<story><title>We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion</title><url>https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheDong</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t matter if they exist as exact copies in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;The law doesn&amp;#x27;t recognize a mathematical computer transformation as creating a new work with original copyright.&lt;p&gt;If you give me an image, and I encrypt it with a randomly generated password, and then don&amp;#x27;t write down the password anywhere, the resulting file will be indistinguishable from random noise. No one can possibly derive the original image from it. But, it&amp;#x27;s still copyrighted by the original artist as long as they can show &amp;quot;This started as my image, and a machine made a rote mathematical transformation to it&amp;quot; because machine&amp;#x27;s making rote mathematical transformations cannot create new copyright.&lt;p&gt;The argument for stable diffusion would be that even if you cannot point to any image, since only algorithmic changes happened to the inputs, without any human creativity, the output is a derived work which does not have its own unique copyright.</text></item><item><author>dr_dshiv</author><text>“Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions—and pos­si­bly bil­lions—of copy­righted images.”&lt;p&gt;That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies?&lt;p&gt;“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.“&lt;p&gt;“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.”&lt;p&gt;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</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Last5Digits</author><text>This surely can&amp;#x27;t be the case, right? If it was, then what&amp;#x27;s stopping me from taking any possible byte sequence and applying my copyright to it?&lt;p&gt;I could always show that there exists some function f that produces said byte sequence when applied to my copyrighted material.&lt;p&gt;Can I sue Microsoft because the entire Windows 11 codebase is just one &amp;quot;rote mathematical transformation&amp;quot; away from the essay I wrote in elementary school?</text></comment>
<story><title>We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion</title><url>https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheDong</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t matter if they exist as exact copies in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;The law doesn&amp;#x27;t recognize a mathematical computer transformation as creating a new work with original copyright.&lt;p&gt;If you give me an image, and I encrypt it with a randomly generated password, and then don&amp;#x27;t write down the password anywhere, the resulting file will be indistinguishable from random noise. No one can possibly derive the original image from it. But, it&amp;#x27;s still copyrighted by the original artist as long as they can show &amp;quot;This started as my image, and a machine made a rote mathematical transformation to it&amp;quot; because machine&amp;#x27;s making rote mathematical transformations cannot create new copyright.&lt;p&gt;The argument for stable diffusion would be that even if you cannot point to any image, since only algorithmic changes happened to the inputs, without any human creativity, the output is a derived work which does not have its own unique copyright.</text></item><item><author>dr_dshiv</author><text>“Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions—and pos­si­bly bil­lions—of copy­righted images.”&lt;p&gt;That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies?&lt;p&gt;“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.“&lt;p&gt;“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.”&lt;p&gt;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</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hgomersall</author><text>Some years ago I had an idea to have a method of file sharing with strong plausible deniability from the sharer.&lt;p&gt;The idea, in stage one, was to split a file into chunks and xor those with other random chunks (equivalent to a one-time pad), those chunks as well as the created random chunks then got shared around the networks, with nobody hosting both parts of a pair.&lt;p&gt;The next stage is that future files inserted into the network would not create new random chunks but randomly use existing chunks already in the network. The result is a distributed store of chunks each of which is provably capable of generating any other chunk given the right pair. The correlations are then stored in a separate manifest.&lt;p&gt;It feels like such a system is some kind of entropy coding system. In the limit the manifest becomes the same size as the original data. At the same time though, you can prove that any given chunk contains no information. I love thinking about how the philosophy of information theory interacts with the law.</text></comment>