this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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By this logic, you can copy a copyrighted imege as long as you decrease the resolution, because the new image does not contain all the information in the original one.
More like reduce it to a handful of vectors that get merged with other vectors.
Am I allowed to take a copyrighted image, decrease its size to 1x1 pixels and publish it? What about 2x2?
It's very much not clear when a modification violates copyright because copyright is extremely vague to begin with.
Just because something is defined legally instead of technologically, that doesn't make it vague. The modification violates copyright when the result is a derivative work; no more, no less.
What is a derivative work though? That's again extremely vague and has been subject to countless lawsuits seeking to determine the bounds.
If your work depends on the original, such that it could not exist without it, it's derivative.
I can easily create a pixel of any arbitrary color, so it's sufficiently transformative that it's considered a separate work.
The four fair use tests are pretty reliable in making a determination.
In the case of Stable Diffusion, they used 5 billion images to train a model 1.83 gigabytes in size. So if you reduce a copyrighted image to 3 bits (not bytes - bits), then yeah, I think you're probably pretty safe.
Your calculation is assuming that the input images are statistically independent, which is certainly not the case (otherwise the model would be useless for generating new images)