Robert Kneschke photos used to train LAION model without consent
A German photographer d is covered his photos had been used to train the LAION-5B dataset, raising questions about copyright protections from AI datasets and systems and the ethics of the dataset's eponymous developer. Having asked LAION to remove his work from their training data, German stock photographer Robert Kneschke rec eived a demand for 887 euros (USD 980) from LAION's law firm Heidrich Rechtsanwälte for what it called an 'unjustified claim' on the basis that it 'only maintains a database containing links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet.' The fracas put the spotlight on the practices and ethics of LAION, a German-based non-profit dedicated to the 'democratisation' of machine learning research and applications that provides datasets to train major commercial text-to-image and video-generating models such as Stable Diffusion , Midjourney and Google’s Imagen. Kneschke had used the website Have I Been Trained? to find out whether any major datasets had been trained using his images. ➕ April 2023. Kneschke filed a lawsuit against LAION for copyright infringment. ➕ October 2024 . T he court rejected Kneschke's lawsuit on the basis that LAION’s activities fall under protections for scientific research. Copyright law of Germany German authors' right or Deutsches Urheberrecht is codified in the Gesetz über Urheberrecht und verwandte Schutzrechte (also referred to as Urhebergesetz or Urheberrechtsgesetz and abbreviated UrhG). Source: Wikipedia 🔗 System 🤖 LAION-5B Operator: LAION Developer: LAION Country: Germany Sector: Media/entertainment/sports/arts Purpose: Pair text and images Technology: Data base/data set; Neural network; Deep learning; Machine learning Issue: Accountability; C opyright; Transparency Legal, regulatory 👩🏼⚖️ Robert Kneschke v. LAION
- Date it happened
- 2023-04-01
- Organisation involved
- Robert Kneschke
- Product, system or model
- LAION-5B
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