The lawsuit seeks compensation for "damages" caused
The news was recently released on a class action lawsuit by the law firm of Joseph Saveri, LLP (a leading class action law firm with offices in California and New York) in association with Matthew Butterick and Lockridge, Grindal, Nauen PLLP filed suit in United States District Court.
The plaintiffs seek compensation for damages caused by Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney, and an injunction to prevent future damages, as they are said to have created products that infringe the rights of artists and other creators under the guise of the called "artificial intelligence".
The lawsuit alleges direct copyright infringement, indirect copyright infringement related to infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), violation of the publicity rights of band members, breach of contract related to the DeviantArt Terms of Service, and various violations of California unfair competition law.
And it is that with the increasing demand for text-to-image AI systems that are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. These tools, which often offer a few free credits before being charged, can create all kinds of images with just a few words, even those that clearly evoke the works of many, many artists (if they don't appear to have been created by the same artist).
Users can refer to these artists with words like “in the style of” or “by”, along with a specific name. And actual uses for these tools can range from personal amusement to more commercial cases. But the discovery by artists that their work is being used to train the AI raises a fundamental concern:
Anyone who generates images with systems like Stable Diffusion or DALL-E can sell them, the specific terms regarding copyright and ownership of these images vary. "I don't want to be involved in the machine at all, that will devalue what I do," said Daniel Danger, an illustrator and printmaker who learned that several of his works had been used to train Stable Diffusion.
These results are far from magical: for one of these systems to ingest your words and produce an image, it must be trained on mountains of data, which can include billions of images pulled from the Internet, combined with written descriptions.
some services, including OpenAI's DALL-E system, do not disclose the data sets on which their systems are based of IA. But with Stability Diffusion, Stability AI is clear about its origins. Its base dataset was trained on pairs of images and text selected for appearance from an even more massive cache of images and text from the Internet. The complete dataset, known as LAION-5B, was created by the German artificial intelligence association LAION (Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network).
This practice of extracting images or other content from the Internet to form data sets not new and traditionally It falls under what is known as fair use., a legal principle of US copyright law that authorizes the use of copyrighted works in certain situations. In fact, these images, many of which may be copyrighted, are used in a very different way.
While the concerns are real, the remedies are unclear. Even if AI-generated images have widespread impact (for example, changing business models), that doesn't necessarily mean they violate artists' copyrights.
Stable Diffusion is an artificial intelligence (AI) software product, released in August 2022 by a company called Stability AI. According to Matthew Butterick, Stable Diffusion contains unauthorized copies of millions, if not billions, of copyrighted images. These copies were made without the knowledge or consent of the artists.
As alleged in the complaint, Stable Diffusion is an artificial intelligence product used by Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney in their AI image products. It trained on billions of copyrighted images contained in the LAION-5B dataset, which were downloaded and used without compensation or consent from the artists.
“As booming technology continues to change every aspect of the modern world, it is critical that we recognize and protect the rights of artists against illegal theft and fraud,” said Joseph Saveri, founder of the law firm Joseph Saveri, LLP. He continued: "This case represents a broader fight to preserve the property rights of all artists and other creators."
In addition to obtaining redress for the misconduct, this lawsuit seeks to prevent that outcome and ensure that these products follow the same rules as any new technology that involves the use of massive amounts of intellectual property. If music streaming can be achieved within the law, so can AI products.
Source: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/