballenf 3y ago
Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a derivative too close to the original, then that new work is potentially copyright infringement. That is, we focus on the output of the process to determine infringement with living artists and ignore the training. But with ML, everyone focuses on the training. It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and refuse to output a work that too closely resembles one or more work under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate professional artists do as well? Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we don't take away their brushes based on capability.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- picadores 3y ago
  The AI will not throw a molotowcocktail at you or hang you from a lamppost when it starves?
- kranke155 3y ago
  Let me change the argument around: Why is it assumed that because an artwork is freely available on the internet, you are allowed to train a machine to reproduce it, being in its totality or just details that are used in the creation of new works? IE why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions. So actually building a machine there, under the cover of darkness, that learns from your work so you can produce new work, why is that allowed in the first place? Certainly wouldn't be at a museum. The key thing here is - if you want artists' data, you should ask for it. They didn't. This would be equivalent of training a Github CoPilot on every available piece of code in existence, ever, instead of what they had available. Why should that be allowed? So if I built some toy code in 1996, and happened to post it on usenet, and it's a great implementation of X, why the heck is CoPilot allowed to read it? It's my property.
ndiddy 3y ago
> Two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit have dropped their infringement claims because they didn’t register their work with the copyright office before suing. The copyright claims will be limited to artist Sarah Anderson’s works, which she has registered. I’m impressed that their legal team was incompetent enough that they didn’t bring this up as an issue before filing the lawsuit.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
  What makes you think the legal team didn't know? The plaintiffs wanted to sue, so they did
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
0dayz 3y ago
Hasn't this always been a precarious road? With say fair use for instance. Not only that but I really wish we could just redo copyright to be more flexible but ultimately empowering the creator with conclusive licenses for others to use (like in AI, other creative work, streaming, etc.) and the creator is paid either monthly or per generated image/song.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Having done way more corporate court than I want (patents, mergers, liquidation), I’m increasingly convinced that the judicial system is fundamentally flawed. The reality is that the law in 2023 US is so obscure and opaque and how judges come to their ruling seems to be by their total whim with no actual philosophy other than maintenance of the system. Further I’m extremely unimpressed with the vast majority of judges competence in display - such that contempt should be the starting position. The fact that this is how laws are actually made (precedent of applications will always beat the letter) means that nobody who doesn’t have a warchest will be able to actually utilize the system coherently As with everything now, courts are rules by those with the most money
- corethree 3y ago
  The final decision made by this article is one I agree with with or without money and I have no incentive the game. Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.
  - nirvdrum 3y ago
    And yet these systems are incapable of genuine creativity. If they were, they would be taught rules & techniques and set off to their own devices to draw, like humans. But, they can't and they're not. LLMs and humans don't learn or create in the same way. Moreover, there's no reason we should grant LLMs the full rights and privileges of humans.
    - marcinzm 3y ago
      Are we going to hold all human artists to that standard as well? I suspect many would fail it.
      - nirvdrum 3y ago
        I don't follow. Which standard is that? Many (most?) artists do in fact fail, particularly if they're unable to find a creative way to differentiate themselves. Society generally shuns plagiarism. We call out things that are deemed as "knock-offs", whether they're bands, video games, movies, books, or clothing.
TotalCrackpot 3y ago
This is consistent with historically intellectual property being a construct that benefits owners of capital and not actual innovators. That's why I think it should be abolished, this is yet another mechanism to monopolize a space to profit through some kind of rent-seeking procedure.
- nness 3y ago
  What should it be replaced with — a system where no one retains intellectual rights over the works that they create?
  - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
    What is intellectual right? I respect authorship, with obvious consideration that no intellectual activity happens in a vacuum, as Isaac Newton said: "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.". I believe that I should never be able to get financially hurt or go to prison because I used other person's thoughts.
    - delecti 3y ago
      > I believe that I should never be able to get financially hurt or go to prison because I used other person's thoughts "Use another person's thoughts" is obfuscating the reality of the situation so far as to be disingenuous. The way society ensures new works are created is to guarantee a temporary monopoly over certain narrow types of ideas to their creators. Why would anybody be an author if everyone could download free copies of any new book that came out? I think patents are granted too liberally, and that copyright lasts at least twice as long as it should, but to argue that intellectual property can't even in theory be beneficial to protect is silly.
      - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
        Do you suggest that you need intellectual property for new ideas to be created and propagated? THAT'S silly! For most of the history of this species there were no intellectual property rights and people still were sharing their thoughts and ideas for various reasons.
OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
> Two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit have dropped their infringement claims because they didn’t register their work with the copyright office before suing. The copyright claims will be limited to artist Sarah Anderson’s works, which she has registered. The lawsuit is moving forward, but only on copyrighted work. This is (not yet) a story.
- thowaway91234 3y ago
  I’m so confused about American copyright law. I was always under the impression that copyright is granted automatically and you didn’t need to “register” it, contrarily to a trademark which must be registered and is only valid for its specific industry.
  - nness 3y ago
    That was my belief too, but: "Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work." https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html (Makes me wonder if, back in the day, every song that was downloaded and then pursued by the RIAA was registered...)
    - dannyw 3y ago
      Which law firm took the plaintiffs and filed the case without registering copyright? This isn't a good sign.
      - pavon 3y ago
        It can take several months to register a copyright, so they may have started the process and took a gamble on how slow the court would move, knowing they could fallback on the works that were registered if it didn't work out.
sofixa 3y ago
I'm really looking forward to the EU framework around "AI". It's definitely a better approach than having individual artists sue and get dismissed on technicalities (that don't even apply in most of the EU - e.g. in France, if you release something by default you get copyright on it, so the judge's reasoning couldn't apply here) and judges deciding based on their interpretation of vague laws crafted in an age when "AI" was little more than niche science fiction if that.
- flanked-evergl 3y ago
  > I'm really looking forward to the EU framework around "AI" After GDPR and the cookie pop-ups my expectations for things coming out of the EU is quite low. Every company I have worked it has a different and often conflicting interpretation of GDPR, and some places uses it to play politics, and governments of individual EU countries are not doing their part to clarify how things should be interpreted. It's a dumpster fire IMO.
laylower 3y ago
This is the first paragraph... "The contentious issue of whether AI art generators violent copyright — since they are by and large trained on human artists’ work, in many cases without their direct affirmative consent, compensation, or even knowledge — has taken a step forward to being settled in the U.S. today." Is it human-generated? Violent copyright?
cmiles74 3y ago
It seems like they focused too much on the details of how the model works and how data is encoded by the model. "In his dismissal of infringement claims, Orrick wrote that plaintiffs’ theory is “unclear” as to whether there are copies of training images stored in Stable Diffusion that are utilized by DeviantArt and Midjourney. He pointed to the defense’s arguments that it’s impossible for billions of images “to be compressed into an active program,” like Stable Diffusion." Perhaps future litigation will be more successful if they treat the model as a black box. Could an argument be made that a person's intellectual property was used to train the model without compensation and _that_ is the illegal act? From there one would only have to demonstrate that the output form the model is similar to a person's body of work.
- soco 3y ago
  Maybe even the data for training should be opt-in, then at least this case would have been easier solved. The outputs are then another story - I can agree to training but I'm not eager to see knock-offs of my work being outputted and spread.
nologic01 3y ago
Can somebody explain how this will not kill any incentive to publish anything? Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever? This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade between regions as thieves would ambush traders and steal any goods.
- gedy 3y ago
  It's just not that different from people seeing works and learning or being inspired, so how do you "ban AI" without adding more crazy DRM/DMCA stuff for legitimate use?
  - bakugo 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - PierceJoy 3y ago
      I agree that the scale is different, but even the way you’ve phrased it sounds pretty comparable to how humans learn and produce art. Besides scale, how is it different?
      - kaibee 3y ago
        The colour of the bits is different. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
    - csallen 3y ago
      Um, it's extremely comparable. You basically just described the human process, but used bigger numbers lol. Go on any art site, whether it's drawings or writing, and a massive amount of the human learning and inspiration you see is just copying from others, too. People drawing their favorite characters, writing fan fiction that copies from their favorite books, etc. This is so extremely comparable to AI it's weird to me that you don't see it.
raincole 3y ago
My perspective is there are two different main issues about AI (especially Stable Diffusion). One is how it works consistently with the current law. Ml model is basically a highly lossy compressed data format. If you collect millions of copyrighted images, merge them into a super big image, then compress it into a .jpg. Are you allowed to redistribute this .jpg file? To me, it's mostly depending on how lossy (low quality) your .jpg is. (Note the fact that human brains are also lossy compressed data is completely irrelevant here: you can only compare machine to machine, algorithm to algorithm. You can't say if a human has right to do X, therefore a machine has the same right to do X.) But this line of thinking, while consistent to me, is dangerous. Because it means open models like Stability Diffusion are more likely to be illegal than a closed one like MidJourney, since it's closer to the source materials. If closed models end up being legal but open models don't, it would be a big loss for our society as a whole.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  Machines do not have rights. The question is whether an human with a specific machine has a certain right, as opposed to a human with a different machine.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    > human with a specific machine I assume the entire client+server system constitutes the "machine" in this case, correct? So does "human with" refer to the end user (client side) or the sysadmin (server side)? Maybe one is an accomplice? The machine isn't going to infringe without certain prompting by the end user, just as an inkjet printer isn't going to do so.
- harshreality 3y ago
  That's a difficult question because the boundaries of similarity/derived works for copyright purposes are determined by judges and juries based on their intuitions. There's no mathematical similarity testing, and trying to formulate such a thing would be challenging. What's similar enough to a pop music theme, that has a grand total of a few lines of unique music, to be a copyright violation? How many bars have to be copied, and what kinds of minor variances do or don't avoid a violation? If you're inspired by a haiku, and change 5 of 17 syllables, is that still a copyright violation? Who knows.
deleted 3y ago
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ptx 3y ago
> Orrick spends the rest of his ruling explaining why he found the artists’ complaint defective, which includes various issues, but the big one being that two of the artists — McKernan and Ortiz, did not actually file copyrights on their art with the U.S. Copyright Office. [...] The other problem for plaintiffs is that it is simply not plausible that every Training Image used to train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable) What? I thought everything was copyrighted by default under the Berne Convention? That's the reason for the existence of CC0 [0], after all. Their FAQ says: "Copyright and other laws throughout the world automatically extend copyright protection to works of authorship and databases, whether the author or creator wants those rights or not." [0] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_CC0.3F https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_CC0.3F
- silverlight 3y ago
  In the U.S. you have to actually file for a copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office if you actually want to bring a copyright suit against someone.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

190 points by starshadowx2 3y ago

artninja1988 3y ago

Good. Most claims got dismissed (although with leave to amend) with only the infringement on the input side really remaining. This lawyer is a clown

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Why is Midjourney completely off the hook while Stability AI is not? I'm trying to pull up the original court document, but the PDF isnt loading.

tick_tock_tick 3y ago
Basically the judge said the idea AI images generated are infringing on copyright is so stupid it's thrown out. The other part of the case is if the artists copyright was violated when training the AI and they have only claimed that Stability used their art to train.
starshadowx2 3y ago
For that count specifically, Stability was directly involved with creating and funding the LAION dataset, whereas Midjourney and DeviantArt were not. The DeviantArt direct claim is because of how DeviantArt has been using Stable Diffusion for their DreamUp system, but the direct claim against Midjourney has been less clear from the plaintiffs about whether they're going against Midjourney using Stable Diffusion in one model (beta/test/testp) or their use of training data (like LAION)
gamblor956 3y ago
The plaintiffs apparently failed to plead sufficient factual allegations to support their infringement claim against MTD, which is a rookie mistake. Factual allegations at this point don't have to be correct (that's what discovery is for), but they do have to at least satisfy the legal requirements for each prong of a legal claim. In many legal pleadings, the plaintiffs will state, "upon information and belief, we [assert X factual allegation]" since they don't yet have the discovery to support a more specific factual allegation.

williamcotton 3y ago

Orrick also dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright infringement claims entirely. Well, duh. The judge is helping out the plaintiffs in this case. A jury would have been easily convinced by the defense that no images produced by Stability's systems are visually derivative. The key is indeed what follows: The judge allowed Andersen to continue pursuing her key claim that Stability's alleged use of her work to train Stable Diffusion infringed her copyrights. So unless there is some kind of summary judgement I would wager that this becomes the focus of both sides as this heads towards trial. But that's it. As predicted by commentary from legal scholars, the outputs of Stable Diffusion are distinct from the model and are not infringing on copyright... at least for this complaint!

gamblor956 3y ago
No, he dismissed McKernan and Ortiz because they didn't register their images for U.S. copyright, which is a foundational prerequisite for any copyright lawsuit (in the U.S.) This simply means that they need to register their images for copyright before they can re-join the case. (https://www.gibsondunn.com/supreme-court-holds-that-copyright-owners-may-not-sue-for-infringement-until-copyright-office-processes-registration/ https://www.gibsondunn.com/supreme-court-holds-that-copyrigh...) EDIT: reading the linked PDF further, and it appears that McK and O's legal counsel stated that the two weren't asserting the copyright claims at all, which is why they were dismissed with prejudice. That means that they can't re-join the case by filing for copyrights for their images...Their lawyer fucked up pretty badly and if I were either of them I'd be filing a malpractice lawsuit.
- starshadowx2 3y ago
  Isn't that linked case because they started to file for copyright and then sued rather than waiting for it to be completed first? In this case they never filed in the first place, and it was dismissed with prejudice.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  I'll check PACER and read the actual ruling when I'm at work tomorrow, but yeah I'm interpreting "dismissed entirely" as "dismissed with prejudice". You're entirely correct that if it was dismissed without prejudice the complaints on copyright infringement on the outputs could be amended and refiled.

minimaxir 3y ago

This lawsuit was always weird because it was a much much weaker case than the GitHub Copilot lawsuit by the same firm: atleast with text you can point out exact infringement, but the Stable Diffusion lawsuit (https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/ https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/) seems mostly based on inaccurate technical memes like "diffusion is just compression" without examples. The HN discussion back when this lawsuit was first announced was correctly pessimistic: the top comment was "Where are the copies?". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377910

alphanullmeric 3y ago

Intellectual property shouldn’t be a thing. If you still have it after I’ve supposedly stolen it from you, then it’s not real property. The easiest test of consistency is simply to ask about both piracy and AI training data. If you support IP in one case but not the other then you’re a hypocrite. There is no third option where your support of something depends not on what it is but who it benefits.

gumballindie 3y ago
You do realise that if people’s intellectual work is not protected there wont be any intellectual work left, right? Why would i create something knowing you can just grab it and use it? Communism did the same to physical property, where you didnt own much and everything belonged to everyone. That didnt end particularly well because people inherently want to own things, especially the output of their own creation. Sure you can use it, but according to the terms and conditions of the owner. Same goes for owning objects. You can use my car if i let you use my car.
- alphanullmeric 3y ago
  And if there was no slavery we wouldn’t have any pyramids. I don’t care. You don’t have the right to an idea, a sound or a particular arrangement of pixels. That’s not communism because nothing is being taken from you. I don’t owe you any terms and conditions to something you don’t own.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Well, by law, i do and you do owe me royalties. Hopefully these people hire better lawyers next time. Also people tend to get upset when their ownership of things is violated, pixels or otherwise.
    - alphanullmeric 3y ago
      Sure then, by law I could have had slaves too. Glad you’re honest about the side of history you sit on.

gamblor956 3y ago

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byprrngynpe/AI%20COPYRIGHT%20LAWSUIT%20mtdruling.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byprrngynpe/... The dismissal of Deviant was inappropriate given that the case hasn't reached discovery yet. The dismissal was granted based on a substantive evaluation of the Defendant's assertions which is inappropriate at this early procedural stage of the case. (see e.g. page 10 where the judge evaluates the "plausibility" of alleged facts, and page 12 where he says "I am not convinced" about the plaintiff's theory, even though in a MTD this is not a determination he is supposed to make pre-discovery). Moreover, even if plaintiff's language was "unclear", the appropriate procedure is to require them to amend their claim and dismiss Deviant if the plaintiff does not amend, not to dismiss a defendant and give the plaintiff leave to amend their claims. With respect to Midjourney, the Plaintiffs failed to plead sufficient factual allegations to support their claim, so that dismissal was appropriate. (Pre-discovery, it's okay for the alleged/pleaded "facts" to be wrong, you just need to allege sufficient "facts" that you have a legal basis for a court case. Note that "facts" in the MTD context doesn't mean real world facts, it is a legal term of art that actually refers to an allegation of a fact that will later be determined to be true or false at the actual legal proceeding on the merits.)

artninja1988 3y ago
Interesting. How do you see the Getty v stability lawsuit going? That looks much worse for stability. Do you think they will just settle and stability will pay them some licensing fee?
- gamblor956 3y ago
  Getty has a much stronger case, given that warped versions of the Getty logo have shown up in a number of SD-generated images, so it's obvious that there was impermissible copying. I'm not sure Stability will agree to a licensing fee, since part of the rationale for the last version of SD was to remove the infringing images from their training sets going forward.
  - artninja1988 3y ago

hankchinaski 3y ago

This is like Michelangelo suing Caravaggio because he copied or better, was inspired by his work

soulofmischief 3y ago

A thought experiment: Imagine you have a blob of seemingly random data. Nothing in the data contains anything recognizable as illegal or in violation of copyright. Now imagine that the right input suddenly turns the data into illegal or infringing material, after a transformation operation. And not just a single unique input such as a password which clearly represents a mapping function between two sets of data. But imagine if there were seemingly infinite possible inputs, each of which transformed the data into a different infringing blob of data. If these inputs exactly represented the novel, copyrightable or illegal aspects, but the blob itself was inert. What should be illegal here? The blob, which by itself is free of any questionable bits of data, or the inputs which transform it into something tangible? Both? Neither? Well, it has never been illegal to draw or paint something representing CSAM, for example. And it has never been illegal to draw or paint Mickey Mouse in your own home. What's often illegal is publishing said data. Ignoring the free speech debate around artificially produced CSAM, publishing it is already illegal in many territories. It is also illegal to violate copyright in many countries when publishing information. What's interesting is that it is not illegal to trace a drawing and hanging it up on your wall, instead of buying the the real drawing from its rights-holder. It's also not illegal to reproduce a tracing done by a friend. But the recording and film industries have been more successful in convincing us that it should be illegal to do the same for a song or film. That you should not be able to "trace" the data at home, and that you should not be able to share it with me, that I should not be able to trace over your tracing and bring home a copy for myself. I can understand, and support a copyright system which regulates the publishing of copyrighted material. Even copyleft paradigms lean on regulation for enforcement. But the film and music industry actively try to restrict individual freedoms in the name of corporate profits, while still screwing over their clients and employees with respect to profit-sharing. Back to the point: That blob should never be illegal. The activation functions should never be illegal. That is a basic extension of free speech. But publishing, that is a different story, and we already have laws offering such protections both with respect to illegally-produced or copyrighted content. Any attempt to regulate what kind of model I am allowed to run at home is a massive infringement on my rights as an individual, and is borne either out of gross ignorance of current copyright law from the same people crying, "But think of the copyrights!", or direct, insidious corporate greed. You can adjust this thought experiment so that instead of dealing with a magic blob, we are dealing with a program that makes it really easy to produce illegal or copyrighted works after a bit of human interaction. Is there claim here now? Are we basing the law on how much human involvement was needed to create the output? We've faced similar arguments around technological leaps such as the printing press or mechanical loom. Did we, as a society, reject these advances in technology in order to protect loom workers and scribes? Bottom line. You can pry my models out of my cold, dead or handcuffed hands. Times like these really shine a light on who is complicit in the system, and who suffers from it. If you are in the creative industry, you need to understand how things are going to change. As an engineer with decades of investment into my craft, I also have to face the rude awakening that is ahead in my own industry as automation creates a gap between highly-skilled professionals and newcomers. Being a paid software engineer might become as hard of work as becoming a famous professional artist. Lots of connections, insane specialization and a lifetime devoted to the craft. A lot of people in school for engineering right now might struggle to find employment in 20 years or less if they cannot cross this gap in time. Artists aren't the only tribe experiencing a huge industry shake-up over a technology that will one day be so ubiquitous that it's inside of your toaster.

sinuhe69 3y ago

Orrick dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright claims because they had not registered their images with the U.S. Copyright Office, a requirement for bringing a copyright lawsuit. That is the key.

Topfi 3y ago

Here is a direct link to the motion for those interested: https://scribd.com/document/681174239/Order-on-motion-to-dismiss https://scribd.com/document/681174239/Order-on-motion-to-dis...

aa_is_op 3y ago

Amazing how copyright law amazingly disappears when it's to the detriment of major tech companies and protecting smaller creators. Just amazing!

gmerc 3y ago
I’m not sure if here you are reading that. Have you read the article? The copyright infringement claim (for training) is left intact. It’s the other claims that had no basis in existing law (e.g. no copyright was registered, etc) that have been thrown out.
flanked-evergl 3y ago
> Amazing how copyright law amazingly disappears Can you elaborate in what way it disappeared in your opinion?
- aa_is_op 3y ago
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Spivak 3y ago
It's really not, copyright is and always has been incredibly political and ebbs and flows with the whims of the existing power structures. And that's mostly to do with the fact that copyright, unlike say murder, is much less defined, has as many interpretations as people, and is something that is designed to be overbroad and selectively enforced where everyone in the world by the letter is constantly violating it. So this it pretty much expected and if it swings the other way the US/EU is going to hobble themselves in the face of any locality that gives zero shits about copyright. It's less about the art and more that the art enables these models to do real useful work and is better at it for having access to more data.

kranke155 3y ago

This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from 1,000,000 individuals, train your AI to replace them, compensate no one. You can do this in every area: driving, farming, cooking. Music. Just dispossess everyone of all their property by training an AI to copy all their work! What could be easier (and less morally right)…

treyd 3y ago
Intellectual property never really existed. Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. The production of culture has been slowly becoming more distorted as cultural assets that should be and historically were held in common accumulates under the umbrella of massive intellectual property holders (Disney, Universal, etc) after we took the legal concept that was meant to apply to a much more narrow context and applied it broadly. They benefit disproportionally from intellectual property than individual artists do. The (recent) past dominating the present, being ruled by abstractions, and all that. Is it bad that this will be used to displace individual artists/creatives in the value chain of media production? Of course it is. But we shouldn't be responding to that by clinging harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness, we should be developing new models for funding production.
- rvz 3y ago
  > Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. Great! So given your articles are in the public domain on your website I can make millions out of it without given you a cent or direct credit and sources without paying you and can claim it all as my own then.

ballenf 3y ago

Can someone explain again how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same? There are artists that can study a painting for a few minutes and then recreate it from memory. There are artists who study a particular body of work so long that they can create more works indistinguishable in style. If an artist recreates a copyrighted work or creates a derivative too close to the original, then that new work is potentially copyright infringement. That is, we focus on the output of the process to determine infringement with living artists and ignore the training. But with ML, everyone focuses on the training. It seems an ML tool could add a filter to the output and refuse to output a work that too closely resembles one or more work under copyright. Isn't that basically what legitimate professional artists do as well? Thousands of artists are capable of infringement, but we don't take away their brushes based on capability.

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picadores 3y ago
The AI will not throw a molotowcocktail at you or hang you from a lamppost when it starves?
kranke155 3y ago
Let me change the argument around: Why is it assumed that because an artwork is freely available on the internet, you are allowed to train a machine to reproduce it, being in its totality or just details that are used in the creation of new works? IE why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions. So actually building a machine there, under the cover of darkness, that learns from your work so you can produce new work, why is that allowed in the first place? Certainly wouldn't be at a museum. The key thing here is - if you want artists' data, you should ask for it. They didn't. This would be equivalent of training a Github CoPilot on every available piece of code in existence, ever, instead of what they had available. Why should that be allowed? So if I built some toy code in 1996, and happened to post it on usenet, and it's a great implementation of X, why the heck is CoPilot allowed to read it? It's my property.

ndiddy 3y ago

> Two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit have dropped their infringement claims because they didn’t register their work with the copyright office before suing. The copyright claims will be limited to artist Sarah Anderson’s works, which she has registered. I’m impressed that their legal team was incompetent enough that they didn’t bring this up as an issue before filing the lawsuit.

OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
What makes you think the legal team didn't know? The plaintiffs wanted to sue, so they did
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0dayz 3y ago

Hasn't this always been a precarious road? With say fair use for instance. Not only that but I really wish we could just redo copyright to be more flexible but ultimately empowering the creator with conclusive licenses for others to use (like in AI, other creative work, streaming, etc.) and the creator is paid either monthly or per generated image/song.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

Having done way more corporate court than I want (patents, mergers, liquidation), I’m increasingly convinced that the judicial system is fundamentally flawed. The reality is that the law in 2023 US is so obscure and opaque and how judges come to their ruling seems to be by their total whim with no actual philosophy other than maintenance of the system. Further I’m extremely unimpressed with the vast majority of judges competence in display - such that contempt should be the starting position. The fact that this is how laws are actually made (precedent of applications will always beat the letter) means that nobody who doesn’t have a warchest will be able to actually utilize the system coherently As with everything now, courts are rules by those with the most money

corethree 3y ago
The final decision made by this article is one I agree with with or without money and I have no incentive the game. Every piece of creation you and I make us the sum total of our experiences and that includes copy written work. Holding an LLM guilty for that is like holding the human brain guilty for memorizing copyrighted work.
- nirvdrum 3y ago
  And yet these systems are incapable of genuine creativity. If they were, they would be taught rules & techniques and set off to their own devices to draw, like humans. But, they can't and they're not. LLMs and humans don't learn or create in the same way. Moreover, there's no reason we should grant LLMs the full rights and privileges of humans.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    Are we going to hold all human artists to that standard as well? I suspect many would fail it.
    - nirvdrum 3y ago
      I don't follow. Which standard is that? Many (most?) artists do in fact fail, particularly if they're unable to find a creative way to differentiate themselves. Society generally shuns plagiarism. We call out things that are deemed as "knock-offs", whether they're bands, video games, movies, books, or clothing.

TotalCrackpot 3y ago

This is consistent with historically intellectual property being a construct that benefits owners of capital and not actual innovators. That's why I think it should be abolished, this is yet another mechanism to monopolize a space to profit through some kind of rent-seeking procedure.

nness 3y ago
What should it be replaced with — a system where no one retains intellectual rights over the works that they create?
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  What is intellectual right? I respect authorship, with obvious consideration that no intellectual activity happens in a vacuum, as Isaac Newton said: "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.". I believe that I should never be able to get financially hurt or go to prison because I used other person's thoughts.
  - delecti 3y ago
    > I believe that I should never be able to get financially hurt or go to prison because I used other person's thoughts "Use another person's thoughts" is obfuscating the reality of the situation so far as to be disingenuous. The way society ensures new works are created is to guarantee a temporary monopoly over certain narrow types of ideas to their creators. Why would anybody be an author if everyone could download free copies of any new book that came out? I think patents are granted too liberally, and that copyright lasts at least twice as long as it should, but to argue that intellectual property can't even in theory be beneficial to protect is silly.
    - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
      Do you suggest that you need intellectual property for new ideas to be created and propagated? THAT'S silly! For most of the history of this species there were no intellectual property rights and people still were sharing their thoughts and ideas for various reasons.

OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago

> Two of the three artists who filed the lawsuit have dropped their infringement claims because they didn’t register their work with the copyright office before suing. The copyright claims will be limited to artist Sarah Anderson’s works, which she has registered. The lawsuit is moving forward, but only on copyrighted work. This is (not yet) a story.

thowaway91234 3y ago
I’m so confused about American copyright law. I was always under the impression that copyright is granted automatically and you didn’t need to “register” it, contrarily to a trademark which must be registered and is only valid for its specific industry.
- nness 3y ago
  That was my belief too, but: "Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work." https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html (Makes me wonder if, back in the day, every song that was downloaded and then pursued by the RIAA was registered...)
  - dannyw 3y ago
    Which law firm took the plaintiffs and filed the case without registering copyright? This isn't a good sign.
    - pavon 3y ago
      It can take several months to register a copyright, so they may have started the process and took a gamble on how slow the court would move, knowing they could fallback on the works that were registered if it didn't work out.

sofixa 3y ago

I'm really looking forward to the EU framework around "AI". It's definitely a better approach than having individual artists sue and get dismissed on technicalities (that don't even apply in most of the EU - e.g. in France, if you release something by default you get copyright on it, so the judge's reasoning couldn't apply here) and judges deciding based on their interpretation of vague laws crafted in an age when "AI" was little more than niche science fiction if that.

flanked-evergl 3y ago
> I'm really looking forward to the EU framework around "AI" After GDPR and the cookie pop-ups my expectations for things coming out of the EU is quite low. Every company I have worked it has a different and often conflicting interpretation of GDPR, and some places uses it to play politics, and governments of individual EU countries are not doing their part to clarify how things should be interpreted. It's a dumpster fire IMO.

laylower 3y ago

This is the first paragraph... "The contentious issue of whether AI art generators violent copyright — since they are by and large trained on human artists’ work, in many cases without their direct affirmative consent, compensation, or even knowledge — has taken a step forward to being settled in the U.S. today." Is it human-generated? Violent copyright?

cmiles74 3y ago

It seems like they focused too much on the details of how the model works and how data is encoded by the model. "In his dismissal of infringement claims, Orrick wrote that plaintiffs’ theory is “unclear” as to whether there are copies of training images stored in Stable Diffusion that are utilized by DeviantArt and Midjourney. He pointed to the defense’s arguments that it’s impossible for billions of images “to be compressed into an active program,” like Stable Diffusion." Perhaps future litigation will be more successful if they treat the model as a black box. Could an argument be made that a person's intellectual property was used to train the model without compensation and _that_ is the illegal act? From there one would only have to demonstrate that the output form the model is similar to a person's body of work.

soco 3y ago
Maybe even the data for training should be opt-in, then at least this case would have been easier solved. The outputs are then another story - I can agree to training but I'm not eager to see knock-offs of my work being outputted and spread.

nologic01 3y ago

Can somebody explain how this will not kill any incentive to publish anything? Why would any human spend their limited lifespan to create a piece of work that will be grabbed without permission, approximated algorithmically (at least on the surface) and reused in infinite possible small variations without any attribution or remuneration whatsoever? This feels like a reversion to medieval times with minimal trade between regions as thieves would ambush traders and steal any goods.

gedy 3y ago
It's just not that different from people seeing works and learning or being inspired, so how do you "ban AI" without adding more crazy DRM/DMCA stuff for legitimate use?
- bakugo 3y ago
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  - PierceJoy 3y ago
    I agree that the scale is different, but even the way you’ve phrased it sounds pretty comparable to how humans learn and produce art. Besides scale, how is it different?
    - kaibee 3y ago
      The colour of the bits is different. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
  - csallen 3y ago
    Um, it's extremely comparable. You basically just described the human process, but used bigger numbers lol. Go on any art site, whether it's drawings or writing, and a massive amount of the human learning and inspiration you see is just copying from others, too. People drawing their favorite characters, writing fan fiction that copies from their favorite books, etc. This is so extremely comparable to AI it's weird to me that you don't see it.

raincole 3y ago

My perspective is there are two different main issues about AI (especially Stable Diffusion). One is how it works consistently with the current law. Ml model is basically a highly lossy compressed data format. If you collect millions of copyrighted images, merge them into a super big image, then compress it into a .jpg. Are you allowed to redistribute this .jpg file? To me, it's mostly depending on how lossy (low quality) your .jpg is. (Note the fact that human brains are also lossy compressed data is completely irrelevant here: you can only compare machine to machine, algorithm to algorithm. You can't say if a human has right to do X, therefore a machine has the same right to do X.) But this line of thinking, while consistent to me, is dangerous. Because it means open models like Stability Diffusion are more likely to be illegal than a closed one like MidJourney, since it's closer to the source materials. If closed models end up being legal but open models don't, it would be a big loss for our society as a whole.

gpderetta 3y ago
Machines do not have rights. The question is whether an human with a specific machine has a certain right, as opposed to a human with a different machine.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  > human with a specific machine I assume the entire client+server system constitutes the "machine" in this case, correct? So does "human with" refer to the end user (client side) or the sysadmin (server side)? Maybe one is an accomplice? The machine isn't going to infringe without certain prompting by the end user, just as an inkjet printer isn't going to do so.
harshreality 3y ago
That's a difficult question because the boundaries of similarity/derived works for copyright purposes are determined by judges and juries based on their intuitions. There's no mathematical similarity testing, and trying to formulate such a thing would be challenging. What's similar enough to a pop music theme, that has a grand total of a few lines of unique music, to be a copyright violation? How many bars have to be copied, and what kinds of minor variances do or don't avoid a violation? If you're inspired by a haiku, and change 5 of 17 syllables, is that still a copyright violation? Who knows.

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ptx 3y ago

> Orrick spends the rest of his ruling explaining why he found the artists’ complaint defective, which includes various issues, but the big one being that two of the artists — McKernan and Ortiz, did not actually file copyrights on their art with the U.S. Copyright Office. [...] The other problem for plaintiffs is that it is simply not plausible that every Training Image used to train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable) What? I thought everything was copyrighted by default under the Berne Convention? That's the reason for the existence of CC0 [0], after all. Their FAQ says: "Copyright and other laws throughout the world automatically extend copyright protection to works of authorship and databases, whether the author or creator wants those rights or not." [0] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_CC0.3F https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_CC0.3F

silverlight 3y ago
In the U.S. you have to actually file for a copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office if you actually want to bring a copyright suit against someone.

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