If we want to go down the rabbit hole where a hyperlink in a text file to a publicly accessible copyrighted photo on an artist's portfolio site/web server is "copyright infringement", or more accurately "assisting in making copyrighted content available", where the artist themselves is the one making those images is available publicly, then we're officially in clown world.

It would be more like abetting copyright infringement by making it easier for scrappers to find content to train their models on. LAION isn’t posting a single link on their twitter account for their followers. It’s clear what this dataset is being used for.

Artists put content on the internet so you can look at it and share it with your friends and say “wow cool art” not so you can run it through an art generating model to put them out of job. That we never anticipated this possibility means you call fallback on the “fair use” argument but legal does not mean ethical, especially when the law has yet to catch up to changing times.

That assumes that using copyrighted works to train AI is copyright infringement. And that simply pasting a link to a publicly available file that the artist themselves made available is "abetting." I'm betting that using copyrighted works to train "AI" is fair use, just like a human learning from a photo would be fair use.

You’re right, I can’t claim that it is. I understand that the models do not contain the original work.

But they are not simply sharing a single link and the “intent” is different. I personally feel that we should not treat human learning and AI learning the same. Unlike humans, the AI is essentially immortal and infinitely copiable.

The issue isn’t having a link the issue is selling a dataset to people with the intent for them to preform copyright infringement.

Selling pipes, cellphones, igniters, and black powder is perfectly legal. Selling pre assembled pipe bombs filled with black powder and a remote detonators is going to very quickly get you into a great deal of legal trouble.

1. They're not selling a dataset, it's a public dataset.

2. The artist made the photo publicly available.

3. Read this opinion and come back to the conversation with a more level head instead of making analogies to promoting terrorism: https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/53/5/notes/files/53...

First the actual use for training AI isn’t needed for copyright protection to kick in, simply downloading his images to build the training set is already copyright infringement.

2. The artist disabled crawling on their website so it’s accessible but not fully available.

3. Your link says many things that aren’t settled in terms of US law but rather the options of the author. “even if infringement occurs during machine learning, training AI with copyrighted works would likely be excused by the fair use doctrine.” That’s a lot of possibilities not actual guarantees.

However, it ignores the largest issue namely if the output of these AI’s are all simply derivative works.

2. robots.txt is not legally enforceable. It's a gentleman's agreement, a widely accepted standard to codify into a scraper for it to observe and respect.

3. That's why it's called an opinion. No shit. Maybe instead of talking about promoting terrorism, you should have a level head and talk about fair use.

Robots.txt is permission it allows you to do something that is otherwise illegal. You are not allowed to do this stuff by default.

Something people don’t understand is “Right click file save as…” on a copyrighted image breaks copyright, as you don’t have permission to make a copy.

Are you saying that after all these years of omitting robots.txt from my public personal website of priceless blog posts and code repositories, I can take Google and Microsoft to court for scraping, linking to, and reproducing what I deem as substantial portions? They've violated my rights! They didn't have permission!

In all seriousness, that's total shit. It's publicly accessible. That's the permission. There have been different cases like weev where the judge has viewed it differently because of specific details like carrying out the action of enumeration, or guessing IDs, to reveal non-public information, but that had to do with the CFAA.

If you reproduce content in total in another work, resell, etc., that's another thing.

> It's publicly accessible. That's the permission.

Fair use is permission. Every library book is accessible that doesn’t have copyright implications.

You brought up robots.txt as if it was illegal to scrape or crawl the artist's website since his site had one that was supposed to "turn off scraping." That's what I was referring to. And that's just flat out laughably wrong.

In the context you're now talking about by the letter of copyright law, downloading a photo, image, file of something or other, a "copyrighted work" where it's publicly accessible, and has a particular license specified that you may not reproduce it, may technically be "unlawful" letter by letter of the law, but I doubt any judge is going to actually see it that way versus intent of the law unless you literally reproduce or share a substantial portion of it, sell a complete copy, etc. It's almost certainly fair use to study, and use portions of the copyrighted work in your own copyrighted works.

The legality of scrapping without explicit permission depends on the context as has been demonstrated by multiple court cases. Robots.txt short circuits that by giving permission to people who might not otherwise qualify.

As to making a copy with intent to X, that’s what fair use is. A student may photocopy the full text of an short article so they can accurate quote it in their term paper. They can’t simply photocopy an article because they are a student with access to the article and a photocopier nor can the photocopy a full book because they want to use a short quote in their paper. Copying incidental to acceptable use becomes retroactively acceptable. This distinction may seem crazy to you, but the fact that intent matters means you can’t judge an action without context.

Fair use in commercial context is looked at with vastly more suspicion than fair use in academic context, which again demonstrates specific actions on their own aren’t always enough information to say if something is allowed.

>The legality of scrapping without explicit permission depends on the context as has been demonstrated by multiple court cases. Robots.txt short circuits that by giving permission to people who might not otherwise qualify.

It's been determined that it's legal, if it's publicly accessible, and you don't receive a cease-and-desist letter telling you to stop. If it's public, that's permission. Simply "turning off scraping" by putting a robots.txt there doesn't make the content and linked images of a public web page any less public and restricted from being scraped, legally.

Just last year, the LinkedIn case: LinkedIn had a robots.txt, and the judge didn't give a fuck. Nor did he care what their terms of use said. Rather, it was hiQ's continued scraping of LinkedIn data even after LinkedIn's cease-and-desist letter to them that constituted access of data "without authorization."

>As to making a copy with intent to X, that’s what fair use is.

Yes, and?

>This distinction may seem crazy to you

It's not a crazy distinction, that's what I'd basically said previously, so perhaps we're talking past each other.

> LinkedIn

There’s a lot of precedent here showing scrapping isn’t guaranteed to be acceptable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur....

$79,640.50 in compensatory damages + $39,796.73 discovery sanction

I could go on, but I am not sure what exactly you’re trying to argue here.

Power Ventures' actions violated the CFAA because they bypassed security measures intended to make the content not-exactly-public. The judge dismissed claims of copyright infringement despite them hosting "cached" versions of the scraped profiles using Facebook's trade dress. The damages + discovery sanction had to do with them bypassing security restrictions with their scraping, creating profiles and using bots to scrape with those profiles to access further information than was public, and Power Ventures' ignoring their explicit cease-and-desist the first time, and their non-compliance with discovery in some context. Read the case.

>I could go on, but I am not sure what exactly you’re trying to argue here.

That public is public. If you leave the door open in the real world, someone CAN enter your home. If you host your image on a public webpage, they can scrape it. robots.txt is not a security measure, nor is it a contract that magically gives the right to scrape where it wasn't given previously, it is a gentleman's agreement that you can ignore if you want to be a dick about it, and know about the robots.txt. Ethically, that's wrong, but it is how it is.

Not to mention, as I came to understand while reading during this discussion, LAION wasn't even crawling: they were using a public commoncrawl dump to gather their images. commoncrawl had crawled the author's site previously. They just took that data and got image links out of it.

1. they weren't selling a dataset

2. the artist didn't "disable" scraping in any meaningful way, legally

3. linking to the image is not illegal, and they're justified to respond with an invoice in Germany to recover legal fees for this dumb copyright complaint

4. it may fall under fair use to download images and train neural nets on them, it may not be. it always depends on the context and the specific case.

pretty simple stuff.

> If you leave the door open in the real world, someone CAN enter your home.

No trespassing signs have legal weight even without a fence.

Read up on Thomson Reuters v Ross Intelligence.

No trespassing signs have legal weight with certain conditions, and it's up to the judge. I've been in a court case where simply taking pictures outside of the property and showing that the gap between each no trespassing sign was more than 100ft wide was enough for a judge to throw out the charges. I was dirt biking on the power company's property, you see. It hinges on the defendant not noticing such restrictions. In both cases, the robots.txt meant jack. Even their security measures usually meant jack. Instead, it was a legal cease and desist from a lawyer that constituted "no authorization."

Thank you very much for the link to that opinion. I'm keeping it bookmarked and will likely show it to many people as time progresses.

Is sharing someone's private location information on the internet illegal[0] or immoral? Because it is just linking to their home address, it isn't harming or doing anything physically to the person. There are obvious examples that demonstrate this type of slippery slope argument is equivocation on some level, linking to something can be seen as an invitation for people to copy it and violate copyright.

[0] The answer at least in the US is the act itself is likely not illegal although it can be construed to lead to a crime, such as incitement.

You have a human you want to train to paint. You download an image of a painting and give it to the human to train it on, amongst many. The human, in the future, may paint something that has vaguely or substantially similar qualities to the original painting. Has copyright infringement occurred in this instance? No: the downloading of the image for study in this particular instance is for sure, 100%, fair use protected by copyright law.

Now, let's try something similar. You have a monkey you want to train to paint. You download an image of a painting and give it to the monkey to train it on, amongst many. The monkey, in the future, may paint something that has vaguely or substantially similar qualities to the original painting. Has copyright infringement occurred in this instance?

Let's go further: You have a neural network you want to train to paint. You download an image of a painting and give it to the neural network to train it on, amongst many. The neural network, in the future, may paint something that has vaguely or substantially similar qualities to the original painting. Has copyright infringement occurred when that happens?

I find it hilarious that in this thread, instead of asking the question of whether this is fair use, multiple posters have jumped to comparing this to thievery, promoting terrorism and posting of private information as an analogy to harm.

Well good luck trying to teach your monkey to paint. Let me propose a simple vocabulary refresher: feeding into an human eye is "showing", feeding into a machine is "copying". calling this copying "training" is nice and cute, but training is what you do as a human. As submarines do not swim, LLM's do not train: they copy information and extract similarities inside a neural net. As for your mention of various "hilarious" scarecrows, it demonstrates that you know your logic is on shaky grounds.

WRT "teaching a monkey how to paint", I think the above poster is referring to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

>As submarines do not swim, LLM's do not train:

The neural network behind the LLM is "trained." Yes, it's a term of art, very observant. That doesn't change the fact that there's not a substantial reproduction of a work in it. LLMs "learn" to predict text by feeding them vectors, the resulting "weights" of that process could be thought of and implemented as a big walkable decision tree to predict the next token it weren't for combinatorial explosion, but there's no substantial reproduction, or "copy", in there.

Is there a substantial reproduction, in your head, of a song or a text or a painting you can perfectly recall and can't seem to forget? Be careful, the copyright police will get you, the only way to delete it is to delete yourself!

>feeding into a machine is called copying

Copyright law deals in "reproductions" as far as I understand it. Feeding a copyrighted document as vectors into a program that reconfigures some matrix of vectors, and then using that matrices to output probability distributions into something tangible, where something tangible isn't a complete or substantial reproduction of the copyrighted work, is not a copyright violation.

If you think it is, amend copyright law, or take it to court and let a judge settle the matter, and hope it's in your favor.

How is the copyrighted document being "fed as vectors" if not through a process of copy of the data that it contains? Indeed the semantics are surely going to get their day in court. The fact that you felt the need to qualify reproduction with the word "substantial" probably means that copyright will show how much "substance" is allowed to be, or not to be, copied.

About your question: """Is there a substantial reproduction, in your head, of a song or a text or a painting you can perfectly recall and can't seem to forget? Be careful, the copyright police will get you, the only way to delete it is to delete yourself!"""

This equivalence between "perfect" human recall, and a copy of the data input into an AI model is a bit of a strawman I think: it is the distribution of copied information that copyright protects against, the information has been uploaded in vectors, have fun demonstrating it is not being used in producing this or that model output. If I learn a popular song and do a cover, there is a copyright law for that, I owe rights.

>it is the distribution of copied information that copyright protects against, the information has been uploaded in vectors

The "vectors" are not "uploaded" or "copied" into a file or neural network, they're transformed. In the context of stable diffusion, They're transformed, progressively "noised" or "corrupted", "diffused" with random gaussian noise, and in the context of stable diffusion, it's "trained" and "learns" how to "denoise" various "noised" stages of images represented as a vector of pixel data into their original form.

Then, when it comes to generation of images consistent with an "annotation" or "prompt", it is "conditioned towards" or "biased towards", with more "training", by noising an input image, and concating or combining that vector of pixels with a vector of the annotation of the image. It then "learns" to denoise with that conditioning information, the annotation.

Then, you can take the trained model, and do the same thing, with just a text prompt as a vector concated to a vector of random gaussian noise, and no input images.

That's basically and very simplistically how it works.

The output is not a substantial reproduction from the input images + annotations when trained. It takes the random noise, and "tries" to denoise it into something consistent with the prompt with conditioning to guide it.

Your attempt at covering would be a substantially similar reproduction. Your goal is to do a reproduction. Whereas, the model "learns" to generate images consistent with an annotation/prompt, by conditioning it with that "goal" on top of how it "learned" to denoise the images.

Even the film industry might have had trouble getting the Pirate Bay guys if the pictures they were linking to were hosted by the film industry themselves.

There's a difference:

* In the Pirate Bay case, the copyright owners hadn't posted the copyrighted contend anywhere. Someone who was not the copyright owner posted an unauthorized copy, and the Pirate Bay were linking to that unauthorized posting.

* In this case, the copyright owner has posted the content; and LIAON is linking to the copyright owner's authorized posting.

Linked to the data that is illegally hosted by someone else.

Here, they are linking to the data that is legally hosted with extra metadata. This is exactly how we wanted the www to work.

Then again, Google guys said, we are just linking to the data...

This is actually a good analogy. TPB is just linking to copyrighted materials. It’s the user who is committing the infringement by downloading, using, reproducing, etc the material. In this case they’re both linking to the material and controlling the application that’s downloading, using, reproducing, etc the material. That seems like a material difference to me. (Pun intended)

The Pirate Bay links to pirated content. LAION links to the photographer’s own website.

Valid reply

If TPB was links to the original source videos as hosted by Disney, I don't think they'd have had such a hard time arguing it was OK.

Your comparison would be more reasonable if LAION had an origin link and then a link to a copy of the file explicitly for the purposes of copyright infringement.