8 ms·

High Court rules that Getty vs. Stability AI case can proceed

110 points by AndrewDucker 3y ago

asperous 3y ago
The training jurisdiction one is interesting. Are future companies going to exclusively train their models in a copyright lack country? Seems like jurisdiction would be based on the copyright of the allegedly infringed images, and UK-based users creating copyright infringing copies in the UK. But that's apparently not the law or case law in the UK yet.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  As anyone stealing data or other digital goods in countries that dont respect property they will be punished when trying to sell in countries there property is protected.
  - whythre 3y ago
    Still not convinced training AI is theft, and I think copyright law is a cudgel used by powerful corpos to extract rent and smash innovation.
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
      Yep. That is the question. Anyone that immediately comes back with “it’s stealing!”, especially those that were confidently saying it when this first became an issue, long before they would’ve had any time to contemplate it deeply, are just proving that techies’ sense of transferable expertise is completely unfounded.
      - Retric 3y ago
        No it isn’t, because ‘steeling’ is allowed. There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. However being a derivative work isn’t enough to guarantee copyright infringement. So, the only question is if we are going to carve out an exception here or not. The idea someone can use a VCR to copy live TV and let people watch it later came out of a court case not copyright law. There’s a lot of such exceptions, but getting one isn’t guaranteed.
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        There are some ironclad exceptions but they would have to make it through the dysfunctional Congress. The big one is recipes. Recipes under the current copyright regime in the US are considered non-copyrightable facts, which is why every cookbook and recipe blog has lots of copyrightable splash photos and personal anecdotes. Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box.
        blibble 3y ago
        not sure what Congress has to do with a case in the UK fair use is mostly a US concept, there is no such thing in the UK or most other countries
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        It seems like UK and EU agree that you cannot copyright a recipe other than maybe the exact way it was written: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-property-rights-in-recipes-and-food https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-pr... https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ Though you can patent novel methods of food production, which is also true in the US. The root statement is still the same, legislatures can amend copyright laws as they wish if they really care. I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now, but that’s my impression from across the pond.
        blibble 3y ago
        > I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now in terms of ability to legislate it works considerably better than the US congress up to you if you call that well functioning
        surfacedetail 3y ago
        You can only copyright the actual expression of a recipe as a literary work, but the functional aspect, the cake let's say, isn't copyrightable.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. There isn’t much to debate, unless of course, you wish to benefit from that theft. Powerful corpos can train whatever they wish against the data they own. For instance, microsoft can train its bots on microsoft’s source code, instead of people’s code, but that is not going to happen because they are aware of the implications - the procedural generators are exactly that and nothing more. Meanwhile we cant use their products without a license. So if they decides to play this game then so should we.
      - AmericanChopper 3y ago
        > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. Using publicly available information doesn’t require anybody’s consent.
      - tavavex 3y ago
        Theft is the act of taking away someone else's property. "Using" (aka copying) the public data I create isn't theft, be it with my consent or without. It may be copyright infringement under certain conditions, but arguing that this infringement is stealing is like arguing that digital piracy and shoplifting are basically the same thing.
      - Ukv 3y ago
        > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft Are text snippets, thumbnnails and site caches shown by search engines (on an opt-out basis) "theft"? If you draw a car, which you can do due to having seen many individually-copyrighted car designs, are you stealing from auto manufacturers? Have I just committed theft by using a portion of your comment above as a quote? I don't claim here that statistical model fitting inherently needs to be treated the same as the above examples, but rather use examples to show that the bar of "using" is far too broad. Legally, copyright infringement in the US requires that the works are substantially similar and not covered by Fair Use. Morally, I believe that artificial scarcity, such as evergreening of medical patents, is detrimental and needs to be prevented wherever feasible - and wouldn't call any kind of copying/sharing/piracy "theft". The digital equivalent of theft is, for example, account theft where you're actually removing the object from the owner's possession.
    - Loughla 3y ago
      What is your justification for AI training not being theft?
      - artninja1988 3y ago
        Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody
        oblib 3y ago
        >>Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody That's a perfect oxymoron.
        anonymousab 3y ago
        The major corps and tech companies loved to claim otherwise for years as it suited their interests.
      - gedy 3y ago
        Fair use. (Even if the creator doesn't like that)
      - prvc 3y ago
        If including a copyrighted work in an AI training corpus is theft because of its influence on some artificial neural net, then so is viewing it by a human being, whose memory is now somehow the property of the copyright holder, an absurd conclusion.
        poidos 3y ago
        Your premise that a neural net is equivalent to a human brain seems much more absurd.
        prvc 3y ago
        You wouldn't look at a car.
        3y ago
    - JambalayaJim 3y ago
      Training a model on another person’s work shouldn’t be considered theft, but the model also shouldn’t be allowed to generate profits. Without of course compensating the owner of the training data. Someone needs to come up with a royalty structure for this stuff.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway14356 3y ago
      if you can legally use something its not stealing. Even the argument that its logical to call it that isn't certain. If i take your picture I own it? If you take a picture and i upload it to fb meta gets to use it? If I publish your book under my name and no one finds out, did I write it? If no author can be found, may I read it?
      - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - rasz 3y ago
      Thats because the word 'training' is doing all the heavy lifting here. Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database. Humans learn, humans train, computers encode data. You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie.
      - chii 3y ago
        > You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie. no you wouldn't, but these diffusion models do way more than ffmpeg, and do qualitatively different things. I am on the fence, but i lean towards the side where training an AI using existing works is not infringement, as long as the AI's output is (or can be) majority new works. For example, a poor training algorithm that merely repeats the training dataset (and cannot output new works) is infringing, while a different algorithm (such as the current stable diffusion one) that can output works that has never been made and is totally new, does not infringe - after all, style and ideas are not infringing and if the algorithm managed to extract those ideas from the training set, all the better.
        ddol 3y ago
        What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”? If I look at a photo of Prince and then using that image as reference create a new silkscreen painting is that fair use or infringement? Because the US Supreme Court has ruled that instance I referenced was infringement as both images were used for magazine covers [0]. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna64624 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna64624
        chii 3y ago
        > What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”? the existing copyright rulings are sufficient to determine this, and has nothing to do with ai models. You've already pointed out a case - if you use an AI to generate an image which has sufficient likeness to an existing one, then the AI portion is irrelevant to the ruling. You could've made that same image in photoshop without AI, and should obtain the same ruling. But in the above circumstance, the silkscreen used in the creation of the image does not itself infringe. And replace that silkscreen with AI model, nothing has changed.
    - jterrys 3y ago
      I think using data that you don't have the copyrights to train AI is theft. That being said, Getty is hardly the paragon of goodwill considering they regularly steal from public domain databases, issue DMCA takedown requests of the stolen content from said databases, and then turn around to sell it to unwitting people for a subscription. They own none of the copyrights for what they are doing but have been allowed to get away with it.
      - zmgsabst 3y ago
        Have you only read books you own the copyright to? What’s the legal distinction between you learning and AI learning?
        keonix 3y ago
        If I regurgiate something I read in copyrighted book without proper license that also would be theft, no distinction there. I'm not distributing my brain, at least same (but probably more restrictive) should apply to models - training is okay, but using and distributing should be limited by copyright
        broken-kebab 3y ago
        Explaining anything publicly based on my understanding I got reading books would be illegal following this logic. I'm not sure this is how it works.
        visarga 3y ago
        They want to muddle the distinction between ideas and expression. You can't copyright ideas. Everyone is entitled to copy ideas.
        keonix 3y ago
        It would not be illegal based on fair use (though you have to be careful there also), but if you try to regurgiate large portions of the book then it would be. And we do know that models regurgiate training material verbatim (Copilot)
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      I think that if you stick to a definition of 'fair use' that allows the slurping of entire corpuses, then copyright doesn't have any teeth anymore. If the license makes the data public viewing, like with websites, then slurp all you want. If the license forbids automated bulk processing, then stop whining about fair use and pay for a license that allows bulk processing. "Out system actively uses every single byte of data to produce any output" is so obviously not the intention fair use clauses.
      - surfacedetail 3y ago
        Fair use doesn't exist in the UK.
    - vohk 3y ago
      While I somewhat agree with that take on copyright, I think you have to pick a lane to keep that position coherent: Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation, or You throw out copyright completely in this context, but that means the resulting models cannot be treated as proprietary either unless they were produced using absolutely no unlicensed training data. I think there is an argument for both. Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. The current status quo is perfectly described by powerful corpos extracting rent. Billions for themselves and pennies for the average artist.
      - tavavex 3y ago
        > Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation I don't think that current copyright laws automatically entitles people to royalties from something like AI-generated imagery. The dichotomy you've presented here isn't pro-copyright vs anti-copyright, but "so pro-copyright that they argue for expanding the current laws" vs not. > Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. That definitely benefits all the "powerful corpos" you've mentioned here. Now, Disney, Adobe, Meta etc. can use a fraction of their money to get all the data they would ever need and be the sole profiteers, while all newcomers will face an impassable barrier to entry that prevents them from ever threatening the existing players.
      - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
        There is at least one middle ground area where you acknowledge that copyright and intellectual property restrictions should be removed, but that we should also recognize that all of the existing work was created by artists who expected they would have copyright protection. We should in my view not take from artists without their consent, and there is no implied consent when their works were posted at a time they believed they were protected by copyright. This would mean we have to do a few difficult and worthwhile things: explicitly dismantle the copyright system, encourage artists to donate their existing works to the commons, and then only make datasets based on legally collected information. This would also have the side effect of encouraging the development of new training techniques and model designs which are more sample efficient. I am afraid that what we will do instead is allow some erosion of copyright for small creators without dismantling the power large intellectual property holders have over the rest of us.
    - anonymousab 3y ago
      > I think copyright law is a cudgel It is interesting to me that we are finally seeing a case where many smaller, independent artists and creators are using these laws to assert their rights against the encroachment of the moneyed tech interests, and of course now all of the powerful corpos are singing another tune. Rules for thee, not for me.
wokwokwok 3y ago
> The idea here is that Stable Diffusion "memorised" the Getty logo, and could place it on outputs on demand. > This is no longer possible as far as I can tell. ? Why would it no longer be possible? Stability has exactly zero way of updating the weights once they have made them public. Is the suggestion that this was only possible on 1.4 and 1.5 and XL don't have the issue? ...or somehow what the model was previously capable of doing is now no longer possible? That seems like enormously unsubstantiated speculation. We have proof from multiple independent studies that these models in general memorize a small percentage of their training data to the degree that reasonable reconstructions of the original training images can be recovered from the model. There is, to my knowledge, no mitigation of this that has been implemented, or even conceptualized by either stability or anyone else. Interesting read regarding the actual ruling the judge made, but this is some "opinion here" commentary, which seem out of place; what the court actually rules is the interesting part of this.
- echelon 3y ago
  I've memorized the Getty image and could reproduce it for you. Should I be lobotomized? I think we need an entirely new approach to copyright. You can't copyright a brain, and weights are closer to that than they are pirated digital archives.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    Stable Diffusion isn't a human being. It's not even sentient. It's a system designed to synthesize images, and it was trained using images authored by human beings - without the rightsholders' consent. This has nothing to do with lobotomies. You have rights as a human that a piece of software does not have. I don't understand why I keep seeing people roll stuff out like 'should I be lobotomized' as some sort of attempt to distract from this just being a dispute over copyright minimalism/maximalism.
    - artninja1988 3y ago
      And the people training stabile diffusion shouldn't need the authors consent to train on their works.
rvz 3y ago
Very predictable and unsurprising. Stability knew they needed a license for training on Getty's copyrighted images given the presence of their watermark. OpenAI partnered with Shutterstock for that case with DALL-E to avoid this legal headache. The fair use excuses here are absolutely weak in Stability's case and this will only end with a licensing deal being made.
- surfacedetail 3y ago
  >The fair use excuses here are absolutely weak in Stability's case and this will only end with a licensing deal being made. There's no fair use in the UK, and this decision is preliminary on whether the case should proceed.
  - ascorbic 3y ago
    The equivalent concept is fair dealing https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright
    - surfacedetail 3y ago
      I know, I'm a lawyer. Fair dealing is closed-ended, and the TDM exception doesn't apply to StabilityAI as they're not a research institution, their best defence is that the training didn't take place in the UK, or that any copies were transient.
thorum 3y ago
Important to note this is not a ruling about copyright infringement: Stability has not yet even presented a defense on that subject. Instead they argued that although they are a UK-based company, no people or computers residing in the UK were involved in the development of Stable Diffusion, so a UK court has no jurisdiction on the matter. The judge didn’t find the evidence for this (which includes the CEO saying he asked around and is “confident” it’s true) conclusive enough, so things will move forward. It may turn out to be true later, but Getty will get a chance to present counter-evidence, and so on.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  I truly don't see how it matters where the computers are is he saying they airgapped their corporation and never looked at any output? that their product never operated in the UK? Bizarre.
- TimPC 3y ago
  You can infringe in the UK by serving copyrighted content to users in the UK regardless of where the actual training occurred. This take on copyright law is asinine and juvenile and I’m not surprised the judge struck it down. Can you imagine if you had no piracy occurring in the US when users download pirated content from a server in the Philippines and you could only handle the case under the Filipino legal system?
  - surfacedetail 3y ago
    But that's the issue, they're not serving copyright content to users in the UK because the outputs aren't derivative, the legal question is very narrow, it is about the training of the model. There will be a separate trade mark question on the outputs, which wasn't part of the request to dismiss the case. >Can you imagine if you had no piracy occurring in the US when users download pirated content from a server in the Philippines and you could only handle the case under the Filipino legal system? Your hypothetical is about actual distribution and communication to the public of copyright works, this is very different to what is at stake here.
georgebarnett 3y ago
Maybe I've got the completely wrong end of the stick here, but why isn't an AI model treated as a fact, given it's essentially a factual summary of the most likely bit sequences to occur given an input sequence?
- monocasa 3y ago
  Because copyright has always tried to balance the idea of 'facts' against the idea of 'derivative works', even when they're blatantly in conflict with one another.
- gpm 3y ago
  This argument feels like arguing that it's a fact that Game of Thrones first book consists of <this text>, thus <this text> (the entirety of the book) isn't copyrightable. If the bit sequence is likely to occur because it's someone else's creative content (or part of it is)... that doesn't seem like it can be a 'fact' in the relevant manner.
  - georgebarnett 3y ago
    What I'm wrangling with is this: I agree that a particular sequence of words is copyrightable. What I'm struggling with is that facts _about_ that corpus of text are not copyrightable. A simple fact could be that the word "bar" is the 5th word. The 6th word is "jazz". Etc. A model is trained from these "facts" across many source documents. It is thus itself a derived 'fact' given a set of training inputs and parameters, so then how could _that_ then be copyrighted? Put another way - there's the origin text and then.. is it turtles all the way down and none of it can be copyrighted because its all math and calculations derived from that?
- staticman2 3y ago
  Well for one thing creative works aren't "facts". If they were you could simply pirate any movie, because "facts" can't be copyrighted.
neya 3y ago
This is how a company whose failing business model collapsing fast would act. I never liked Stock photo sites since their inception - they always followed dark patterns, spammed the entire search results with keywords that had nothing to do with them. If you searched for something "free" they would show you images of something that was NOT free. But hey, "royalty free" is close enough, I guess? They went on to sue Google Images that allowed the spirit of open web - where you could simply right click and save any image - from doing so. And now that AI can pretty much produce stellar quality images with just a single line of text input, they don't have anything else to do other than drag everyone into litigation. I'm a photographer myself (Sony A7C2/24-70mm G-Master) and I have learned to accept that this is going to be the future. And though there will always be a market for real photographers, AI will take over bulk of our jobs. And the programmer in me who spent ages trying to find the perfect background image for my website says that's not really a bad thing.
- visarga 3y ago
  Initially photography itself was considered un-copyrightable "because it just reproduces a natural image". But later they came around and considered topic selection, composition, and other elements to be creative.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
visarga 3y ago
I don't think copyright has much meaning left in it anymore. Any work can be "extracted" into its elements, ideas and style, and recombined in million ways. You could generate a billion images with SD and train the next model on them. Make sure they don't look close to copyrighted works. Being AI generated, they have no copyright. You can still use real data as well if it is in the public domain. If you do this enough the initial copyrighted dataset is going to be further removed from the model. The model can't reproduce a copyrighted work because it hasn't seen any of them during training. But more importantly, this process strictly separates ideas from expression and trains only on ideas without copyrighted expression. If authors complain it means they want to own ideas and styles. You can also use copyrighted works to train a classifier to rank the quality of training examples, and apply it to filter your synthetic data to be higher quality. You can even train a RLHF model to say when two works are "close enough" to constitute an infringement, and double down on safety by ensuring you don't generate or use risky works. That's why I was saying that I don't think copyright has much meaning left in it anymore. Knowledge wants to be free, it travels, shape-shifts and evolves. It does not belong to any one of us except if we keep it to ourselves.
- PUSH_AX 3y ago
  You can’t trust the output to be accurate yet, the resulting model would be worse than the original for artefacts.
  - visarga 3y ago
    In smaller LLMs it has been demonstrated that purely synthetic datasets can make a model 5x more efficient. So a 1.5B model can score like a 7B model. The model is Phi-1.5 from Microsoft. But you can also empower the LLM, it can use more tokens, chain of thought, multiple rounds of LLM inference, use other specialized models, use tools, execute code, use search, and have a human in the loop. Does that remind you of anything? Yes, "OpenAI GPTs", they are the empowered LLM environments that can create data superior to LLM alone. The general recipe is LLM+something extra = smarter than LLM. That something extra is usually a simulation or code execution or some real world interaction. This generates LLM error examples and feedback to learn to fix them in the next iteration. It is targeted training data.

110 points by AndrewDucker 3y ago

The training jurisdiction one is interesting. Are future companies going to exclusively train their models in a copyright lack country? Seems like jurisdiction would be based on the copyright of the allegedly infringed images, and UK-based users creating copyright infringing copies in the UK. But that's apparently not the law or case law in the UK yet.

gumballindie 3y ago
As anyone stealing data or other digital goods in countries that dont respect property they will be punished when trying to sell in countries there property is protected.
- whythre 3y ago
  Still not convinced training AI is theft, and I think copyright law is a cudgel used by powerful corpos to extract rent and smash innovation.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    Yep. That is the question. Anyone that immediately comes back with “it’s stealing!”, especially those that were confidently saying it when this first became an issue, long before they would’ve had any time to contemplate it deeply, are just proving that techies’ sense of transferable expertise is completely unfounded.
    - Retric 3y ago
      No it isn’t, because ‘steeling’ is allowed. There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. However being a derivative work isn’t enough to guarantee copyright infringement. So, the only question is if we are going to carve out an exception here or not. The idea someone can use a VCR to copy live TV and let people watch it later came out of a court case not copyright law. There’s a lot of such exceptions, but getting one isn’t guaranteed.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        There are some ironclad exceptions but they would have to make it through the dysfunctional Congress. The big one is recipes. Recipes under the current copyright regime in the US are considered non-copyrightable facts, which is why every cookbook and recipe blog has lots of copyrightable splash photos and personal anecdotes. Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box.
        blibble 3y ago
        not sure what Congress has to do with a case in the UK fair use is mostly a US concept, there is no such thing in the UK or most other countries
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        It seems like UK and EU agree that you cannot copyright a recipe other than maybe the exact way it was written: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-property-rights-in-recipes-and-food https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-pr... https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ Though you can patent novel methods of food production, which is also true in the US. The root statement is still the same, legislatures can amend copyright laws as they wish if they really care. I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now, but that’s my impression from across the pond.
        blibble 3y ago
        > I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now in terms of ability to legislate it works considerably better than the US congress up to you if you call that well functioning
        surfacedetail 3y ago
        You can only copyright the actual expression of a recipe as a literary work, but the functional aspect, the cake let's say, isn't copyrightable.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. There isn’t much to debate, unless of course, you wish to benefit from that theft. Powerful corpos can train whatever they wish against the data they own. For instance, microsoft can train its bots on microsoft’s source code, instead of people’s code, but that is not going to happen because they are aware of the implications - the procedural generators are exactly that and nothing more. Meanwhile we cant use their products without a license. So if they decides to play this game then so should we.
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. Using publicly available information doesn’t require anybody’s consent.
    - tavavex 3y ago
      Theft is the act of taking away someone else's property. "Using" (aka copying) the public data I create isn't theft, be it with my consent or without. It may be copyright infringement under certain conditions, but arguing that this infringement is stealing is like arguing that digital piracy and shoplifting are basically the same thing.
    - Ukv 3y ago
      > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft Are text snippets, thumbnnails and site caches shown by search engines (on an opt-out basis) "theft"? If you draw a car, which you can do due to having seen many individually-copyrighted car designs, are you stealing from auto manufacturers? Have I just committed theft by using a portion of your comment above as a quote? I don't claim here that statistical model fitting inherently needs to be treated the same as the above examples, but rather use examples to show that the bar of "using" is far too broad. Legally, copyright infringement in the US requires that the works are substantially similar and not covered by Fair Use. Morally, I believe that artificial scarcity, such as evergreening of medical patents, is detrimental and needs to be prevented wherever feasible - and wouldn't call any kind of copying/sharing/piracy "theft". The digital equivalent of theft is, for example, account theft where you're actually removing the object from the owner's possession.
  - Loughla 3y ago
    What is your justification for AI training not being theft?
    - artninja1988 3y ago
      Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody
      - oblib 3y ago
        >>Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody That's a perfect oxymoron.
      - anonymousab 3y ago
        The major corps and tech companies loved to claim otherwise for years as it suited their interests.
    - gedy 3y ago
      Fair use. (Even if the creator doesn't like that)
    - prvc 3y ago
      If including a copyrighted work in an AI training corpus is theft because of its influence on some artificial neural net, then so is viewing it by a human being, whose memory is now somehow the property of the copyright holder, an absurd conclusion.
      - poidos 3y ago
        Your premise that a neural net is equivalent to a human brain seems much more absurd.
        prvc 3y ago
        You wouldn't look at a car.
      - 3y ago
  - JambalayaJim 3y ago
    Training a model on another person’s work shouldn’t be considered theft, but the model also shouldn’t be allowed to generate profits. Without of course compensating the owner of the training data. Someone needs to come up with a royalty structure for this stuff.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway14356 3y ago
    if you can legally use something its not stealing. Even the argument that its logical to call it that isn't certain. If i take your picture I own it? If you take a picture and i upload it to fb meta gets to use it? If I publish your book under my name and no one finds out, did I write it? If no author can be found, may I read it?
    - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - rasz 3y ago
    Thats because the word 'training' is doing all the heavy lifting here. Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database. Humans learn, humans train, computers encode data. You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie.
    - chii 3y ago
      > You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie. no you wouldn't, but these diffusion models do way more than ffmpeg, and do qualitatively different things. I am on the fence, but i lean towards the side where training an AI using existing works is not infringement, as long as the AI's output is (or can be) majority new works. For example, a poor training algorithm that merely repeats the training dataset (and cannot output new works) is infringing, while a different algorithm (such as the current stable diffusion one) that can output works that has never been made and is totally new, does not infringe - after all, style and ideas are not infringing and if the algorithm managed to extract those ideas from the training set, all the better.
      - ddol 3y ago
        What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”? If I look at a photo of Prince and then using that image as reference create a new silkscreen painting is that fair use or infringement? Because the US Supreme Court has ruled that instance I referenced was infringement as both images were used for magazine covers [0]. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna64624 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna64624
        chii 3y ago
        > What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”? the existing copyright rulings are sufficient to determine this, and has nothing to do with ai models. You've already pointed out a case - if you use an AI to generate an image which has sufficient likeness to an existing one, then the AI portion is irrelevant to the ruling. You could've made that same image in photoshop without AI, and should obtain the same ruling. But in the above circumstance, the silkscreen used in the creation of the image does not itself infringe. And replace that silkscreen with AI model, nothing has changed.
  - jterrys 3y ago
    I think using data that you don't have the copyrights to train AI is theft. That being said, Getty is hardly the paragon of goodwill considering they regularly steal from public domain databases, issue DMCA takedown requests of the stolen content from said databases, and then turn around to sell it to unwitting people for a subscription. They own none of the copyrights for what they are doing but have been allowed to get away with it.
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      Have you only read books you own the copyright to? What’s the legal distinction between you learning and AI learning?
      - keonix 3y ago
        If I regurgiate something I read in copyrighted book without proper license that also would be theft, no distinction there. I'm not distributing my brain, at least same (but probably more restrictive) should apply to models - training is okay, but using and distributing should be limited by copyright
        broken-kebab 3y ago
        Explaining anything publicly based on my understanding I got reading books would be illegal following this logic. I'm not sure this is how it works.
        visarga 3y ago
        They want to muddle the distinction between ideas and expression. You can't copyright ideas. Everyone is entitled to copy ideas.
        keonix 3y ago
        It would not be illegal based on fair use (though you have to be careful there also), but if you try to regurgiate large portions of the book then it would be. And we do know that models regurgiate training material verbatim (Copilot)
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    I think that if you stick to a definition of 'fair use' that allows the slurping of entire corpuses, then copyright doesn't have any teeth anymore. If the license makes the data public viewing, like with websites, then slurp all you want. If the license forbids automated bulk processing, then stop whining about fair use and pay for a license that allows bulk processing. "Out system actively uses every single byte of data to produce any output" is so obviously not the intention fair use clauses.
    - surfacedetail 3y ago
      Fair use doesn't exist in the UK.
  - vohk 3y ago
    While I somewhat agree with that take on copyright, I think you have to pick a lane to keep that position coherent: Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation, or You throw out copyright completely in this context, but that means the resulting models cannot be treated as proprietary either unless they were produced using absolutely no unlicensed training data. I think there is an argument for both. Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. The current status quo is perfectly described by powerful corpos extracting rent. Billions for themselves and pennies for the average artist.
    - tavavex 3y ago
      > Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation I don't think that current copyright laws automatically entitles people to royalties from something like AI-generated imagery. The dichotomy you've presented here isn't pro-copyright vs anti-copyright, but "so pro-copyright that they argue for expanding the current laws" vs not. > Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. That definitely benefits all the "powerful corpos" you've mentioned here. Now, Disney, Adobe, Meta etc. can use a fraction of their money to get all the data they would ever need and be the sole profiteers, while all newcomers will face an impassable barrier to entry that prevents them from ever threatening the existing players.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      There is at least one middle ground area where you acknowledge that copyright and intellectual property restrictions should be removed, but that we should also recognize that all of the existing work was created by artists who expected they would have copyright protection. We should in my view not take from artists without their consent, and there is no implied consent when their works were posted at a time they believed they were protected by copyright. This would mean we have to do a few difficult and worthwhile things: explicitly dismantle the copyright system, encourage artists to donate their existing works to the commons, and then only make datasets based on legally collected information. This would also have the side effect of encouraging the development of new training techniques and model designs which are more sample efficient. I am afraid that what we will do instead is allow some erosion of copyright for small creators without dismantling the power large intellectual property holders have over the rest of us.
  - anonymousab 3y ago
    > I think copyright law is a cudgel It is interesting to me that we are finally seeing a case where many smaller, independent artists and creators are using these laws to assert their rights against the encroachment of the moneyed tech interests, and of course now all of the powerful corpos are singing another tune. Rules for thee, not for me.

wokwokwok 3y ago

> The idea here is that Stable Diffusion "memorised" the Getty logo, and could place it on outputs on demand. > This is no longer possible as far as I can tell. ? Why would it no longer be possible? Stability has exactly zero way of updating the weights once they have made them public. Is the suggestion that this was only possible on 1.4 and 1.5 and XL don't have the issue? ...or somehow what the model was previously capable of doing is now no longer possible? That seems like enormously unsubstantiated speculation. We have proof from multiple independent studies that these models in general memorize a small percentage of their training data to the degree that reasonable reconstructions of the original training images can be recovered from the model. There is, to my knowledge, no mitigation of this that has been implemented, or even conceptualized by either stability or anyone else. Interesting read regarding the actual ruling the judge made, but this is some "opinion here" commentary, which seem out of place; what the court actually rules is the interesting part of this.

echelon 3y ago
I've memorized the Getty image and could reproduce it for you. Should I be lobotomized? I think we need an entirely new approach to copyright. You can't copyright a brain, and weights are closer to that than they are pirated digital archives.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Stable Diffusion isn't a human being. It's not even sentient. It's a system designed to synthesize images, and it was trained using images authored by human beings - without the rightsholders' consent. This has nothing to do with lobotomies. You have rights as a human that a piece of software does not have. I don't understand why I keep seeing people roll stuff out like 'should I be lobotomized' as some sort of attempt to distract from this just being a dispute over copyright minimalism/maximalism.
  - artninja1988 3y ago
    And the people training stabile diffusion shouldn't need the authors consent to train on their works.

rvz 3y ago

Very predictable and unsurprising. Stability knew they needed a license for training on Getty's copyrighted images given the presence of their watermark. OpenAI partnered with Shutterstock for that case with DALL-E to avoid this legal headache. The fair use excuses here are absolutely weak in Stability's case and this will only end with a licensing deal being made.

surfacedetail 3y ago
>The fair use excuses here are absolutely weak in Stability's case and this will only end with a licensing deal being made. There's no fair use in the UK, and this decision is preliminary on whether the case should proceed.
- ascorbic 3y ago
  The equivalent concept is fair dealing https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright
  - surfacedetail 3y ago
    I know, I'm a lawyer. Fair dealing is closed-ended, and the TDM exception doesn't apply to StabilityAI as they're not a research institution, their best defence is that the training didn't take place in the UK, or that any copies were transient.

thorum 3y ago

Important to note this is not a ruling about copyright infringement: Stability has not yet even presented a defense on that subject. Instead they argued that although they are a UK-based company, no people or computers residing in the UK were involved in the development of Stable Diffusion, so a UK court has no jurisdiction on the matter. The judge didn’t find the evidence for this (which includes the CEO saying he asked around and is “confident” it’s true) conclusive enough, so things will move forward. It may turn out to be true later, but Getty will get a chance to present counter-evidence, and so on.

cyanydeez 3y ago
I truly don't see how it matters where the computers are is he saying they airgapped their corporation and never looked at any output? that their product never operated in the UK? Bizarre.
TimPC 3y ago
You can infringe in the UK by serving copyrighted content to users in the UK regardless of where the actual training occurred. This take on copyright law is asinine and juvenile and I’m not surprised the judge struck it down. Can you imagine if you had no piracy occurring in the US when users download pirated content from a server in the Philippines and you could only handle the case under the Filipino legal system?
- surfacedetail 3y ago
  But that's the issue, they're not serving copyright content to users in the UK because the outputs aren't derivative, the legal question is very narrow, it is about the training of the model. There will be a separate trade mark question on the outputs, which wasn't part of the request to dismiss the case. >Can you imagine if you had no piracy occurring in the US when users download pirated content from a server in the Philippines and you could only handle the case under the Filipino legal system? Your hypothetical is about actual distribution and communication to the public of copyright works, this is very different to what is at stake here.

georgebarnett 3y ago

Maybe I've got the completely wrong end of the stick here, but why isn't an AI model treated as a fact, given it's essentially a factual summary of the most likely bit sequences to occur given an input sequence?

monocasa 3y ago
Because copyright has always tried to balance the idea of 'facts' against the idea of 'derivative works', even when they're blatantly in conflict with one another.
gpm 3y ago
This argument feels like arguing that it's a fact that Game of Thrones first book consists of <this text>, thus <this text> (the entirety of the book) isn't copyrightable. If the bit sequence is likely to occur because it's someone else's creative content (or part of it is)... that doesn't seem like it can be a 'fact' in the relevant manner.
- georgebarnett 3y ago
  What I'm wrangling with is this: I agree that a particular sequence of words is copyrightable. What I'm struggling with is that facts _about_ that corpus of text are not copyrightable. A simple fact could be that the word "bar" is the 5th word. The 6th word is "jazz". Etc. A model is trained from these "facts" across many source documents. It is thus itself a derived 'fact' given a set of training inputs and parameters, so then how could _that_ then be copyrighted? Put another way - there's the origin text and then.. is it turtles all the way down and none of it can be copyrighted because its all math and calculations derived from that?
staticman2 3y ago
Well for one thing creative works aren't "facts". If they were you could simply pirate any movie, because "facts" can't be copyrighted.

neya 3y ago

This is how a company whose failing business model collapsing fast would act. I never liked Stock photo sites since their inception - they always followed dark patterns, spammed the entire search results with keywords that had nothing to do with them. If you searched for something "free" they would show you images of something that was NOT free. But hey, "royalty free" is close enough, I guess? They went on to sue Google Images that allowed the spirit of open web - where you could simply right click and save any image - from doing so. And now that AI can pretty much produce stellar quality images with just a single line of text input, they don't have anything else to do other than drag everyone into litigation. I'm a photographer myself (Sony A7C2/24-70mm G-Master) and I have learned to accept that this is going to be the future. And though there will always be a market for real photographers, AI will take over bulk of our jobs. And the programmer in me who spent ages trying to find the perfect background image for my website says that's not really a bad thing.

visarga 3y ago
Initially photography itself was considered un-copyrightable "because it just reproduces a natural image". But later they came around and considered topic selection, composition, and other elements to be creative.
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visarga 3y ago

I don't think copyright has much meaning left in it anymore. Any work can be "extracted" into its elements, ideas and style, and recombined in million ways. You could generate a billion images with SD and train the next model on them. Make sure they don't look close to copyrighted works. Being AI generated, they have no copyright. You can still use real data as well if it is in the public domain. If you do this enough the initial copyrighted dataset is going to be further removed from the model. The model can't reproduce a copyrighted work because it hasn't seen any of them during training. But more importantly, this process strictly separates ideas from expression and trains only on ideas without copyrighted expression. If authors complain it means they want to own ideas and styles. You can also use copyrighted works to train a classifier to rank the quality of training examples, and apply it to filter your synthetic data to be higher quality. You can even train a RLHF model to say when two works are "close enough" to constitute an infringement, and double down on safety by ensuring you don't generate or use risky works. That's why I was saying that I don't think copyright has much meaning left in it anymore. Knowledge wants to be free, it travels, shape-shifts and evolves. It does not belong to any one of us except if we keep it to ourselves.

PUSH_AX 3y ago
You can’t trust the output to be accurate yet, the resulting model would be worse than the original for artefacts.
- visarga 3y ago
  In smaller LLMs it has been demonstrated that purely synthetic datasets can make a model 5x more efficient. So a 1.5B model can score like a 7B model. The model is Phi-1.5 from Microsoft. But you can also empower the LLM, it can use more tokens, chain of thought, multiple rounds of LLM inference, use other specialized models, use tools, execute code, use search, and have a human in the loop. Does that remind you of anything? Yes, "OpenAI GPTs", they are the empowered LLM environments that can create data superior to LLM alone. The general recipe is LLM+something extra = smarter than LLM. That something extra is usually a simulation or code execution or some real world interaction. This generates LLM error examples and feedback to learn to fix them in the next iteration. It is targeted training data.