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by limitedsupply 1256 days ago
As I anticipated, you are referencing research that does not show exact copies being generated by Stable Diffusion. Do "semantically equivalent" images infringe on copyright? I would argue that they do not. We will see how this plays out in court.

Food for thought: if I write instructions for generating an SVG of a black square, does my program contain copyrighted material (Malevich's Black Square)? You and I could argue about that, but you will probably quote more research that disproves your own point. So let's skip that.
1 comments
karpierz 1256 days ago
> As I anticipated, you are referencing research that does not show exact copies being generated by Stable Diffusion. Do "semantically equivalent" images infringe on copyright? I would argue that they do not. We will see how this plays out in court.

If you're convinced that a photo of Mickey Mouse with slightly larger ears, or slightly reddish pants isn't copyright infringement, then sure, neither is any of this stuff. It would also mean that republishing copyrighted images with lossy compression algorithm (IE, JPEGs) would also not violate copyright.

I would suggest looking at the actual laws around copyright instead of relying on what you feel copyright should be.

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oneeyedpigeon 1255 days ago
> If you're convinced that a photo of Mickey Mouse with slightly larger ears, or slightly reddish pants isn't copyright infringement, then sure, neither is any of this stuff.

Isn't this already well-established? For example, this image, used in The Simpsons:

https://static.simpsonswiki.com/images/d/d4/Mickey_Mouse.png

is clearly Mickey Mouse in intent, but not in a copyright infringing way.

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karpierz 1255 days ago
To be clear, I'm not saying that you can't create Mickey Mouse images that are transformative (or that Disney might not bother suing over; I think there'd be a lawsuit if the Simpsons tried making a commercial film following the adventures of their rendition of Mickey Mouse).

Also, that usage of Mickey Mouse might be copyright infringing, but fall under fair use (probably parody), which is a specific defense of copyright infringement (similar to "self defense").

What I am saying is that:

1) If your model returns images which look near-identical to your training data, then any copyright infringement that applies to the training image will also apply to your image.

2) If your model can consistently return copyrighted imagery, there's little difference between explicitly sharing those images (with a password) and implicitly sharing them (via a model + prompt).

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limitedsupply 1255 days ago
Amazing. It’s so obvious I wonder why billion dollar corporations didn’t figure out the legal implications of these models yet. Do you have an email address I could pass on to OpenAI?
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