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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

The group used raw HTML code collected by the California nonprofit Common Crawl to locate images around the web and associate them with descriptive text. It does not use any manual or human curation.

Does the Common Crawl data already take care of the copyright issue? Or else how does the LAION crawler deal with that problem?

I mean, it's not too hard to write an image crawler. Also, scaling it up it a bit of a challenge, but it's a technical one. But the real difficulty is how to deal with all the legal strings attached...

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LAION doesn’t publish the images, only the metadata, which includes the original image URLs. Anyone who wants to make use of the image set has to re-download the images from the original sources [0], and is then liable for actually using the images. Arguably, the alt text contained in the metadata is still subject to copyright though.

Arguably, a short alt text does not meet the threshold of originality under most jurisdictions. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality

This is the most commonly misunderstood characteristic of LAION, and I find that alarming because it feels like it just plain means a lot of people don't understand how the internet actually works.

Which is not surprising but guys, it's everywhere it's also not optional to understand this.

Yet, what LAION is doing appears to be somewhat obvious. We are a non-profit and not publishing the images seems like hiding behind technicalities.

What do you think they're doing?

We understand it just fine. Us internet people do free labor, then others take it and monetize it.

Seems like you both don't understand LAION and don't understand hyperlinking.

Well, at least one content producer is pissed about it.

Sorry, only in German:

https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e...

And translated via Google translate:

https://www-alltageinesfotoproduzenten-de.translate.goog/202...

After reading it, it seems that LAION is merely doing the dirty work (going as far as intimidating the creators of the materials they use) so that other companies can utilize copyrighted material without taking too much risk. Not sure if this teacher is a hero...

According to Christoph Schumann there is legislation in Europe that allows the usage of crawled data for public research institutions and nonprofit organisations. LAION is a registered german nonprofit (gemeinnütziger Verein).

Source: https://entwickler.de/machine-learning/laion-open-source-ai (found in another post).

Commercial entities are using the data, however. I'm pretty sure the German legislation didn't mean that to be allowed.

Sure. But that is not in LAIONs responsibility. They provide URIs to images and the corresponding alt texts.

It's not really a difficulty though is it, for VC funded unicorns who ask forgiveness and move fast. When the law catches up, if ever, they'll pay a slap on the wrist while sitting on their superyachts

Less than 0.01% of the 5.8 billion images have an associated license. This license was taken from the webpage so cannot be trusted.

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