Court Sides With Midjourney, Stable Diffusion In Copyright Suit Against Artists

Image generated on AI

Midjourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt are on the winning end of a copyright dispute with three human artists, who have been given a chance to amend their arguments.

On Tuesday, US District Judge William Orrick filed a decision in a class-action copyright suit brought forth by artists Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz, who asserted in January that art-generating artificial intelligence tools Midjourney, Stability AI (the company behind the popular Stable Diffusion program), and DeviantArt’s DreamUp used a training system that scraped billions of images from the internet, including their work, without consent.

All three services are propelled by the Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION), a database containing billions of images.

The companies filed a motion to have the case dismissed, and for the most part, Judge Orrick took their side, claiming that the suit was “defective in numerous respects.”

Orrick dismissed several of the arguments in the artists’ complaints, including one that said the companies were competing with them unfairly. However, the factor that tipped the scales was that McKernan and Ortiz did not get their artwork protected through the US Copyright Office, which is necessary for filing a lawsuit.

In our piece about what to do when you feel your intellectual property has been breached, we explain that in most countries—including the US,—copyright is automatic and that, typically, no registration is required. However, to be able to escalate your matter to court in the US, you will have to file some papers first.

With that, the judge allowed Anderson to proceed with 16 works she believed had their copyright infringed as they were registered.

Judge Orrick agreed that the artists’ copyrights had not been violated as he was “not convinced” AI-generated outputs were “substantially similar” to their work. 

Since text-to-art generators use multiple artworks as references, the resulting content would likely be “derivative,” Orrick ruled. Creators would thus have to prove that an offending AI-generated work either solely or largely copied their copyrighted art.

The three artists have been given a chance to amend their complaint and file a more trimmed-down lawsuit. As per Reuters, Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, the artists’ attorneys, say they’re certain they’ll be able to address the court’s unanswered concerns.

[via VentureBeat and Reuters, cover image generated on AI]