It's probably not, and didn't get op was saying it was - just that its an inevitable thing that will happen to dying industries when AI starts killing them.
I'm having trouble imagining something as detached from reality damages in IP suits. You could hypothetically have more wealth than the world GDP stored on a couple of hard drives if you go the amount of money they sue for. Just imagine, with a day of running dd, you'll have double the world GDP! And it'll fit in a backpack! We're lucky some deranged lunatic hasn't held the world economy hostage with his pirated media and a Linux workstation.
If the original artist/content creators retain the copyright for their images, how does Getty have the legal ability to accuse someone of intellectual property theft when they (Getty) do not own the intellectual property themselves but rather have a non-exclusive license to use it themselves.
> DO I RETAIN COPYRIGHT OF MY WORK?
>Absolutely. We license imagery to our customers on your behalf and you retain the copyright to all content that you submit to us.
> You can register as an individual or a business as long as you are at least 18 years of age.
Getty's lawyers know they won't ever see more than a fraction of that sum. This is fine. This is part of the game. What they hope is to intimidate SD and other AI art generators into submission.
There is nothing stopping a 400 lb programmer, to quote Donald Trump, from bootstrapping their own product.
This is a little like suing www.FreeTorentz432.com (made up name) for distributing mirrors for pirated media.
...which can be cooked as though it is just a frog. National firewalls here, intellectual property content mediation requirements there, a dash of packet shaping allowed here, here, and here... Boiled hydra.
>There is nothing stopping a 400 lb programmer, to quote Donald Trump, from bootstrapping their own product.
With the cost of training such models from scratch dropping every year, this type of legal shenanigans will only encourage model development to move into the shadows where there's be even less accountability and AI ethics.
The huge amounts of money are just an opportunity. Use it as the basis for a monetary system! 10 Getty dollars is an IOU for a share of the potential stable diffusion damages.
> “Getty Images’ visual assets are highly desirable for use in connection with artificial intelligence and machine learning because of their high quality, and because they are accompanied by content-specific, detailed captions and rich metadata,” it writes in the lawsuit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668565 235 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411187 83 comments