[segasaturn]

The plaintiffs are claiming that their art-style is copyrighted intellectual property and that they can sue image generators for damages if it creates an output that resembles theirs. Regardless of what you think about AI art, the precedent of this case will be a huge expansion of the power of IP and copyright law in the US mainly to the benefit of corporations - imagine Disney copyrighting the look of their 3D animated Pixar movies and suing anybody who tries to make a cartoony 3D animated movie for IP theft.

[seanhunter]

That's not what they're claiming.

They're claiming that the models were trained on copyright material[1] and that training models doesn't constitute fair use[2]. Their claims are in the first couple of pages of the court ruling.

The claim is not that the style is copyrightable but that producing work in the same style could affect the market for the original product which is one of the parts of the four factor test for fair use. [3]

[1] Which ldo they were

[2] This is the big one and will have enormous ramifications if it ends up with the court ruling substantially in their favour

[3] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

[pavon]

They are claiming both those things - copyright infringement and a trade dress infringement under the Lanham Act.

That said, their trade dress claim doesn't go so far to claim ownership of an entire style, it is the use of that style in association with their names that is the problem. For example "draw a stick figure cartoon dog" is fine but "draw a dog in the style of xkcd" is not, by their reasoning. And you certainly can't advertise that the model can make images in the style of these artists in ways that might be interpreted as the artists being involved with the company.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> and that training models doesn't constitute fair use

How can it not constitute fair use? They both made no copies of that data (copyright infringement) nor did they commit actual theft by stealing the data from some vault. Everything else is permitted. For that matter, this is equivalent to some human artist studying a piece of art and then starting to create art in that same style too... is that no longer fair use?

There are some court rulings so bad that the judge should just be removed from the bench.

> could affect the market for the original product

Oh, that makes more sense. The "negative movie reviews for newly released films is copyright infringement" argument. Nice.

[akersten]

Even the fair use argument is putting the cart before the horse. I would think these plaintiffs need to convince a court that the works are derivative first, and iff they are derivative, then the fair use argument can be made (that the reproduction is not a copyright infringement, {because e.g., the result is substantially different from the input}).

Asking "is it fair use for a [human/computer] to [study/be trained on] copyrighted works" simply does not make sense as a fair use question because the answer has always been "looking at a painting and internalizing it has nothing to do with fair use, of course studying the old masters is permitted." I'm far from convinced the answer should be any different here.

So to me they're barking up a non productive tree by trying to essentially say "the entire model is copyright infringement." Hopefully a judge/jury is not convinced. IMO it should be case by case for any given artifact, whether human or machine produced, does it infringe. Obviously a harder hill to climb for the plaintiffs.

[ghaff]

A lot of people also conflate plagiarism with copyright infringement. There are a lot of ways I can plagiarize--or at least create works that obviously draw very heavily from other work without attribution--that may be very frowned on, especially in an academic setting, but are not actually infringing.

[seanhunter]

Copyright defines the use of a work. If training a model is not allowed under copyright law, it doesn't matter whether or not a work produced by that model is derivative or not (or even if the model produces no works at all)- the training itself is a copyright violation.

In the case of the US fair use doctrine, there is a four factor test which applies[1] one leg of which is the effect of the use on the potential market for the original work. In the example you gave "studying the old masters", it is trivially true that studying an old master has no effect on the future market for those paintings. However I believe copyright holders may well have a stronger argument about the possibly impact of generative AI on the market for their future work because of the ability of people to generate pastiches of their work. Even if those are not deemed to be derivative (which they may or may not be), the use of the original in training could be deemed not to be fair use because it affected the market for the original.

It's nowhere near as cut and dried as people on either side of this debate seem to be making out.

[1] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

[s1artibartfast]

I think im with the artists on this one. They had to copy the data for model training, which I think constitutes a commercial use.

If I release software under a non-commercial use license, it is still IP infringement if a company uses it in their business process.

[cowboylowrez]

yeah me too but I guess with the AI craze its an unpopular view. it seems straightforward to me, can these models exist without training on the copyrighted input, if not they should not be able to train on this data and the existing models should be either wiped, or license the input data. if the argument starts comparing AIs with actual humans viewing works then we may as well give AIs the vote.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> can these models exist without training on the copyrighted input,

No artists could exist without training on the copyrighted input. They looked at paintings, sculptures, and the like and stored copies in their brain encoded organically. Therefore, natural intelligence is also an infringement.

You use strained, insane logic to try to reach the conclusion you had already decided you wanted to arrive at. You're not a very good thinker.

[cowboylowrez]

didn't know I had any comment replies, sorry for the late ping.

>You use strained, insane logic to try to reach the conclusion you had already decided you wanted to arrive at. You're not a very good thinker.

its also not a big deal because this was not an engaging comment, this is merely insults.