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[return to "We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion"]
1. dr_dsh+12[view] [source] 2023-01-14 07:17:25
>>zacwes+(OP)
“Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions—and pos­si­bly bil­lions—of copy­righted images.”

That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies?

“Hav­ing copied the five bil­lion images—with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists—Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bined to derive other images. It is, in short, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool.“

“Diffu­sion is a way for an AI pro­gram to fig­ure out how to recon­struct a copy of the train­ing data through denois­ing. Because this is so, in copy­right terms it’s no dif­fer­ent from an MP3 or JPEG—a way of stor­ing a com­pressed copy of cer­tain dig­i­tal data.”

The examples of training diffusion (eg, reconstructing a picture out of noise) will be core to their argument in court. Certainly during training the goal is to reconstruct original images out of noise. But, do they exist in SD as copies? Idk

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2. yazadd+X3[view] [source] 2023-01-14 07:43:18
>>dr_dsh+12
> That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies?

In fairness, Diffusion is arguably a very complex entropy coding similar to Arithmetic/Huffman coding.

Given that copyright is protectable even on compressed/encrypted files, it seems fair that the “container of compressed bytes” (in this case the Diffusion model) does “contain” the original images no differently than a compressed folder of images contains the original images.

A lawyer/researcher would likely win this case if they re-create 90%ish of a single input image from the diffusion model with text input.

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3. willia+V11[view] [source] 2023-01-14 17:13:06
>>yazadd+X3
There's a key difference. A compression algorithm is made to be reversible. The point of compressing an MP3 is to be able to decompress as much of the original audio signal as possible.

Stable Diffusion is not made to decompress the original and actually has no direct mechanism for decompressing any originals. The originals are not present. The only thing present is an embedding of key components of the original in a multi-dimensional latent space that also includes text.

This doesn't mean that the outputs of Stable Diffusion cannot be in violation of a copyright, it just means that the operator is going to have to direct the model towards a part of that text/image latent space that violates copyright in some manner... and that the operator of the model, when given an output that is in violation of copyright, is liable for publishing the image. Remember, it is not a violation of copyright to photocopy an image in your house... it's a violation when you publish that image!

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4. codeon+ez1[view] [source] 2023-01-14 20:37:41
>>willia+V11
Lossy compression isn't reversible but presumably the content when compressed tjis way is still covered by copyright.
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5. willia+lJ1[view] [source] 2023-01-14 22:00:04
>>codeon+ez1
Pedantically, yes, lossy compression is not 100 percent reversible. Practically, the usefulness of compression is that it does return the original content with as little loss as possible… so lossy compression is mostly reversible.

All of my other points remain unchanged by this pedantry.

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6. ouid+rb2[view] [source] 2023-01-15 02:47:46
>>willia+lJ1
You can't rip something and compress it badly enough to not violate copyright when you sell it. The point of compression is to throw away information about the original in ascending order of importance.
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