Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
AI art isn't going away, and it better be open instead of in full control of just 2 or 3 companies.
It'll be like how many financial instruments are banned to retail consumers, but are used by the rich and powerful to become more rich and powerful.
AI isn't going away, we need open models that everyone can use.
And if they can, then everyone can. I can buy the rights to a single photograph of Darth Vader and create an entire series TV about his life using AI.
Adobe is already creating such AI with these kinds of partners, so yes
> And if they can, then everyone can. I can buy the rights to a single photograph of Darth Vader and create an entire series TV about his life using AI.
No because a single image of Darth Vader alone won't work. You need a pretrained base model, trained with millions of images. Only then you can feed such base model a single image and get something decent.
So, nobody has contested them yet. I smell a class-action lawsuit for them from the original makers of their clipart library.
The base model can be trained on open source images. Or people may use adobe's software for that. From just a few images of Darth you can make basically anything, so yes it's quite doable already.
It seems to me there is no way to put this cat back in the bag ever again.
In the case of Darth Vader, there is probably a trademark involved as well, but the vast majority of photos , celebs etc don't have that.
Anyways, use of Darth Vader in any work would be a derivative work.
Patents. Copyrights. Franchising?
Artists are now experiencing the joy of getting beaten in the market by someone else selling the product they created. It was not allowed to stand in other industries.
Copyright is a necessary evil. Disney may well be the savior of artists in the age of AI. There is no incentive to produce anything original if someone else can just gank it and drown you in volume.
Without enforcing copyright rules on AI, it may mean the end of copyright entirely.
I share a lot of images under CC-BY-SA-NC and share code under the GPL. If someone can train a model off my work and disregard the terms under which I have shared it, copyright is my only enforcement mechanism.
This is a beautiful world, that can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned.
Ditto for LLMs. Obviously GPT-4 is the best game in town, but I have several LLMs and the code required to use them installed on several machines. Training new data for them can close the gap quite well at the expense of becoming less general.
We can’t regulate our way out of this one. That window closed a while ago.
You can make it illegal if you like, but you’ll never be able to enforce it. And other countries are not obligated to follow suit, and will have significant competitive advantages as a result.
The boundaries of the law are rarely set at what you think you can get away with, but are usually set on some other principle and in between that line and the point where you exist there is plenty of room for prosecution. The jails contain lots of people who thought they 'could get away with it'. Don't be one of those.
Do you feel lucky? What if a specific version of Stable Diffusion is found to be infringing and there's a way to back-attribute an image to it?
Also find it laughable that a lot of the most vocal artists against it make their money drawing characters they don't own anyway.
Approaching this as a designer so obviously these tools will impact me but as long as I can run them on my own hardware without paying tax to Adobe/OpenAI I can at least benefit.
The difference is that the open systems will be for personal use and the closed models by companies using it for profit. And the reason Adobe and others would be used in for profit settings is because they pay the artists. Which is what's intended by the lawsuits?
I suppose you could argue the beneficiaries are the shareholders of Disney, etc rather than its artists. At the same time, maybe this ends with open source systems that artists can host themselves.
These AIs do not need to learn from your work in order to function, they just need to learn from some work. All that extending copyright in this manner would do is create a bunch of unnecessary busywork and slow the progress of technological development. You're not going to get paid $5 for letting a proprietary AI train on your drawing, blog post, or GitHub repo when they could get the same benefit from paying someone else $0.05 to find a public domain image, blog post, or repo elsewhere.
Basically, the amount of value your individual work contributes to generative AI is minuscule, but the amount of effort the entire industry would need to expend in order to compensate you for that value is massive. Unless stifling progress is your explicit goal, it's not worth it.
>In reality, Stable Diffusion works by first converting a user’s prompt into a latent representation: a list of numbers summarizing the contents of the image. Just as you can identify a point on the Earth’s surface based on its latitude and longitude, Stable Diffusion characterizes images based on their “coordinates” in the “picture space.” It then converts this latent representation into an image.
Regardless of the lawsuit, this seems like a quite spurious, self-serving argument in and of itself. If the “coordinates” of the image were not equivalent to the image, how would it be possible to fine tune the model on a set of images and recreate their style? This is setting aside the myriad examples where SD regurgitates fairly close copies of individual works.
This is a bit like training a model on the works of Shakespeare, but then claiming that the tensors resulting from ingesting the data are not actually Shakespeare’s writing. Oh really, where’d they come from then? Thin air?
I'd like to try this. Any suggestions where I can learn how to implement this technique?
Obviously you get the Shakespeare influence, but the bar on copyright infringement is very high for a reason — we don't want to sue artists for being influenced by another writer.
'Capital owners' bankrolled the company that manufactures the device you used to type your asinine comment, as well as bankrolling/funding the companies that manufacture every single item you own, from your toothbrush to your clothes.
If you despise capitalism so much, put your money where your mouth is and relocate to Cuba.
Champagne pseudo-socialists like you give the rest of us liberals a bad name.
Instead of reflexively spewing a series of ideological non-sequiturs, perhaps engage with what I actually said.
Could you name a single startup in the US that has been caught 'bribing' politicians?
And stop drinking the Uber/WeWork/Airbnb/ kool-aid. The vast majority of startups are founded by honest people, and don't rely on breaking laws in order to establish a dominant market position or 'raise a ton of money', I should know, I'm an early employee at a startup with a 'dominant market position'.
Yes you should demonise people for any criminal actions they've actually committed, but please don't demonise them simply for being successful.
All of your comments on this thread sound as though they're made by a college undergrad still in the anti-capitalist/hippy-communist stage.
Grow up! Most things in life are not conspiracies and believing they are will significantly harm your emotional health.
https://theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak-rev...
Oh, but of course, only if I set aside the “kool-aid” of citing the examples of the dominant startup players of the past decade.
Perhaps you should, again, grow beyond your ideological name-calling to a rational engagement with the world, which actually involves everything I’ve described.
Or are you claiming that the word "lobby" in the phrase "attempts to lobby Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz and George Osborne" actually meant 'bribe'?
And despite you frantically scouring Google for something to backup your 'bribery' claims with, the above article ended up being the only thing you could find.
So basically, you essentially spent your own time to prove my point. Thanks.
I'll repeat again what I told you earlier: grow up and stop gorging yourself on conspiracy theories.
Signing off!
You've posted some good comments in other threads, so hopefully this should be easy to fix if you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart. We'd be grateful!
You've posted some good comments in other threads, so hopefully this should be easy to fix if you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart. We'd be grateful!
It's simply not. Stable Diffusion 1.5 was trained on over two billion images. Even if we assume the images were only 10kb on average, that would require 20TB of storage space. The pruned 1.5 model is only 4.27GB, or 4,684x smaller. It is fundamentally and provably impossible to achieve that sort of compression ratio on diverse and already compressed images.
'Coordinates of the image' is a layman's explanation of latent space and the training process, it should not be taken literally.
> how would it be possible to fine tune the model on a set of images and recreate their style?
The fine tune process represents additional training, and to reliably and consistent reproduce a consistent style generally requires overfitting. It is very roughly analagous to an artist using a reference while drawing/painting.
> This is setting aside the myriad examples where SD regurgitates fairly close copies of individual works.
Some works were overrepresented in the dataset because they are overrepresented in the world. There are substantially more images and variants of the Mona Lisa on the internet than there are Random Twitter Artist's Furry Waifu.
This works in much the same way for humans, who are more far more likely to be influenced by the Mona Lisa than Furry Waifu.
> This is a bit like training a model on the works of Shakespeare, but then claiming that the tensors resulting from ingesting the data are not actually Shakespeare’s writing.
.. They aren't. Shakespeare did not write them. His works can't be reproduced from them. There is, provably, not enough data for it. This is more different than if an individual read and referenced Shakespeare while writing a play, for all that entails. Specifically: whether it's a human or a model generating the content, the content that is generated could be a violation of copyright.
You'll note that this is no different to if I copy and paste Mickey Mouse onto a tshirt design, or if I draw him on a piece of paper with a crayon.
Should we also be up in arms about copy/paste and crayons?
> Oh really, where’d they come from then? Thin air?
This hits on a more important point than I think you realize here. Where did inspiration for the human artists come from? Did they spring from a formless void? Or have they seen a lot of images, internalized what they think was important from it, and then generated art from that?
Oh really? Try googling overfitting. Or ask ChatGPT!
> The fine tune process represents additional training, and to reliably and consistent reproduce a consistent style generally requires overfitting ...
It's clear you have a perspective that is set in stone, and insist on not understanding the technology. Hopefully you'll re-evaluate when the plaintiffs in these suits inevitably lose.
> I don’t really care about the copyright argument as it relates to human learning because I think this is all a Napster-style false flag by capital owners to enclose ALL data on the internet. The intent isn’t to argue about these models from first principles such that we all have IP-restriction free access from them. It’s to make them do enough legally gray things at scale that they get restricted to only a few power players.
This argument confuses an image and the style. The former is copyrightable, the latter is not.
That being said, nothing is stopping Getty images, for example, from releasing their own image generator, trained from images they own copyright to.
Or creative common work, etc.
Generally, whenever a company buys a photo, there's a release form where the claimed-author of the photo has to state that they own the rights to the photo. So, the infringement is on the part of the seller, and you have a high barrier to sue Adobe for that.
No, you don’t, Adobe just has a low barrier to suck the source of the image into the case as an additio al defendano and a potential additional de¹1¹fense against any claim of willful infringement.
OTOH, Adobe would like potential plaintiffs to think that it works the way you describe.
Exactly. Companies like Getty, Disney and Shutterstock are never tired of collecting money and the easiest target for this is Stable Diffusion, which is already commercializing the model with DreamStudio which includes Getty's images without their permission.
O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com avoided this by partnering with shutterstock to get this permission first before training on their images for DALL-E 2. If O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com was able to do that, then SD has no reason other than taking images without attribution or credit and using them commercially. (Which they have been caught many times)
Do they own the right to train-a-model? It's not clear at all. A lot of great photographers don't want their unique style to be multiplied ad infinitum. Copyright is to "copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work", and this is not an adaptation
which is fine, if it's theirs they're free to do what they want with it
however I didn't give Microsoft permission to sell people code derived from my works without attribution
You can’t escape it, we may as well all benefit instead of this silly crusade making only 4 companies max benefiting, forever.
I mean, maybe because the impact is so severe we should HAVE new laws affording more protections to artists, but that's a different argument right?
Imagine an image-generating ML dataset that has been trained on nothing but images of Mickey Mouse. Surely the Disney corporation would come after that, I have no doubt about that. Why does commingling Mickey with other inputs change that, if the tool can still reproduce images of Mickey Mouse when asked for that?
1) We just need 1 jurisdiction that allows model training.
2) There is no mechanism to stop model distribution short of banning general purpose computing and the internet. That would cause more harm than good.
3) It is already hard and going to get harder to prove these models were trained on any particular piece of art.
1) same as with torrent trackers. you can download anything, but most of the times you can't legally use it.
2) yet. also harm/good point is a bit hypocritical. pirating of software is good? what about pirating of open source?
3) that`s could become issue for a model creator.
Isn't this what Adobe has done? The results are actually really good.
I'd rather a million artists have their work "stolen", including my own if it ensures future generations wont be locked into Adobe like my work is.
Controlnet + SD was really mind blowing all around. I understand why artists are depressed now, but people are already training hypermodels, textual inversions, and loras. Who knows what the future will bring ?
My two favorite hyper models are around oil paintings, and cars(for my husband, he is getting an AI car calendar for his birthday, let's see if he figures it out :)
This genie isn't going back into the bottle.
I don't think that impacts legal things, however you are correct, AI art can never go away.
If the legal hammer falls on the bad side of this, corporations/people with decent sized assets are unable to use these tools without paying some sort of royalty.
>I understand why artists are depressed now
As someone who isnt an artist, I wish I could sketch something quickly, use controlnet, and have my idea turned into reality in a few seconds. Non artists are basically at the whim of other creators + the randomness of txt2img. Heck, it seems there is something I want changed with nearly every AI art picture, with actual art skills, you could fix these.
Just to be clear on my point, if I could sketch something, I could probably have perfect AI art in 10-15 minutes. Without those skills, it takes ~1-2 hours.
There are a lot of emotions around this space right now. I’m very curious to see how the legal teams break things down logically and with precedents.
Which is to say, compare these models to e.g. simple image compression. If compressed images can violate, the argument that "this is merely VERY GOOD and VERSATILE image compression" probably has enough legal legs to do something with.
Compression has the property that almost all inputs are reconstructable. Generative models have the property that almost all inputs are not reconstructable.
I was very dismissive of the anti-AI-image crowd until I saw that Anne Graham Lotz pic. Only a single known source image of her exists, although many copies of it are distributed far and wide across the internet, and using her name in a prompt results in an image that seems very much like a lossy reproduction of the "original." It's an edge case, to be sure, but that demonstration looks like lossy compression, even though it's not.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Anne+Graham+Lotz&t=brave&iax=image...
I see dozens of images of this woman (who is apparently some kind of minister). Okay, I'm clearly missing something here. Can you explain further?
I just put my local copy of Stable Diffusion to work cranking out images based on an "Anne Graham Lotz" prompt. So far, none of them look anything like the original image. It has generated one of her wearing a similar-colored shirt, but the pose is completely different, and as noted above, she seems to like that color.
The complete set of "matches" they got were interesting, even while the number was very low.
My guess is that because there's a lot of these cases coming the courts are really going to want to come up with some tests for whether a model is ok or not. So even if they say SD did a bad thing with these few images, that's not going to be enough to rule out the broader class of algorithms - next week they'll have another Getty case against the algorithm with the technical mitigation for the rare copied images.
Technologically I know that this is a pretty honest statement of the problem, but I'd expect A LOT OF PEOPLE to read this as "oh, look, they're trying to tweak it to 'destroy evidence.'"
I really hope these lawyers wont mess that up, it's an easy win.
The lawyers won't "mess it up" but rather that the large copyright holders will be able to use this to enforce these restrictions on human generated fan art just as easily as they (and other humans) will be able to enforce it on generative AI.
While it won't be possible to excise the idea of "draw like Disney" from someone's brain, it will be possible to sue the creator to remove the work.
No because in that case you're talking about, there is at least an artist.
There is no artist for a generated picture - closer than the training set.
Doodles, personal art notebooks, photoshopped images - those have never been things that have run afoul of copyright... until they are published.
A person doodling on some paper or running stable diffusion and using it as a background image for their desktop - these have never been at issue before and from a legal point of view are likely very much the same.
Now an AI does the same thing and suddenly no copyright ?
What should be done maybe is explicitly asking for every art generated to ask to pay for it and this money goes for the copyrights.
But unlimited free art without restrictions nor credit to the original author is stealing IP.
Or you remove everything with IP from the training set because it’s cheating.
Also I doubt your claim is true. There’s no way there’s a copyright claim on “paintings that feel like Picasso style”.
https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Comm...
> Le droit moral de l’artiste est «perpétuel, inaliénable et imprescriptible». Il est lié à la personne de l’auteur qui ne peut y renoncer ni le céder à autrui
> The moral right of the artist is "perpetual, inalienable and imprescriptible". It is linked to the person of the author who can neither renounce it nor transfer it to another person
https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Comm...
> Le code de la propriété intellectuelle entend par contrefaçon tous les actes d'utilisation non autorisée de l'œuvre. En cas de reprise partielle de cette dernière, elle s'apprécie en fonction des ressemblances entre les œuvres. La simple tentative n'est pas punissable. La loi incrimine au titre du délit de contrefaçon : - «toute reproduction, représentation ou diffusion, par quelque moyen que ce soit, d'une œuvre de l'esprit en violation des droits de l'auteur, tels qu'ils sont définis et réglementés par la loi » (CPI, art. L. 335-3). - «le débit [acte de diffusion, notamment par vente, de marchandises contrefaisantes], l'exportation et l'importation des ouvrages "contrefaisants" » (CPI, art. L. 335.2 al. 3).
> The Intellectual Property Code defines infringement as all acts of unauthorized use of a work. In the case of partial use of the work, it is assessed according to the similarities between the works. The simple attempt is not punishable. The law incriminates under the offence of counterfeiting: - "any reproduction, representation or dissemination, by any means whatsoever, of a work of the mind in violation of the author's rights, as defined and regulated by law" (CPI, art. L. 335-3). - "the debit [act of distribution, notably by sale, of infringing goods], the export and import of 'infringing' works" (CPI, art. L. 335.2 al. 3).
You don’t want Renoir suing Monet over who owns Impressionism.
That is very different from saying you cannot recreate his specific works.
Or do crappy Pop Art faux copies.
Before those AI if I ever wanted something specific I had to go see an artist and ask (prompt) him for the art I want. If I ask him to draw Andy Warhol Marilyn with my face on it. Can he charge me for it without copyright infringement ? Maybe nobody cares and no one is going to do anything about it but still, his style is specific right ? My face or my dog’s face makes the drawing completely different.
If AI is just « an other form of intelligence », why shouldn’t it be subjected to the same laws ?
If it’s just a tool and not an intelligence, why would openAI wouldn’t be subjected to the same rules ?
If all you do for a living is painting, if I wan’t a unique painting that fit your work style I have to ask you to do it. Now I can ask an AI to paint exactly that but you are not in the loop anymore but your work has been used to train this AI and no one will ever ask you to create art because they love your style and can have it for free.
I mean, I’m all in for free stuff and I’m not an artist but what does artists feel about it ?
You can generate whatever you want. If you want to sell it, then maybe it is a copyright violation. Maybe it isn’t. The point is that it does not matter that an AI tool made it or a human or a random falling of colored sand. Nobody is saying AI tool outputs are immune to copyright. What I am saying is that they are not intrinsically violations of copyright because training data.
> If all you do for a living is painting, if I wan’t a unique painting that fit your work style I have to ask you to do it. Now I can ask an AI to paint exactly that but you are not in the loop anymore but your work has been used to train this AI and no one will ever ask you to create art because they love your style and can have it for free.
That is deeply misleading. You are absolutely fine to ask another artist to create you a work in another artist’s style. The only difference here is cost and perhaps quality. Those are not problems with copyright.
> I mean, I’m all in for free stuff and I’m not an artist but what does artists feel about it
Bad
Let’s say I generate a picture with the style of a famous artist and then use it in one of my marketing campaign. No one will be able to sue me ? You are 100% sure about it ? If so, then then could also sue the AI company also isn’t it ?
It seems like a total abolition of copyright otherwise
You can be sued for selling a copy or a substantially similar work of art. You can make this happen with AI tools.
It seems unlikely to me that someone could go after open AI if you use their tools to generate a copy right violation. But IANAL.
Or that style is not copyrighted? Because it’s not.
> In the case of partial use of the work, it is assessed according to the similarities between the works
Similarities could be understood as style maybe ? It’s not a clear cut
But yes, the claim about an artist owning an entire style sounds pretty off to me. There's no way Picasso has a copyright claim on every cubist painting ever made, nor does Van Gogh own every painting containing a sunflower.
I feel like you’re making the same argument as me, with the same rhetoric, but a different example. No, I do not think the printing press, paint, or generative tools are bannable by copyright. I do think all 3 could be used to produce a work that is in violation of copyright. And no, I don’t think a novel work produced by any of them are in violation of copyright.
If a printing press randomly produces Hamlet, you cannot sell it. That does not mean you cannot generate something that is sellable without violating copyright by printing random words.
There is a small amount of attention paid to whether an artist knew of a work that someone claims was copied. Especially in the literary world with hacks who try to steal from successful authors with pathetic claims.
But they tend not to hold a lot of weight. It just makes it easier to dismiss trolls.
AI is a tool. It is not sentient. It is paint.
Moral rights are... at best a mess. They can be very wide, very up to interpretation and vary depending on the country. They're essentially meant as the ultimate stop button for an artist if their works get used in a way the artist deeply disapproves of[0]. Actual interpretation can vary a lot and cloning an artists style as specifically as SD allows you to do (with "...in the style of X" prompts) could easily be an easy moral rights argument in most jurisdictions, doubly so if economic exploitation is a component. (Which a lot of the hype surrounding SD et al. is also build on.)
For this reason they mostly exist in civil law systems (where a judges ruling sets no precedent for future interpretation), while they barely exist in common law systems (like the US) since it's really difficult to point at consistency with previous cases when it comes to moral rights.
In this case, you can reasonably consider that the strong stance that a good chunk of artists have taken about AI art, that using their work in these models is deliberately altering/distorting the work (Since training these models involves serializing the art down to patterns that can be replicated and iterated on) in a way that is damaging to their reputation.
As for whether or not relief has been granted, do keep in mind that requiring relief for a lawsuit is largely a US only thing. The court systems of other countries tend to lean more towards stop orders rather than immediately pulling out the financial compensation card. That's also the context in which moral rights exist - they are intended to be a stop order, not intended to be something you can financially gain from having it be violated (which is why they exist separate from economic rights, which are well... typical copyright stuff).
Do keep in mind that I am not a lawyer, US or otherwise.
A issuing a ”stop order” (e.g., in US law, a permanent injunction or something similar) is granting relief, financial compensation isn’t the only kind fo relief.
if I create a picture with a style simiar to an existing picture/ artist who has IP on it, then I would get sued
should it be relevent how it was created, either by hand or using AI?
Probably a headline in 2001: "Copyright lawsuits are a legal earthquake for the mp3 music format and the algorithms used to decompress it"
Basically there needs to be a copyright-court-like oracle used in training, so as to suppress output that's quoting the sources to much.
The hypocrisy of Getty Image is insane here, given it's dark past.
I think the only effective way of slowing down AI isn't copyright enforcement, but trade secrets. If Midjourney can control who has access to its service and what kinds of content its users can generate, democratized models/piracy can do nothing to change that.
The reason why there's so much more interest in AI art than AI voice cloning is that there's not yet a publicly available AI voice model with good enough performance. When that model is released or leaked there will be a similar panic around the effectiveness of modern AI voice tools, because anyone good or bad can get their hands on them without being forced to go through the company's content filter.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/getty-images-to-receive-500-mil...
I don't think copyright should be a thing, ESPECIALLY at the current durations. It's obvious to me that reform is necessary.
Here's what I propose:
- Reduce the duration of existing copyrights to 20 years.
- Reduce the duration of new copyrights to 5 years (maybe 10).
- Provide some form of remittance for individual copyright holders which depends on the income for their living, if the 20 years is not enough.
- Require that what is copyrighted must be submitted to the Library of Congress. When the copyright expires, it is to be released to the public in full.
- Strengthen fair use protections. Make it clear that critiques, reviews, parodies, etc are covered.
- Improve takedown requests. Punish fraudulent takedowns by forcing the filer to pay any lost income to the recipient. Require the takedown requests to have specific information about where the copyright violation occurred and how it isn't fair use.
- No criminal prosecution for copyright offenses.
That I don't sell many nor is it my declared profession doesn't change how I should be compensated for the photographs that I sell.
The Library of Congress only applies to the United States and has little sway on any of the rest of the signatories of the Berne Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention and the TRIPS agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
The changing the term of protection provided by the Berne Convention or TRIPS would mean that the United States would be leaving those treaty... which has quite a few implications for how other countries would treat copyrighted works within the US.
> TRIPS requires member states to provide strong protection for intellectual property rights. For example, under TRIPS:
> Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)[8]
> Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9)
The Library of Congress is just an example, I'm sure some international agreement could be made for an independent entity.
As for the Berne Convention or TRIPS, I wasn't just talking about the US. The international copyright laws should also be reformed.
Why shouldn't I be the only one with the right to sell that image?
The course of action for "lose the rights in 20 years" isn't "ok, that's fine" but rather "ok, then I won't publish any of them and deal only in direct sales of prints from a gallery."
The real question is why should you? Copyright is not a natural right (if it was, it wouldn't require enforcement actions on people who never interacted with the original copy). It's a privilege meant to provide an incentive for artists (the effectiveness of which is questionable, even without taking into consideration the negative side-effects).
> The course of action for "lose the rights in 20 years" isn't "ok, that's fine" but rather "ok, then I won't publish any of them and deal only in direct sales of prints from a gallery."
And that is entirely within your rights. But once your photo is disseminated into the public sphere, it's information that you no longer have control over.