According to a report from the Reuters news agency, companies such as Midjourney will have to reveal the material used to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. It will be the same for generative language models like ChatGPT.
Stable Diffusion can do this because it was trained on hundreds of millions of example images harvested from across the web. Some of these images were in the public domain or had been published under permissive licenses such as Creative Commons. Many others were not—and the world’s artists and photographers aren’t happy about it.
Getty Images has filed a case against Stability AI, alleging that the company copied 12 million images to train its AI model ‘without permission … or compensation.’
Whether the Prince Series is fair use turns on whether Warhol “transformed” the photo on which he relied—and the answer to that turns on what exactly “transformative” means
Now, the companies behind these technologies haven’t said as much, but to train these machines it doesn’t seem likely that millions of copyrighted images weren’t used to inform the AI’s learning.
Hunley and Brauer are asking to overturn a California federal judge’s dismissal of their lawsuit alleging that Meta’s Instagram is liable for secondary infringement when third-party sites use Instagram’s embedding tool to display their photos and videos. They argue that this former ruling relied on an outdated test.
Lynn Goldsmith is a famed photographer who is also a long-time American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) member. In 1984 Vanity Fair licensed one of Goldsmith’s photos of Prince that was shot in December of 1981 for $400 to create an illustration of Prince to be used in an article “Purple Fame.” Vanity Fair did not inform Goldsmith that the photo was being used by Warhol as a reference, and she did not see the article when it was initially published.
After a concerted effort by the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), Instagram has added a new option that will enable users to prevent others from embedding content they post to Instagram.
In a report from the Press Gazette, former photographer for AFP Francisco Leong — who started working for AFP in 2005 and left the agency in 2019 — is arguing that the contract he signed with the international news agency which gave copyrights to the agency and not the photographer was in violation of Portuguese law — specifically its Journalist Statue and Code of Copyright — which states that the ultimate rights to journalistic work even through the course of employment belong to the creator. As such, Leong argues that his contract is null and void and that the copyrights to the images should be returned to him.
In a report from Reuters, the complaint alleges that Instagram’s embedding tool allowed publishers to display copyrighted images without obtaining permission from artists or paying a licensing fee. The class-action lawsuit could include “many thousands” of photographers who claim Instagram “induced online publishers” to embed links to Instagram in order to drive traffic — and by association advertising revenue — to the site.
The fundamental mechanics of platforms like Instagram exploit and undermine photographers because photographers lack a unified voice with teeth like those that have secured rights for Musicians and Film Producers.
In 1981, Newsweek hired photographer Lynn Goldsmith to photograph Prince, an up-and-coming musician who was still years away from releasing his seminal “Purple Rain” album. Goldsmith’s portraits never ran, but she did own the copyright. In 1984, Vanity F
Upon Prince’s death in 2016, the Warhol Foundation licensed the Prince Series for use in a Condé Nast tribute magazine, and one of the images was used on the cover. Goldsmith tried to extract a licensing fee, but the Foundation accused her of a “shake down” and filed a pre-emptive lawsuit in 2017. The suit sought a “declaratory judgment” that Warhol’s images didn’t infringe upon Goldsmith’s copyright and were “transformative or are otherwise protected by fair use.” Goldsmith countersued for infringement.
A U.S. appeals court has ruled in favor of photographer Lynn Goldsmith in her copyright dispute over how Andy Warhol had used her portrait photo of Prince.
The judge acknowledged that the daguerreotypes had been taken under “horrific circumstances” but said that if the enslaved subjects, Renty and Delia, did not own the images when they were taken in 1850, then the woman who brought the lawsuit, Tamara Lanier, did not own them either.
The staff of the Penn State newspaper The Daily Collegian are currently battling a contract being forced upon them by school leadership, claiming it strips them of image ownership and takes advantage of their “volunteer worker” status.
Heads up, photographers: there has just been a monumental change to the way you can defend your copyrighted photos from infringement. A copyright small
Heads up, photographers: there has just been a monumental change to the way you can defend your copyrighted photos from infringement. A copyright small claims system has arrived in the United States to help you collect compensation from those who misuse your work.
