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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

The issue isn't models viewing it, it is reproducing and selling it, Imo.

>Don’t share it publicly with no viewing restrictions, yes.

They did share it with legal restrictions (copyright) and everyone is already bound by the TOS (law) so there is no need to sign. Viewing is fine, resale is not.

Do you think there is something special about the internet that changes this? Dont let anyone read read copies of your book if you wont want them to sell copies of it? Dont let people listen to your music if you dont want them to be able to resell it?

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Training doesn’t violate copyright (although this may change in time).

And TOS doesn’t apply to people who don’t agree. Court cases have ruled that you can’t prevent people scraping with a TOS as the data are publicly available and don’t require acceptance to access.

If someone buys my book, I can’t limit how they read it, or who they resell it to. If I give my book away for free, I can’t limit either.

It’s the same with giving out access to my web content.

The restriction point is selling. If I don’t want someone to read my book, I don’t sell it to them. If I don’t want someone to view my web content, I restrict their access and don’t let them view it.

The model is a tool, like photoshop. You as the author of the prompt produced the image by explicit intent. If you then take it and distribute it, you are violating the copyright with criminal intent that’s demonstrable by the prompt itself. According to some friends that are professors of law, that’s likely the most clear violation. The consumption of copyright material to produce a commercial product without license is likely a civil copyright violation, but it’s unclear that’s true. Browser caches for instance were litigated as copyright violations, and CDNs. Obviously they were not found to violate copyright because while they handle and copy and manipulate copyright material they do so incidentally, without intention, and it functions without the copyright material. A lot of the argument on the AI side, which is likely legitimate legally, is these images are incidentally ingested, the models function fine without the copyright material, and don’t produce the copyright material without explicit intent by the user. The case that are the strongest are where the training data is known to have pirated or large copyright libraries inside them and are used regardless.

Finally by posting publicly samples of your work you implicitly grant limited fair use rights to your work. You do not retain full rights prohibiting reproduction of those samples. That’s why artists usually will not post full portfolios. Obviously there are limits but they’re much more egregious than what you see in models where the imagery is consumed into a lossy model that mathematically aggregates it with every other image it ingests.

How is ingesting an image, laundering it via a prompt, and then spitting it back out without attribution fair use?

One major test used by the Supreme Court is if the work is an economic competitor to the original. Similarly, infringement depends on the use, not object.

An image coming out of mid journey may or may not be used in an infringing way.

I can download movie stills from Google or midjourney without breaking copyright. If I print and sell posters of them, that is different.

If that were the primary intended use then it wouldn’t be. However the product incidentally has that behavior if you specifically choose to use it in that way, which is not the intended use or the common use.

I think we basically agree. It seems to me that a lot of the confusion stems from the connotation of “training" on copyrighted materials, and if that connotation is commercial or not.

A individual reading and learning from a book on woodworking isnt commercial use. However, if a business includes the same book as part of literal corporate training program, that would be commercial use.

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