Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

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AFAIK only people can own copyright (the monkey selfie case tested this), and machine-generated outputs don't count as creative work (you can't write an algorithm that generates every permutation of notes and claim you own every song[1]), so DALL-E-generated images are most likely copyright-free. I presume OpenAI only relies on terms of service to dictate what users are allowed to do, but they can't own the images, and neither can their users.

[1]: https://felixreda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin...

> DALL-E-generated images are most likely copyright-free

The US Copyright Office did make a ruling that might suggest that recently[1], but crucially, in that case, the AI "didn't include an element of human authorship." The board might rule differently about DALL-E because the prompts do provide an opportunity for human creativity.

And there's another important caveat that the felixreda.eu link seems to miss. DALL-E output, whether or not it's protected by copyright, can certainly infringe other copyrights, just like the output of any other mechanical process. In short, Disney can still sue if you distribute DALL-E generated images of Marvel characters.

1: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off...

DALL-E can generate recognizable pictures of Homer Simpson, Batman and other commercial properties. Such images could easily be considered derivative works of the original copyrighted images that were used as training input. I'm sure there are plenty of corporate IP lawyers ready to argue the point at court.

I'm kind of surprised that no one had found "verbatim copy" cases as were made with GitHub Copilot. Such exact copies in photography are likely easier to go for than with code snippets.

It might be interesting to find an image in the training set with a long, very unique description, and try that exact same description as input in DALL·E 2.

Of course it's unlikely to produce the exact same image, or if it does, you've also discovered an incredible image compression algorithm.

Oh I don’t have problems with DALL-E doing its thing, I just think it’s wrong if the purpose will be to cleanse off copyrights from images.

The monkey selfie was not derived from millions of existing works, and that is the difference. If an artist has a well-known art style, and this algorithm was trained on it and can copy that style, would the artist have grounds to sue? I don't know.

> If an artist has a well-known art style, and this algorithm was trained on it and can copy that style...

A lawyer could argue that the algorithm is producing a derivative work of the copyrighted input.

Right but if that work isn’t significantly changed from the source, it could be ruled as infringement. DALL-E cannot tell the users (afaik) if a result is close to any source material.

> If an artist has a well-known art style, and this algorithm was trained on it and can copy that style, would the artist have grounds to sue? I don't know.

While nothing has been commercialized yet on the DALLE2 subreddit, I know that it can do Dave Choe's work remarkably well. I also saw Alex Gray's work to be close, but not really identical either. It wasn't as intricate as his work is.

It will be interesting if this takes off and you have a sort of Banksy effect take over where unless it's a physical piece of art it doesn't have much value and is only made all the better because of some sort polemic attached to it, eg Girl with balloon.

I'm going to guess there's not going to be much value placed on anything out of DALLE for a long while. Digital art is typically worth much less than physical art and I would say these GAN images are going to worth less than digital art generated by human hand.

There will be outliers of course but I would be shocked if there's much of a market in it for at least the present.

When these tools can generate layered tiff/psd images, polygon meshes and automate UV packing; then we’ll be talking.

I think the value will be in work produced that gets attached to things which are being sold. So, a book cover or an album cover. If a best selling novel used artwork from this system and it happened to be a very close copy of existing work, I could imagine the author of the original work suing for royalties.

If I write a song am I not deriving it from the existing works I’ve been exposed to?

Sure but if you just release a basic copy of a Taylor Swift song you will get sued to oblivion. So the law seems (IANAL) to care about how similar your work is to existing works. DALL-E does not seem capable of showing you the work that influenced a result, so users will have no idea if a result might be infringing. What this means to me is that with many users, some of the results would be legally infringing.

Well, music is not "pictures" but Marvin Gaye's family got 5 million because Blurred Lines sounds similar enough to a Marvin Gaye song (even though it was not a sample): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgepor...

Even if you imitate someone's style intentionally, they don't have grounds to sue. Style isn't copyrightable in the US. Whether DALL-E outputs are a derivative work is a different question, though

If this were a concern, a user can easily bypass this by having a work-for-hire person add a minor transform layer on top of the DALL-E generated images right?

Wouldn't it have to meet the threshold of being a "transformative" work?

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

Can I infringe another Dalle users rights if I take an image generated by their acount and sell prints of it..?

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