Do AI images violate copyright? A lawyer explains the Stable Diffusion lawsuit; Boing Boing, January 23, 2023

MARK FRAUENFELDER, Boing Boing; Do AI images violate copyright? A lawyer explains the Stable Diffusion lawsuit

"Three artists have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against several AI art generators, including Stability.ai and Midjourney. The lawsuit alleges that the artists' copyright was violated when Stability.ai and other art generators trained their software using billions of images, which included copyrighted art created by the artists. 

In this video, attorney Jake Watson breaks down the arguments in the lawsuit and compares them to related lawsuits and court decisions. He thinks the AI art companies have a good fair use argument for using copyrighted images in its training data."

DeviantArt, Midjourney Face Lawsuit for Using 'Billions of Copyrighted' Images in AI Art; CBR, January 15, 2023

BRIAN CRONIN, CBR ; DeviantArt, Midjourney Face Lawsuit for Using 'Billions of Copyrighted' Images in AI Art

"A lawsuit on behalf of a group of plaintiff artists has been filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against three companies: Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney, over the alleged infringement of the copyright of the artists in the creation of so-called "artificial intelligence" art."

Fair Use Too Often Goes Unused; Chronicle of Higher Education, May 10, 2017

Noah Berlatsky, Chronicle of Higher Education; 

Fair Use Too Often Goes Unused

"Only if authors can’t track down permissions holders, [Julia] Round [editor of the journal Studies in Comics] said, does the journal consider printing small images under the legal doctrine of fair use.

But while publishers want authors to get permission, the law often does not require it. According to Kyle K. Courtney, copyright adviser for Harvard University in its Office for Scholarly Communication, copyright holders have certain rights — for instance, if you hold rights for a comic book, you determine when and by whom it can be reprinted, which is why I can’t just go out and create my own edition of the first Wonder Woman comic. But notwithstanding those rights, fair use gives others the right to reprint materials in certain situations without consulting the author — or even, in some cases, if the author has refused permission...

Seeking permission may seem safe, but it can have serious ethical and practical downsides."