[williamcotton]

And yes, a lawyer for the defense will show that, unlike a zip file of photos that can ONLY be copies of protected works and that anyone distributing such a zip file cannot reasonably say that they are expecting non-infringing works, with Stable Diffusion there is basically no one expecting to get copies of any of the plaintiffs protected works.

Like, literally no one who made or uses SD knows or cares about the plaintiffs, is interested in their drawing style, and even remotely interested in any of their individual protected works. If I were the defendants I would train a model without any of the plaintiffs’ work and then show the court that the results for an astronaut riding a horse are no worse without their works.

And no, some lawyer is not going to scream out “objection, intent has nothing to do with copyright”, because, again, all that is meant by the intent is this: if Stable Diffusion output an image but your intent was not to copy another image… well too bad, you’re still infringing… this all happens where the liability for disseminating the copy and foregoing any fair use is on the person using the tool. Is using the tool worth the risk? Maybe not!

The intentions of the toolmakers are very important to the courts. A tool like a torrent website that does literally nothing to police their content and even actively promotes piracy is going to be treated differently than publicdomaintorrents.info.