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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Entered "Mickey Mouse", "Batman", "Microsoft", "Calvin and Hobbes", and "pokemon" into the generation field.

All of the above appear to generate copyrighted/trademarked images. Careful.

Whenever there's a discussion about copyright and AI-generated images, there will be people claiming that AI can't possibly reproduce images it has been trained on. Stable Diffusion and similar software supposedly only learns higher concepts and hence no one can claim that its outputs are derived works. The rationale I often see mentioned for this argument is that the model is very much smaller (in terms of bytes) than the set of images used to train it, so verbatim images can't possibly be stored in it.

Yet, there are plenty of examples where it will reproduce well-known works out of it. People have reported images with recognizable watermarks [1]. How do you reconcile this fact with the previous claim? Is there a special part of the model that stores Mickey Mouse, Batman and Getty Images watermark verbatim, but other less-well known artists' art gets reduced to mere concepts?

When you put in a prompt "magnificent owl" and get out an unrecognizable owl artwork out of the machine, I wonder. Is that really a novel artwork, or is unrecognizable merely because it was done by some random person uploading their art to an unknown DeviantArt account 5 years ago that was seen by 10 people in total since, just barely changed enough by the AI that a similarity search through billions of images in the training set won't find it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33044611

For a well-known cartoon figure, the issue isn't copyright, it's trademark. If someone types "Mickey Mouse" and this site has Stable Diffusion design a Mickey Mouse shirt and sell it, they are infringing Disney's trademark: they are selling a Mickey Mouse shirt without Disney's permission. It's the same if they hire an artist to do an original Mickey Mouse design.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I think it's much more likely that trademark issues will bring the hammer down on some of these projects than copyright issues, because I think it will be easier to persuade a judge: they let people type "Calvin and Hobbes" and make and sell a "Calvin and Hobbes" shirt to them, and we don't have a license to do that.

Is it also illegal for me to upload an image of the mouse and get it printed on a t-shirt ?

Technically, yep

I see it this way: I provide a means for users to generate what they like, but I'm not mass selling those designs. If a single person uses tshirt pens to paint mickey mouse on their shirt, Disney would probably not sue them. Also there is no way knowing whether I sold any mickey mouse shirts.

If you allowed users to upload their own images, and those images were of Mickey Mouse, and you printed them and sold them, Disney would have a pretty easy claim against you.

You're not just selling a neutral tool here, you're actually printing the potentially infringing art.

> Also there is no way knowing whether I sold any mickey mouse shirts.

Think this statement through. I can come up with a couple of ways for a rights-holder to figure out if you're selling merchandise that infringes on their marks. They can attempt to order one themselves. They can see a tweet where someone shares the cool t-shirt they bought from you.

You're probably not actually in much danger here, but I would still take the hazard seriously if I were you. Be careful.

Indeed. Here is an example of a company ordering trademark-infringing goods directly from a vendor, then successfully pursuing legal action against that vendor:

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122820376/the-good-the-bad-a...

Yep, that's correct. Thanks for the hints!

Currently, I review all created designs before printing, so that would be a way of not infringing, I. E. Cancel orders which are potentially infringing

That should be enough. A block list of prominent trademarked characters might also be possible. That would still leave a huge space of possible ideas.

I mean, how is that any different than what we have now?

I guess the ability to feign ignorance that a certain work is trademarked? I mean, what happens if you have a program that draws random shapes and 3 circles line up in a way that looks like a disney logo?

I get what you're saying, just sorta thinking out loud, lol

I would think what we have now already covers everything. Doesn't matter _how_ you produced an infringement, if you make something too closely to Mickey and sell it, you're infringing _(i'm speaking loosely, ofc)_.

But in that case, the problem wouldn't be mine, but the one making money out of it, wouldn't it?

This is super tricky. I wonder how this plays out in the end.

Well T-shirt companies already let you upload any image you want, and usually have a human reviewer checking for copyright violations. So depending on the risk profile of the manufacturer they will either use the same system or just wing it and hope to not get noticed.

My guess is that 2-5 years from now, copyright/trademark suits will have removed the current iterations of Stable Diffusion from widespread use.

The idea and technology is awesome, but one must be very careful with the training data.

It's not illegal, it's just potentially expensive.

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