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Midjourney, Stability AI and DeviantArt win a victory in copyright case by artists — but the fight continues (venturebeat.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The wording of the title is a bit weird, which makes me notice how legal cases are usually worded like "weaker party succeeds/fails to change the status quo". The artists lost against the companies in this case?

Anyways, important bits here:

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.

Also, Anderson copyrighted only 16 of the hundreds of works cited in the artists’ complaint. The artists had asserted that some of their images were included in the Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) open source database of billions of images created by computer scientist/machine learning (ML) researcher Christoph Schuhmann and collaborators, which all three AI art generator programs used to train.

And then

Even if that clarity is provided and even if plaintiffs narrow their allegations to limit them to Output Images that draw upon Training Images based upon copyrighted images, I am not convinced that copyright claims based a derivative theory can survive absent ‘substantial similarity’ type allegations. The cases plaintiffs rely on appear to recognize that the alleged infringer’s derivative work must still bear some similarity to the original work or contain the protected elements of the original work.

Which eh, I'm not sure I agree with. This is a new aspect of technology that isn't properly covered by existing copyright laws. Our current laws were developed to address a state of the world that no longer exists, and using those old definitions (which I think covered issues around parodies and derivative work) doesn't make sense in this case.

This isn't some individual artist drawing something similar to someone else. This is an AI that can take in all work in existence and produce new content from that without providing any compensation. This judge seems to be saying that's an ok thing to do

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

did not actually file copyrights on their art with the U.S. Copyright Office.

The way they've worded this isn't really a sufficient explanation of how this works. An artist is automatically granted copyright upon the creation of a work, so it's not that they don't have the right to protect their work. It's just that, without registration, you cannot file a lawsuit to protect your work.

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

However, if it's within 5 years of initial publication, they can still be granted a formal registered copyright and bring the complaint again.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Judges don't make laws, they interpret them. If the current laws don't cover said new technology, it's up to the govt to pass new laws.