Did they "copy that right" - AI and Copyright Lawsuits
Yes, I copied that right ;)
As the Yogi Berra quote goes - “its Deja Vu all over again”. For some background, I created the original Open Source Office at Prudential - and one of the many insights I gained during that time was the period of the “patent troll” - legal entities (who typically had NO product themselves ) but would go after Commercial Companies that may have inadvertently used that patent in one or more of their products. As Open Source projects didn’t have the proverbial “deep pockets” suing them was a wasted effort.
And yes, I know that patents are NOT the same as copyright’s - but as you will see - there are a few similarities in the storyline.
Today’s blog entry was driven by the following article from “TheVerge”, which focuses on a recent lawsuit specific to Stable Diffusion and Midjourney AI products
AI art tools Stable Diffusion and Midjourney targeted with copyright lawsuit
The Lawsuit Claim
The lawsuit which is against Stability AI (owns Stability Diffusion) & DeviantArt (owns DreamUp, and Midjourney) - claims both AI generators are “a 21st-century collage tool that remixes the copyright works of millions of artists whose work was used as training data.”
NOTE: As I learned from this same Verge article, there is a similar type of lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI in a similar case involving the AI programming model CoPilot, which is trained on lines of code collected from the web.
DISCLAIMER - I am NOT a Lawyer, so the remainder of this blog is just the perspective of a seasoned IT practitioner !!!!My EARLY Analysis / Questions
My analysis starts by looking at how the real world works. Consider if you will a traditional human artist - in any of the following scenarios:
An graphic artist that is studying numerous video game graphics
A traditional artist that visits 50 Art Galleries
A songwriter that listens to a range of songs
In each case, the HUMAN can be influenced by one or more artists. Obviously they are not being influenced at SCALE (like AI) - so if the HUMAN adopts aspects of a style - is that illegal?
Now we do have existing examples of “case law” (read successful lawsuits) in the music industry - where artists were sued for COPYING (or coming very close) to the original artist - the following article lists 7
7 times artists sued others for copying their music
But what about “style”? I use the example of John Cafferty who wrote the song “On the Dark Side” - but the song sure does sound in the STYLE of Bruce Springsteen (to my knowledge, no lawsuit was ever filed)
Takeaway
I would imagine this is going to be in the courts for some time. In the meantime, AI models will continue to be trained with this type of data (and who knows, maybe someone figures out a workaround). So while an interesting topic - I don’t see this as a show-stopper in the near term.