Why are you even here lol?

Yes, she got very angry.

She can cry a river for all we care

That's not a valid reason to take this down, artstyles cannot be 'stolen' in the same way a car or a house can. The problem with theft is that it deprives the original owner of their property, but Valburn still can draw in this style alongside any other digital or traditional artist if they try hard enough. Just because you're upset at someone doesn't mean you have the right to threaten them.

@EmilyMars 

Images requires a license for any use, that's the "All right reserved" part of the copyrights. This LoRA is not only a "artstyle" but also includes the characters and name of the artist.

In CIVITAI we are getting away with it because we are using the LoRAs for "personal use" for fun or personal projects, which is LEGAL, even when sharing a LoRA is not personal use.

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Our problem (mine and yours too) is that SOME idiot here downloaded this LoRa to profit at the expense of the real artist, and we have the artist reporting the model.... (see the notice "A verified artist believes this model was fine-tuned on their art. We're discussing this with the model creator and artist").

If we don't defend the artists, we we'll have more artists taking models down, and we are going to lose models thanks to some idiot who steals from artists and all those other idiots defending the thief.

@Xylber Frankly I don't care if people are making money using this lora. I wasn't arguing about copyright but rather about ethics. Copyright law shouldn't exist since ideas cannot be stolen and therefore you cannot have property rights over them. Therefore selling images made with loras with an artist's style isn't theft, and she should have no right to complain.

In other comments I used IP in arguments but that's just because it exists at the moment. We don't need less people using AI for commercial purposes, we need more artists to not throw a hissy fit over competition.

And I'm not going to defend her, she complained about this on Twitter and made it public to her fans when she could have just talked with civitai and the model creator. Given her actions, I don’t care if she tells people not to harass others her actions directly caused the harassment.

@AcanthAI you didn't make any effort to contact her when you stole all her images and used them to make a model without her consent did you? why would you expect her to then contact you before tweeting about it?

@EmilyMars if you steal people's art, not just their "art style" but their literal actual art, and then generate images and use that artist's name in the images you've generated, you've not only stolen their work, you're now also attaching their name to stuff they didn't make and making people think they've drawn stuff that they didn't. It's absolutely unethical and you deserve to get harassed for it. You can shrug your shoulders and say you just don't care about being ethical or about artists, but don't pretend its ethical.

@EmilyMars "Copyright law shouldn't exist since ideas cannot be stolen and therefore you cannot have property rights over them."

No idea was stolen here. Forget that, because ideas are not affected at all.

We are talking about copyright, that protects intellectual property (not ideas) which is a kind of property alongside cars and houses. The artist owns the illustrations she made, colors and shapes, characters, brands, etc. etc. and nobody else can profit from her property, the same way nobody can sell a car that is not his own car. This is not an opinion, this is the law.

If you don't like the law (I don't like it either, and yes this is an opinion) or if you are a communist against property, perfectly fine, but we cannot go outside seizing the means of production in the name of Lenin and Marx.

@AcanthAI I was talking about the guy selling the art generated by the LoRA, profitting from the property of others. In a jury it would make the thief to compensate economically the victim (the artist).

You -only- used her images and shared the LoRA for free (which requires a license/permission). A license/permission is required for any use not intended by the author (example, I can listen a song, but I cannot play the song in public, which is considered -public performance- and requires a license).

Now you'll say that you shared a LoRA that doesn't include the original images. But it doesn't matter. The law protects the use of the images, and you "made use of the images to train a LoRA". You don't need a license as long as you keep the LoRA for personal-use-only, but once you share it, you need the license.

That's the free juridical analysis.

My personal opinion: if we keep playing the rebel-punk-anarchists and artists start to make noise, sooner or later we'll end up with some company/representative taking down models (as almost everything in Civitai would need a license). Better stay under the radar. And hoard models.

@AcanthAI they could probably figure out whether you used the artist's work or not by checking the tags in the safetensor file and comparing them to their publicly available portfolio of work. For example: if the word "telephone" has 20 instances in the safetensor file, and the artist has twenty seperate images where a telephone appears somewhere in the image, that would probably be confirmation enough for most people to know that it was trained on them.

@AcanthAI Yes, the character is obviously the same character, so even if you hide the fact you used the images without a license, a jury will rule in favor of the artist just by checking that the LoRA is capable of creating her very same characters. And its using the artist's name.

But, as you say, if you take the job of redrawing her illustrations, creating a similar style, with different characters, colors, shapes, dialogs, brands, logos (etc., everything covered by copyright), then yes, you could say you created something new, and you are the owner of your own art, and retain all the rights for yourself.

This practice is very, very common everywhere: music, cinema, architecture, literature... lot of things "look similar" but can't be considered a copy of other works.

@AcanthAI can you tell me more about the case?

The info I found is that Toyotaro is an employee of the company who owns the license/rights to draw Dragon Ball.

@AcanthAI by using her work without her permission as if seeing someone's art online is a free license to steal it, train a model on it, and then attach her name to it. To pretend you didn't steal her work while, in the same breath, bragging about how there's no evidence you didn't steal it if you took her name off and didn't release the training data is pathetic. learn to draw instead of stealing and using someone's else name.

@AcanthAI Looks like Toyotaro fan-art doesn't use the original drawings, doesn't impersonate the real author, and he didn't sell the illustrations.

Still, Toyotaro needed a license.

Fan-Art is a copyright infringement, but it is usually allowed because it helps as advertisement to sell the main product. For example, having people drawing Goku helps the company to sell more Dragon Ball mangas and animes. Drawing "Squid games" characters helps to bring more people to watch the series. The Fan-art doesn't replace the original work and, most important, doesn't damage the author.

In this case, the LoRA can replace the original work (you can use the LoRA instead of hiring the artists).

Anyway, dont' get me wrong, I'm happy to have all of these LoRAs and I know it takes time to create them (choosing the images, captioning even if you use WD or BLIP, setting up koyha, testing, etc). But my opinion is to try to not target an (let's call it) "indie artist" who make his living out of this work, because now we have some idiot who downloaded your LoRA to missuse it.

Did you talk with the author?

@AcanthAI Not the same, I already explained it.... "A license/permission is required for any use not intended by the author".

I can watch a movie in the cinema and my memory let me remember the movie, but I can't (legally) record the movie in my phone.

I can see the manga and remember how to draw Goku, but I can't (legally) give the images to the machine to make it learn to draw it.

Read about natural rights, copyright and Intelectual Property, you'll learn much more than what I wrote here. And you'll have stronger arguments to defend either your position or defend copyright holders.

Bro, by that logic might as well take down every single LORA and every single model ever,no SD model is trained in vacuum.

@m0n0 Sadly yes, the majority of them.

But my position is to check each case separately, in this case we are damaging one particular person, not a company, not a big studio, just a person who creates illustrations for a living.

Even in the warez scene (software piracy) pirates crack big studios, but don't crack indie games. And when they crack indie games it is common for them to say "ok, we cracked it, but the game is cheap, if you like go buy it and support devs".

They need to give credits to the artist to support them!!

@EmilyMars One year later. I ended up being correct in everything. OpenAI wasn't able to copy Studio Ghibli style anymore. Also today OpenAI announced that they have the LICENSE to generate Disney content (Star Wars and Micky mouse). And this model now credits the author with a link to the artist's X.

That's the difference between somebody who is objective and talks the true, and somebody that twists the reality according to their convenience (a "silver style badge" owner).

@Xylber, the only truth is that corps had found a new source of cash flow 😂

trying to enforce copyright laws on models and their creators is just dumb. the final result that certain model produces and the author behind it should be judged. we see something similar already on civitai, where certain models can produce straight illegal stuff with ToS violations, and yet this models still here and used a lot, while certain cases of violations are moderated.
just "moderate" prompters if there is concern about illegal copyright usage.

if someone needs to use other's works for whatever reason, nothing prevents them from training their own models and never make then publicly available, using them in any legal way or not. all that regulations will just hurt communities like civitai, where people just want to create stuff for fun, mostly. you can't stop businesses from profiting of other's works this way

@vamorand I'm discussing what it is with current laws (facts), not what you THINK should be (opinions). And I was 100% correct, this model got permission from the author.

Say it with me now, children: you cannot use copyrighted images in datasets.

train a lora specific that you must own the images you use

While I don't think that imitating a style should be illegal (that would mainly just benefit big corps) I do believe that it is distasteful and sometimes unethical to imitate someone who is opposed to it. It can cut into their profits, ruin their search results, and opens up for the pervertion of something very personal. Being a traditional artist is hard enough as it is. If AI art wants to evolve it should work with traditional artists, not against them.

my brother in christ literally the AI ​​has the artist's name in the title

@AcanthAI "we try to work with artists" bro without any kind of permission they began to use AIs that emulate art styles of well-known artists, with the title of each one the respective artist from which the AI ​​copied the style, saying that "we tried" is a complete lie because they only tried that when the Artists even claimed that there were AIs that had their name and drawing style

@AcanthAI I don't think this is a very convincing response, you seem pretty tribalistic and use generalizations to justify yourself.

I actually don't think there is much difference ethically between imitating by hand and doing it with AI, my opinion would stand if the imitation was done manually with enough accuracy.

You may be right about profits in most cases, but not all, and even when you're right it's still distasteful and hurtful. Traditional artists feel hurt not just because of fearmongering, unchecked imitations started before the fearmongering did. You're just adding fuel to the fire.

Oh, and I'm sick of hearing definitions of what is and isn't art.

@AcanthAI Yeah mostly, and that's a good reason.

But also because you're making the AI community look bad.

True, I'm sending a team of African men to OP's house as we speak.