There’s going to be a lot of low effort takes about this.

In the context of the Copyright Office’s previous few decisions this makes sense.

Midjourney is toast if it does nothing to stop the by-design inertia of the quasi-caselaw way these things are decided.

The source of the most flaws in the Zarya of the Dawn registration rejection came from the Copyright Office copying and pasting deeply flawed technical explanations directly from Midjourney. It’s on Midjourney and no one else. They ought to be paying a great IP firm to submit rebuttals on behalf of losing users, but whatever.

“Yeah bro, but predict the future.” In this particular case, you're going to be able to register AI generated artwork - maybe not in the specific way that Midjourney does it, because the Copyright Office isn't going to pull their own pants down after issuing the Zarya of the Dawn decision, pulling their pants back up, in reaction to social media pulling their pants down. But ControlNets and T5-style grammatically substantive prompts will do.

The recent Andy Warhol decision and the way Google Books actually panned out means Stability and Runway are boned, and probably Midjourney too. The Author's Guild-like litigants will get a small payout, they will not prevail in a huge way, but they will prevail - they actually prevailed in Google Books too but people don't understand that, the news reported it as "Google won" but it actually lost in that it settled and didn't get to do any of the things it really wanted to do.

Meta will be forced to stop distributing its tainted LLaMA, express permission will be needed for all intents and purposes, but academics will be "fair use." I don't know if there's going to be some loophole to academize their work, it's just going to be hard to argue that compute resources and devops - the things Stability's, Runway's, Meta's teams really bring to the table compared to the academy - mean they ought to benefit from the same protections as a traditional education institution, in spite of being commercial entities.

It remains to be seen what will happen with Adobe's efforts. Nobody would be talking about latent diffusion models or pixel diffusers or whatever if it weren't for the fact that they were trained on content that wasn't expressly permitted. So it doesn't matter if Adobe got express permission for the training inputs of its models, so long as it's also using this code that maybe wasn't "trained" (in the ML sense) on unpermissioned content in this particular case but was definitely authored in the context of unpermissioned content in an equally essential way. It's the same reason you can't conduct unethical human research and launder it into something clean. It taints everything.

Anyway, I doubt Adobe trained their own text encoder unencumbered. It's acutely obvious with these community efforts at "training" stable diffusion "checkpoints" on "CC0" content. My dudes, you're using CLIP, which is trained on LAION 2b. It's just so painfully low information. Adobe will not prevail.

But Adobe surely will convince the low information bros that their way is bulletproof. In an intellectually honest way, nobody using diffusers or transformers with permissioned content will just get away with it.