Judge William H. Orrick of the Northern District of California, filed a 28-page decision that details how the lawsuit brought by artists Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz was defective on “numerous” counts and how current submissions made it difficult for the court to make a decision on copyright infringement.
The defects in the case include two of the three artists, McKernan and Ortiz, not filing any copyrights for their work with the US Copyright Office. Anderson, too, only filed copyright for just 16 of her images out of the hundreds cited in the lawsuit.
The three artists have contested that the AI service providers used datasets from LIAON to train their AI models and LIAON included the works of the artists as part of their datasets, which resulted in copyright violation.
However, Judge Orrick did not agree with the argument. He wrote: “The other problem for plaintiffs is that it is simply not plausible that every Training Image used to train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable), or that all DeviantArt users’ Output Images rely upon (theoretically) copyrighted Training Images, and therefore all Output images are derivative images.”
Read more:
Ghoshal, A. (2023, October 31). Artists lose first copyright battle in the fight against AI-generated images. Computer World. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3709691/artists-lose-first-copyright-battle-in-the-fight-against-ai-generated-images.html