Getty Images Is Suing Stable Diffusion for a Staggering $1.8T | Hacker News Reader

Getty Images Is Suing Stable Diffusion for a Staggering $1.8T

petapixel.com

30 pointsMontagFTB24 comments

Open articleView on HN

Discussed recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668565 235 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411187 83 comments

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Getty Images v. Stability AI – Complaint - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668565 - Feb 2023 (234 comments)

Getty Images is suing the creators of Stable Diffusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411187 - Jan 2023 (83 comments)

Also:

Getty sues Stability AI for copying 12M photos and imitating famous watermark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34687534 - Feb 2023 (9 comments)

Stable Attribution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670136 - Feb 2023 (339 comments)

Reminder that Getty Images has scraped, stolen and resold thousands if not tens of thousands of images online.

did they lose a lawsuit for it

* In 2008 they lose against Alain Ernoult, a french photographer, in a french court for €1 million

https://kaptur.co/getty-images-fined-1-million-euros/

* In 2013 they lose against Daniel Morel in a US court for $1.2 millions (a french photographer again!)

http://www.epuk.org/news/follow-the-daniel-morel-vs-afp-and-...

* They have win against Carol Highsmith in 2016. But they probably had settled small money out court for deceptive business practice.

https://petapixel.com/2016/11/22/1-billion-getty-images-laws...

In short, if you want to win a lawsuit against Getty, do no put your images in the public domain, and be a french photographer.

Stock images is the first business that will be killed or seriously reduced by an AI. Getty is fighting for its survival.

Why is that a good thing?

It's probably not, and didn't get op was saying it was - just that its an inevitable thing that will happen to dying industries when AI starts killing them.

Smells like when RIAA was suing individuals for billions of dollars per album they put on Napster.

I'm having trouble imagining something as detached from reality damages in IP suits. You could hypothetically have more wealth than the world GDP stored on a couple of hard drives if you go the amount of money they sue for. Just imagine, with a day of running dd, you'll have double the world GDP! And it'll fit in a backpack! We're lucky some deranged lunatic hasn't held the world economy hostage with his pirated media and a Linux workstation.

If the original artist/content creators retain the copyright for their images, how does Getty have the legal ability to accuse someone of intellectual property theft when they (Getty) do not own the intellectual property themselves but rather have a non-exclusive license to use it themselves.

> DO I RETAIN COPYRIGHT OF MY WORK? >Absolutely. We license imagery to our customers on your behalf and you retain the copyright to all content that you submit to us. > You can register as an individual or a business as long as you are at least 18 years of age.

https://joinus.gettyimages.com/eng/

Be cheaper to buy them for 2.4 billion

.. yawn. next.

Getty's lawyers know they won't ever see more than a fraction of that sum. This is fine. This is part of the game. What they hope is to intimidate SD and other AI art generators into submission.

There is nothing stopping a 400 lb programmer, to quote Donald Trump, from bootstrapping their own product.

This is a little like suing www.FreeTorentz432.com (made up name) for distributing mirrors for pirated media.

The global Internet is an indestructible hydra.

> There is nothing stopping a 400 lb programmer, to quote Donald Trump, from bootstrapping their own product.

Well, there is the issue of the cost to train that data set in the first place...

>There is nothing stopping a 400 lb programmer, to quote Donald Trump, from bootstrapping their own product.

With the cost of training such models from scratch dropping every year, this type of legal shenanigans will only encourage model development to move into the shadows where there's be even less accountability and AI ethics.

> The global Internet is an indestructible hydra.

...which can be cooked as though it is just a frog. National firewalls here, intellectual property content mediation requirements there, a dash of packet shaping allowed here, here, and here... Boiled hydra.

$1.8T: The pinnacle of "Getty math".

The huge amounts of money are just an opportunity. Use it as the basis for a monetary system! 10 Getty dollars is an IOU for a share of the potential stable diffusion damages.

Related: "The 8 billion iPod" by Rob Reid - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0

It's a funny TED talk on "copyright math".

They have an excellent point:

> “Getty Images’ visual assets are highly desirable for use in connection with artificial intelligence and machine learning because of their high quality, and because they are accompanied by content-specific, detailed captions and rich metadata,” it writes in the lawsuit.

LMAO at $1.8T, of course. Classic Getty.

Now I'm curious what the total valuation of Getty is.

""" Total Valuation Getty Realty has a market cap or net worth of $1.66 billion. The enterprise value is $2.31 billion.

Market Cap 1.66B Enterprise Value 2.31B """ - https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/gty/statistics/

I don't really know what the difference is between Market Cap (shares * share price?) and Enterprise Value (???) is.

Enterprise value is market cap + debt.

"Get"ty fucked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com