Hugging Face open-source AI platform dragged into AI Copyright Wars in suit by EVOX Productions v. Stability AI, Runway AI, and Deviant Art. Suits hit 125 v. AI cos. in U.S. on its 250th birthday

The AI Copyright Wars are escalating. EVOX Productions, which has already sued Stanford University for the creation of the ImageNet dataset, has now turned its litigation attention to Hugging Face, the open-source platform for AI developers.

Hugging Face’s alleged infringement includes: “the ‘Stanford Cars’ dataset, contains 8,144 images of automobiles for public download, including 225 Copyrighted Photographs. The 225 Copyrighted Photographs are identified in Exhibit C. Notably, unlike the LAION datasets, the ‘Stanford Cars’ dataset displayed and distributed on Hugging Face’s website contains the actual Copyrighted Photographs—not just the URLs to the websites that display the Copyrighted Photographs. On information and belief, this ‘Stanford Cars’dataset containing 225 Copyrighted Photographs has been downloaded from Hugging Face at least 90,000 times.”

This Stanford Cars dataset was allegedly created by Stanford University researchers, as alleged in the complaint against Stanford University: “After Stanford had completed its work, it made 11,364 of EVOX’s Images publicly available from the following links at Stanford’s website * * * .”

Stanford University sued for copyright infringement based on Stanford AI researchers’ compilation of unlicensed images in ImageNet dataset, one of the most important datasets in the history of AI research

In addition to Hugging Face, EVOX Productions has sued the AI companies Stability AI, Runway AI, and Deviant Art for their alleged infringement in using or sharing EVOX’s professional photographs for cars in datasets used to train their models without permission.

This is the 125th copyright lawsuit against AI companies in the United States, just in time for the 250th anniversary of the United States.

Excerpt from EVOX PRODUCTIONS’ COMPLAINT: