In January 2023, with the release of AI generators, I predicted copyright lawsuits will be filed against AI companies.
I was right. Within the same week, the 1st lawsuit against generative AI companies was filed. The first of many to come.
Then, upon researching the origin of AI training, which started at universities, I predicted that the legal claims against AI companies would lead back to the origin of AI training at universities.
Well, it turns out, I was right again, although I wish I wasn’t.
EVOX Productions, the creator of automobile photography, has sued Stanford University. (The claims against University of Michigan, William Marsh Rice University, and Baylor College of Medicine were dismissed.)
What Is the ImageNet Dataset?
The universities were alleged to be a part of a consortium that created the ImageNet dataset, which consists of nearly 14 million images scraped from online.
Stanford University Professor Li Fei-Fei, who is not named in the lawsuit, is widely credited for advancing AI deep learning by overseeing the compilation of this important ImageNet dataset that was used by AI researchers in computer vision in an annual ImageNet competition.
The AlexNet paper by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton, submitted in this competition, is also widely considered one of the most important research papers in the history of AI research. It is one of the most cited AI research papers ever. And, yes, that’s the same Hinton who later was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Both the ImageNet dataset and the AlexNet paper were instrumental in showing how increasing the size of datasets can improve the capabilities of AI models.
Nonetheless, Stanford University is being sued by EVOX Productions for its AI researchers’ part in compiling and distributing ImageNet without copyright licenses.
From the original complaint:
This lawsuit was first filed on Dec. 31, 2024.
The case against Stanford survived a motion to dismiss. Here’s a part of the Second Amended Complaint, the one now before Judge Wise:
What’s at stake in the suit v. Stanford?
If this lawsuit has any success, it will spawn more lawsuits against universities where AI research takes place, as well as more lawsuits against Stanford by others whose works were used in ImageNet.
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DOWNLOAD THE SECOND AMENDED COMPLAINT V. STANFORD