US judge rules artists over copyright in copyright case
The artists have faced hurdles in copyright battles with generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies; Class action lawsuits against several of the companies have been dismissed by a US judge for lack of evidence.
In an Oct. 30 order, California District Court Judge William Orrick said the copyright infringement suit against generative AI imaging service Midjourney, art platform DeviantArt and AI firm Stability AI was “defective in many respects,” previously dismissing bids from the companies.
Judge Orrick, however, allowed a class action member to proceed with a copyright infringement claim against Statable and gave the class 30 days to file an amended complaint with additional evidence.
“Determining the truth of these allegations, even Stable – whether the recording in violation of copyright law occurred in the context of training or during the operation of Stable Diffusion – recognizes that it cannot be resolved at this time,” Orrick wrote.
The lawsuit, first filed in mid-January, alleges that Stable Diffusion's AI model, Stable Diffusion, deleted billions of copyrighted images without permission to train the software.
DeviantArt also included Stable Diffusion on its website, potentially copying millions of images from there without permission and in violation of its terms of service, the suit said.
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Orrick says the AI-generated images do not infringe on the artists' copyrights, as they are “unsafely” derived from copyrighted images. “I don't believe it,” he added, unless the department can show that the images created are similar to the artists' work.
Some class members had their copyright claims rejected because their images were not registered with the Copyright Office, which is required to bring a copyright infringement suit.
Allegations of copyright infringement have been central to similar legal actions against AI organizations, such as the Authors Guild class action against OpenAI, Universal Music Group's Anthropocene, and Getty Images in the US and UK agreeing to settle AI.
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