Private people who agreed that Getty would manage their distribution and compensate them when their image was used by one of Getty's clients, yes.

So yeah, not only is it very much Getty's content to distribute, but Stability AI is absolutely screwing over thousands of little guys by not paying royalties too...

Some of that, but Getty also repackages images with licenses that allow it. And sometimes then acts like it "owns" those images by harassing others that use the same original source, including the original copyright owner. That's not especially relevant to the article, but helpful to understand a lot of what's there isn't their IP to manage.

That’s the minority of their images and also if it’s the version from their server with their watermark on it, it actually is their IP to manage. So as you said it’s not especially relevant and it’s very clear stability didn’t limit its scraping of Getty to these kinds of images. Getty in other instances being jerks doesn’t make them wrong here.

>That’s the minority of their images

It's difficult to find any source that would prove or disprove that. I can find references that they changed 35 million images to "royalty free" in 2014. The examples I can find of those are things like this: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/mcs/media/images/73409000/...

Which appears to be a public domain image.

Or this $499 image from Getty: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/floyd-burrough...

Free from the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/00651772/ (including the 50MB tiff that appears to be the highest resolution avaialable)

The crux of the issue is whether Stable Diffusion is 'learning' like a human would be if they just scrolled through Getty Images or someone's DeviantArt to learn to draw and copy their style (a style is not copyrightable).

This is why Getty Images' claim is that Stable Diffusion is a "collage tool", while SD will most likely argue on the basis of the AI being capable of exhibiting the same level of creativity as a human.

It's best understood as an extremely sophisticated collage tool. We can make vague analogies about how training ML models is sort of like human learning, but ultimately it's not actually that.

It will still spit out stuff like watermarks and product box art unprompted, because its "learning" is still fundamentally mindless. It works in the realm of pixels, it has no mechanism for understanding context.

My understanding is that it doesn't in fact work in the domain of pixels, but I'm far from an expert.

So "extremely sophisticated" that the word "collage" takes on an almost entirely new meaning.

So, not really.

It's really really not best understood as a sophisticated collage tool.

You can't take a person and turn them into a cartoon if you're just pasting existing parts of images together. Stable diffusion understands what is a cartoon and it understands what is you (assuming you train it on your face).

It spits out watermarks because it understands that watermarks appear in images and it's going to try to reproduce the watermarks if you ask for something that tends to have a watermark in it.

This seems totally irrelevant to the case in my view, which is whether Stability Ai had the right to use Getty’s content for training in the manner that they allegedly did.

In general, consuming content cannot be a violation of copyright or a license agreement; What is controlled, however, is stuff like reproduction. So if you do see a Getty Images picture, redraw it almost verbatim (even without tracing), you've effectively reproduced it, but the act of viewing it isn't illegal. In this vein, "exhibiting the same level of creativity as a human" is important - if it is, you can argue that the AI is just creating new stuff and the training set was simply "viewed", so anything it creates isn't necessarily infringement of any one of Getty's photos.

That’s really helpful clarification, thanks :) - and helps explain why the claim doc includes a focus on the stages in the process where the Getty content is allegedly copied.

With this in mind it will be even more interesting to see how this plays out.

The difference here, which in my opinion the law is yet to catch up with, is the scale of usage enabled by these algorithms.

A lot of it is public domain photos that they pretend they own the copyright for.

Not sure if you are asserting this but Just because an image is in the public domain, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Stability has a right to use it for training. I have online content that is licensed as Creative Commons attribution, non commercial, share alike- it seems to me that using this for training would breach at least the non commercial terms of that license.

I'm talking about millions of old photos and art that have had their copyright expire. Getty sells them for $500 a pop.

Eg: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/people-and-t...

This isn't a photo, but there are millions of pics as well.

Fair enough. I agree that $500 is a big ask for public domain content, however there is still a service provided by Getty in surfacing this content. It seems fair to charge a fee for that convenience- after all, the consumer has an option to do that work and find it themselves if they value their time less than the cost and have the necessary knowledge. Kevin Kelly identifies this in his excellent article “better than free“ (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/)

Getty asserts a related point in the claim- that the work done to build extensive metadata for the content (which Stability apparently used for training their models) is a valuable service in and of itself.

I understand not liking the price point here, but people sell copies of public domain works all the time; it's utterly mundane.

I'm upset that they're misrepresenting these works as being protected in order to make a sale to people who don't know better. It's a scam.

Unless they have explicitly transferred ownership, then yes. IP generally vests with the creator and is licensed to the recipient unless they have explicitly agreed otherwise.