8 ms·
Is training with user-generated content a way to launder copyrighted images? That is, if I upload an image of Ironman or whatever to my Facebook or Instagram pa
by cowboyscott 3y ago
Is training with user-generated content a way to launder copyrighted images? That is, if I upload an image of Ironman or whatever to my Facebook or Instagram page as a public post and Meta trains their model on that data, is there wording in my user agreement that says that I declare that I own the content, which then gives Meta plausible deniability when it comes to training with copyrighted material?
(apologies for the run-on sentence - it is early still)
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago> Is training with user-generated content a way to launder copyrighted images? Doubt it. If you upload child porn to Instagram and they distribute it - it's still an Instagram problem, AFAIK.
- dragonwriter 3y agoChild porn is not a copyright issue, so the DMCA safe harbor for UGC doesn't apply, and its criminal, so the Section 230 safe harbor doesn't apply, so its very much not an applicable example as to whether use of UGC in other contexts is a way of leveraging safe harbor protections for content, whether for copyright or more generally.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoIt's still an Instagram problem if someone uploads copyrighted info and Instagram distributes it...
- fragmede 3y agoAs long as Instagram follows the DMCA and takes it down, they're covered by Section 230, do I don't know if it's a problem per se.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoIt literally/legally isn't and is one of the reasons US is king for hosting services like IG. Read Section 230.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- glimshe 3y agoI think Meta is already assuming that there will be no liability for training with copyrighted material. I find it very unlikely that image owners will win the AI training battle.
- lxgr 3y agoI'd be extremely surprised if the "Mickey Mouse standing on the moon" example image was a legitimate way to "launder copyright". The interesting question is just who will be liable for the copyright violation: The party that hosts the AI service? The party that trained it on copyrighted images? The user entering a prompt? The (possibly different) user publishing the resulting image?
- darkwraithcov 3y agoMM will be public domain in Jan.
- liotier 3y agoSome early versions will.
- JohnFen 3y agoUnless Disney can engineer yet another oppressive extension to copyright durations.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoNot going to happen. When Disney did their copyright extension last time, they had bipartisan influence. Now Disney is in the middle of the culture war, and there is no Republican that will risk being primaried to support Disney. Given that you de facto need 60 votes in the Senate, it is not happening.
- JohnFen 3y agoI guess that's some sort of silver lining to the state of things today!
- sp332 3y agoThey don't own the copyright, but they do have a "non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works". https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/478745558852511 https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/478745558852511
- bee_rider 3y agoThey user might upload something that they don’t have rights to. Technically the user is the one misbehaving, but we, Facebook, and any reasonable court know that users are doing that.
- JAlexoid 3y agoThat's why there is a safe harbor provision in DMCA.
- grogenaut 3y agoDoes that provision allow them to build derivative works, when they get a dmca request do they retrain the AI after removing the copyrighted work?
- luma 3y agoCopyright law as it exists today allows one to create transformative works. There is little to suggest that an AI trained on copyrighted works is in any way violating that copyright when inference is run.
- TheDong 3y agoCopyright law as it exists allows a creative process to create transformative works. Computers cannot create copyright. They are not creative. Just because I save your image as webp or jpeg or whatever doesn't mean I have changed the copyright. Just because I zip it up with a hundred other images doesn't mean the zipfile is free of your copyright. Effectively, computers are executing math, and math by itself does not construct new copyright, since copyright is the result of a creative human process. As far as I can tell, current AI are fundamentally not too different from wildly complex compression algorithms. You compress a billion images down to a model. The model now can reproduce a fraction or the whole of the copyrighted work with some low probability. Rote and probabilistic compression. The creator of the AI might own the copyright for what it produces if constructing the AI was suitably creative, i.e. if you construct an AI that trains on random noise and produces images, those are clearly something you, the author of the AI's code, can claim copyright over... But current AI seem like math more than anything else. It's plausible that reinforced learning or some other part of training does imbue creativity into the process, but that doesn't seem obviously true to me.
- sosodev 3y agoIt seems like this is still very much a legal gray area. If it's concretely decided in court that generative AI cannot produce copyrighted work then I assume it makes no difference what the source of the copyrighted training material was.
- KaiserPro 3y agoWhen an image us uploaded is it re-licensed: > When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems. You can delete content individually or all at once by deleting your account.
- ROFISH 3y agoSo if you delete your image the entire trained data set is invalid because they no longer have license to the copyright?
- KaiserPro 3y agoNow that is a multi-million dollar question. How derived data is handled after copyright is revoked is a question thats hard to answer. I suspect that the data will be deleted from the dataset, and any new models will not contain derivatives from that image. How legal that is, is expensive to find out. I suspect you'd need to prove that your image had been used, and that it's use contradicts the license that was granted. It would take a lot of lawyer and court time to find out. (I'm not a lawyer, so there might already be case history here. I'm just a systadmin who's looking after datasets. ) postscript: something something GDPR. There are rules about processed data, but I can't remember the specifics. There are caveats about "reasonable"
- raincole 3y agoAt this point all big players assume it's okay to train on copyrighted materials. If you can[0］crawl materials from other sites, why can't you crawl from your own site? [0]: "can" in quotes
- carstenhag 3y agoBecause your users have agreed to terms of service that don't mention analyzing the images to train an AI model.
- PeterisP 3y agoIf their legal assumption is it's not a copyright violation to train a model on some image, then it's logical that their ToS doesn't mention it, as they need the user's permission only for the scenarios where the law says that they do.
- kolinko 3y agoWithin Polish (European?) legislation, an agreement on use of copyright needs to explicitly state in what areas you are allowed to copy/use the copyrighted work. So, e.g. if an agreement didn't explicitly state that a company can use the work in TV (or Radio, or sth), then they don't have the right to do so. When new mediums are invented (like internet), you need to sign an annex to the agreement extending it to this medium. Having said that, I would still consider it a fair use to train model on given images, but using the trained model to replicate a specific style etc, would most likely be considered a new medium. (IANAL though)
- PeterisP 3y agoIt's not a legal way to "launder" copyrighted images, because for things where copyright law grants exclusive rights to the authors, they need the author's permission, and having permission from someone and plausible deniability is not a defense against copyright violation - the only thing that it can change is when damages are assessed, then successfully arguing that it's not intentional can ensure that they have to pay ordinary damages, not punitive triple amount. However, as others note, all the actions of the major IT companies indicate that their legal departments feel safe in assuming that training a ML model is not a derivative work of the training data, they are willing to defend that stance in court, and expect to win. Like, if their lawyers wouldn't be sure, they'd definitely advise the management not to do it (explicitly, in writing, to cover their arses), and if executives want to take on large risks despite such legal warning, they'd do that only after getting confirmation from board and shareholders (explicitly, in writing, to avoid major personal liability), and for publicly traded companies the shareholders equals the public, so they'd all be writing about these legal risks in all caps in every public company report to shareholders.
- rpdillon 3y ago> However, as others note, all the actions of the major IT companies indicate that their legal departments feel safe in assuming that training a ML model is not a derivative work of the training data, they are willing to defend that stance in court, and expect to win. I think the move will be to argue fair use, declaring the derivative work to be transformative, and possibly to point out that only a small amount (1%-3%) of the original data is retained.
- caesil 3y agoTraining on copyrighted content isn't a copyright violation. Sarah Silverman is currently learning that the hard way.
- ezoe 3y agoAnother method of copyright laundering is doing ML learning in a country where it doesn't protected under copyright law. Personally, I'm on a side of using copyrighted data for machine learning input source doesn't violate copyright. Statistically, learned model for generative Ai doesn't retain even 1 bit of input. It's hard to say NN model data infringe any copyright of the input source. The copyright is applied to the expression, not the process. If the generative AI produces an image that's clearly a copy of a specific Ironman image which existed before the image generation, that's copyright infringement.
- lawlessone 3y ago>learned model for generative Ai doesn't retain even 1 bit of input. It does. The data is just obfuscated.
- WanderPanda 3y agoI agree with you but I think the argument is flawed. If you think about it like this h265 also just steals 10% (or whatever the compression ratio is) of an artifact
- jasmer 3y ago[dead]
- abrookewood 3y ago"learned model for generative Ai doesn't retain even 1 bit of input". If that was true, it shouldn't be possible to trick the models into regurgitating their source material, but cleary that is possible [0]. [0] https://stackdiary.com/chatgpts-training-data-can-be-exposed-via-a-divergence-attack/ https://stackdiary.com/chatgpts-training-data-can-be-exposed...
- Kubuxu 3y agoVery LLMs are quite a different from diffusion models. The model size vs training set size is skewed the other way.
- zeruch 3y ago"Is training with user-generated content a way to launder copyrighted images?" Pretty much.
- incrudible 3y agoYou are very very unlikely to stumble upon something resembling a training image closely enough for copyright to take effect, and in any event this is not the purpose of these systems. You may be running into trademarked content, but in that case you can not speak of laundry, because you can not use a trademark even if the image is AI generated.
- zeruch 3y ago"You are very very unlikely to stumble upon something resembling a training image closely enough for copyright to take effect" That is definitely not the case, and is completely contingent on the prompt matching closely what the training set has in it.
- incrudible 3y agoI think you misunderstand copyright and perhaps conflate it with a trademark. A given prompt may yield a result closely resembling some copyrighted work, but that in and of itself does not violate copyright. Getting a nearly identical result is very unlikely, perhaps with enough tries on a very famous painting. Even then, that is not the purpose.
- zeruch 3y ago"I think you misunderstand copyright and perhaps conflate it with a trademark" Nope. Quite the contrary.
- FpUser 3y agoIt is not any different than actual live artist learning from works of others
- SirMaster 3y agoWhat about all the photos of people at Disney taking pictures of themselves standing next to Mickey Mouse etc. I don’t think there’s a question that people are allowed to upload photos like that.
- JohnFen 3y ago> I don’t think there’s a question that people are allowed to upload photos like that. Technically, that's a copyright violation. Disney just opts not to enforce their rights for that sort of use. Similarly, you technically can't take and post pictures of statues, paintings, some buildings, etc., and some rightsholders do enforce their copyright when people do those things.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Technically, that's a copyright violation. Outside of things within the scope of fair use would be within Disney’s rights to restrict, but given the actual public policies and guidance on photography at Disney parks, I think there is a very strong case that noncommercial photography (for people are present as paid guests) is permitted by implied license. > Similarly, you technically can't take and post pictures of statues, paintings, some buildings, etc., and some rightsholders do enforce their copyright when people do those things. Well, not buildings if they are in or visible from a public place in the US, at least under copyright law. (Photography of some, particularly government, buildings may run afoul of other law.) This may be different in other countries.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Well, not buildings if they are in or visible from a public place in the US, at least under copyright law. Ahhh, you're correct. This was apparently changed in 1990. I just hadn't updated my mental model in accordance with that change. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright-architectural-photos.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright-architectu...