AI images are alleged to be infringing! 360 responds to the court, lawyer: There is no precedent at home and abroad

Finance Associated Press

2024-06-12 17:21Published on the official account of Cailianshe under Shanghai Poster Industry Group

"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" on June 12 (Reporter Huang Xinyi) In response to AIGC creator DynamicWang's questioning of "360AI new product launch stolen pictures", 360 vice president Liang Zhihui responded that the creator asked for 10 times the price to buy the so-called "original picture model", which is beyond the scope of cognition and is willing to resort to law.

AI images are alleged to be infringing! 360 responds to the court, lawyer: There is no precedent at home and abroad

Later, the creator also posted the chat records of the two sides to "fight back", saying that he used model procurement to steal the concept. Previously, DynamicWang also responded to the 10 times price. He said that 360 said in the communication that it would buy the model license on its Xiaohongshu, but this is the license price for small and medium-sized startups, and it does not apply to 360 companies.

In response to this copyright dispute, an industry lawyer told the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that this is essentially an unauthorized issue of training data, and there are relevant prosecution cases in progress at home and abroad, but no effective judgment has been made.

▍The two sides have different opinions on copyright fees

Recently, AIGC creator DynamicWang posted that the 360AI new product launch conference stole the pictures generated by its AI drawing model, and demonstrated the "partial redrawing" function of the product at the press conference.

At the 360AI new product launch conference held on June 6, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360 Group, asked the backstage staff to call a photo picture of a woman in ancient costumes during the demonstration, and used "sexy" as a prompt word to frame a certain part of the woman in the picture for AI to redraw. The female costume photos used during the demonstration are derived from the pictures mentioned by DynamicWang.

Left: Photo taken at the 360 launch Right: Original image by the creator of AIGC

The creator said in an interview that the female costume photo was obtained by redrawing the original picture he created, so the details of the two pictures will be different; The original image was generated by him using an AI drawing model trained and debugged by himself. "My attitude is that this must be a tort, and since it is a tort, it is legitimate and reasonable to claim compensation." DynamicWang mentioned.

After the matter fermented, 360 contacted DynamicWang to build a group of communication. Judging from the published chat records, Liang Zhihui, vice president of 360, apologized for using pictures. However, in the follow-up communication, DynamicWang was not satisfied with the argument of the relevant person in charge of 360 and the marketing public relations that "this is not a misappropriation of pictures", and hoped to deal with it with "procurement model authorization" rather than compensation. ”

In response to this matter, Liang Zhihui, vice president of 360, responded that the creator asked 10 times to buy the so-called "original image model", which is beyond the scope of cognition and is willing to resort to law.

"We tried to negotiate with us, but the author said that he wanted us to buy the model at 10 times the price and pay compensation separately (as evidenced by the recording). This is beyond what we know to be reasonable, and we are willing to go to court and openly discuss copyright issues. In addition, I would like to ask DynamicWang for advice, do the images you use to train the model have copyrights? So how to define the copyright ownership of the model and the copyright ownership of the model? If copyright is not open, it will be difficult for AIGC to develop. New technologies bring new problems, and the truth is becoming clearer and clearer, and we hope to truly promote the development and progress of the domestic AIGC industry through fair and open discussions." Liang Zhihui said.

▍There have been a number of copyright infringement cases of AIGC models

In response to the copyright problems caused by AIGC, there have been a number of related copyright infringement cases at home and abroad, the root cause of which is that the formation and improvement of AIGC models rely on a large amount of data training, and the data used for training often contains content protected by copyright law.

On January 23, 2023, three comic book artists in the United States filed a class action lawsuit in the Northern District Court of California against three AIGC commercial application companies, including Stability AI, alleging copyright infringement of the Stable Diffusion model developed by Stability AI and the paid AI image generation tools developed by the three defendants based on the above models.

On November 29, 2023, four domestic painting creators posted on Weibo that they had sued the main company of Xiaohongshu and the main company of Xiaohongshu Trik software to the court, on the grounds that Trik had used the artist's original work as training data without authorization, thus generating pictures that were highly similar to the original work, "infringing on the legitimate rights and interests of the creator".

At present, there are relevant precedents in China for copyright disputes over AI images. In January 2024, China's first AI-generated image copyright infringement case came into effect. After the plaintiff used the Stable Diffusion model to generate an image that was infringed, it sued the Beijing Internet Court. After five hearings in the case, the court finally found that the plaintiff's picture was "original", met the definition of a work, and was a work of art and protected by copyright law.

However, Xiong Dingzhong, a lawyer at Beijing Qinglu Law Firm, told the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that "the problem of unauthorized training data similar to the 360 incident is still in the judicial process at home and abroad, and no effective judgment has been made." It is believed that once there is a relevant judgment in China, it will have greater reference significance for the infringement and protection of AI training data in the future. ”

(Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily reporter Huang Xinyi)

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