AI art generator Stable Diffusion faces another copyright lawsuit, this time from Getty

[midian182]

A hot potato: For the second time this week, Stability AI, creator of the art generation tool Stable Diffusion, is being sued over alleged copyright violation for scraping content to train its systems. This time, stock images/video/music provider Getty Images has "commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London" against Stability AI.

Getty Images said in a statement that Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright "absent a license to benefit Stability AI's commercial interests and to the detriment of the content creators."

Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge that the company had notified Stability AI of its upcoming litigation in the UK. There's no word on whether a US case will follow.

"The company [Stability AI] made no outreach to Getty Images to utilize our or our contributors' material so we're taking an action to protect our and our contributors' intellectual property rights," said Peters.

Check out How to Run Stable Diffusion on Your PC to Generate AI Images

It looks like Stability AI's lawyers will have a busy few months, or years, ahead. We heard yesterday that three artists had launched a class action against the company, Midjourney (another AI art generator), and portfolio site DeviantArt for allegedly violating copyright laws. Lawyer Matthew Butterick, who filed the case alongside antitrust and class action specialist Joseph Saveri Law Firm, said creators are concerned about AI systems being trained on copyrighted work without consent, credit, or compensation.

Questions over what material generative AIs are trained on sit alongside fears that they will replace human jobs. It's proving to be a murky area, legally, with most creators of the systems arguing that such training falls under the fair use doctrine in the US, or fair dealing in the UK. Peters says Getty Images doesn't think this is an accurate assumption, unsurprisingly.

Something that could support Getty Images' case is an independent analysis of Stability AI's dataset that found a large portion came from Getty Images and other stock image sites. Moreover, the AI often recreates Getty Images' watermark in its generated images.

Peters told The Verge that Getty Images isn't interested in financial compensation or stopping the development of these AIs but finding ways of building a model that respects intellectual property. Stability AI says the next version of Stable Diffusion will allow artists to opt out of having their work included in training datasets, but that might not be enough to placate original creators and companies like Getty Images.

🚩My face is in the #LAION dataset. In 2013 a doctor photographed my face as part of clinical documentation. He died in 2018 and somehow that image ended up somewhere online and then ended up in the dataset- the image that I signed a consent form for my doctor- not for a dataset. pic.twitter.com/TrvjdZtyjD

— Lapine (@LapineDeLaTerre) September 16, 2022

Adding to the controversy is the recent news that a California-based AI artist discovered private medical record photos taken by her doctor in 2013 were part of the LAION-5B image set. The dataset, a collection of 5 billion images and associated descriptive captions created by a German-based research non-profit, is used to train Stable Diffusion and other generative AIs. Artists can check if their work is part of LAION-5B at Have I Been Trained.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/97286-ai-art-generator-stable-diffusion-faces-another-copyright.html

 

[poltevo]

We all know how well "opt-out" works:S Even having this option is a tacit acceptance from Stable Diffusion that ethically people should be able to opt-out of this.

 

[Bullwinkle M]

Getty is Spam
TikTok is Spam
Shutterstock is Spam
Pinterest is Spam
Alamy is Spam
Instagram is Spam

The first 5 pages of Google Search results for "Gallery" or "Pics" are SPAM

Why can't they make AI that works?
Why can't they make Algorithms that work?
Why do 87% of the the first 1000 Search links take you to completely unrelated sites?

M O N E Y !!!!!!!

Now THERE is a story you should cover (HONESTLY)

 

[tellmewhy]

If copyright existed before the day the Gutenberg press was invented, then the Gutenberg press would never have been invented!

This means that if copyright existed and was respected back then, then today all humans would still be living in the same environment as in the Middle Ages. No electricity, no cars, no computers, no computers, no health care, no nothing because it was all done by the ability to copy and disseminate to the maximum extent possible the work of others with no barriers such as sending money, paying taxes, yes negotiating what percentage of co-ownership everyone has, looking for all of them and getting permission, etc.

If copyright existed then today the population of the earth would be less than 1 billion and quite possibly most of us would not even exist.

In practice, copyright (like patents), although created by the legislator with good intentions, is in practice used to poison the competition that will come afterwards. It is clearly a method of poisoning. It may protect expensive movies like Avatar from being broadcast raw over the air but for the other 99% of the time it is poisoning the competition that is trying to be born.

So copyright may just be a mistake of the past that needs to be sorted out as soon as possible.

 

[Endymio]

If copyright existed before the day the Gutenberg press was invented, then the Gutenberg press would never have been invented!

Oops! The first three years of its existence, the Gutenberg press printed nothing but bibles. For the first half-century, it printed almost exclusively those same bibles, and a few classical Greek texts, none of which would have been covered by copyright law.

We all know how well "opt-out" works:S Even having this option is a tacit acceptance from Stable Diffusion that ethically people should be able to opt-out of this.

You realize that Stable Diffusion has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with that consent form, or how and why this woman's photographs wound up on the Internet, right?

 

[RudyBob]

Lawyers coming out ahead. Mom, Dad send your kids into copyright law.

 

[PixelMediaArts]

Most likely this will require the supreme court to interpret fair use under the DMCA. The key is if they have stored images on their servers in order to train the AI. If they have then they could be in violation of the DMCA under Fair Use. If they used the images to analyze and learn through URL links to images then it would most likely fall under Fair Use.

 

[tellmewhy]

Most likely this will require the supreme court to interpret fair use under the DMCA. The key is if they have stored images on their servers in order to train the AI. If they have then they could be in violation of the DMCA under Fair Use. If they used the images to analyze and learn through URL links to images then it would most likely fall under Fair Use.

There is no computer that can "see" directly through url links, all computers worldwide always download the information locally and store it in the cache (which can be the hard drive or the ram). Let's say someone types "cat" into getty images and scrolls down, then ALL those images are stored locally on their computer.
This amounts to hundreds of violations per minute because all the images are copyrighted by default and the website user doesn't own any of them, so it's a violation because they don't have the right to store them locally and all of that “criminal” behavior because someone watch cats on a website.

Same with email because text is also a form of information that is copyrighted (the weights of a neural network are not that kind of form of information that is copyrighted) so when you reply the other person's text is stored except yours and on various computers until it arrives. So in terms of copyright and email is illegal and “criminal” behavior.

Copyright normally shouldn't exist but because everyone was born into an environment where copyright existed it's hard to manage it, so just for compatibility reasons they could have a duration of 2 to 10 years at most, same long as the warranty they give on the products.

 

[Endymio]

There is no computer that can "see" directly through url links, all computers worldwide always download the information locally and store it ...all images are copyrighted by default...so it's a violation because they don't have the right to store them locally

By your logic, every person to ever use the Internet has violated copyrights beyond count. Luckily, your analysis is false. See: Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc., 416 F. Supp. 2d 828 (C.D. Cal. 2006) for just one such case law example:

"...Local caching by the browsers of individual users is noncommercial, transformative, and no more than necessary to achieve the objectives of decreasing network latency and minimizing unnecessary bandwidth usage (essential to the internet). It has a minimal impact on the potential market for the original work, especially given that most users would not be able to find their own local browser cache, let alone locate a specific cached copy of a particular image. That local browser caching is fair use is supported by a recent decision holding that Google's Click for Enhanced Coverage Linking Searches own cache constitutes fair use."

Same with email because text is also a form of information that is copyrighted

False again. Not all text is copyrighted, nor copyrightable.

 

[tellmewhy]

By your logic, every person to ever use the Internet has violated copyrights beyond count. Luckily, your analysis is false. See: Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc., 416 F. Supp. 2d 828 (C.D. Cal. 2006) for just one such case law example:

"...Local caching by the browsers of individual users is noncommercial, transformative, and no more than necessary to achieve the objectives of decreasing network latency and minimizing unnecessary bandwidth usage (essential to the internet). It has a minimal impact on the potential market for the original work, especially given that most users would not be able to find their own local browser cache, let alone locate a specific cached copy of a particular image. That local browser caching is fair use is supported by a recent decision holding that Google's Click for Enhanced Coverage Linking Searches own cache constitutes fair use."

False again. Not all text is copyrighted, nor copyrightable.

Okay, I suppose we at least agree that it is not an elegant or efficient solution to have to ask the court to sit every time for such a silly reason and also that we owe our existence and prosperity to a "copy cat” machine (the Gutenberg's printing press).

 

[Joray K Joseph]

If copyright existed before the day the Gutenberg press was invented, then the Gutenberg press would never have been invented!...

This reads likes someone who doesn't know history, creativity, human nature nor the business world. Because if you did you wouldn't have made such an absurd comparison