I will sue your neural network! "Institut Lumière" against AI-enthusiast.
The "Institut Lumière" tries to delete from YouTube the AI enhanced video "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" made by AI enthusiast Denis Shiryaev.
What happened: The famous (millions of viewings) “[4k, 60 fps] Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1896), AI-enhanced” video has gone from YouTube because of the lawsuit.
What's with this video: The video has gone viral around a year ago when AI enthusiast Denis Shiryaev enhanced the quality of the original 1896 black and white film using neural networks. Some media wrote about it, it was reposted all over the internet, numerous blog posts about how he did it, etc.
Why it is gone: The “Institut Lumière” (IL) decided to sue Denis because of... I don't know. Reasons.
What do I think: This is an ugly incident, and it shows IL from the unpleasant side and creates a bad precedent.
Now, to some details.
How did it start?
Denis is a Russian blogger and AI-enthusiast. He has a YouTube channel where he posts videos processed by neural networks to increase quality, fps, colorize them. And they are quite good! Have a look at this examples with 18M views.
He also has a telegram blog (Russian only) and lately founded a company called neural.love that provides services for online video enhancement powered by AI.
T(B)rain departs
Around March-April 2021 "Lumier Institute" send a pre-trial claim to delete AI-enhanced version of the video from YouTube. They didn't like that it is different from the original - 60ps and high-res (like, duh, that's the whole point in AI-enhanced videos) + copyrights violation.
So they struck the video on YouTube and video was blocked.
Denis managed to restore it by appeal - he mentioned that (1) 70 years have passed since Louis Lumière died meaning the video goes to the public domain, and (2) there was no monetization on this video. And YouTube restored it (thanks!).
Denis, having a wide Russian soul, proposed a couple of places in the video where "Institut Lumière" could place some information that they found important. They declined and insisted on full deletion.
Choo-choo
A couple of days ago Denis wrote that IL decided to sue him for real this time, and not strike in YouTube. They requested a formal answer in 7 days if the video will be deleted or not. Afaik, because Auguste Lumière died in 1954, they think that copyright stays in place up until 2024.
As Denis says, he has no time, neither money to fight with the lawsuit right now. So he decided to block the video on YouTube.
When law is lawless
Now the video is gone. That makes me sad as hell. IL paid no attention to other copies of the same video, both original and enhanced versions. You can freely google them, find them on YouTube, and watch them over and over. I still don't understand, why IL decided to attack this exact video. The only difference from all other instances - lots of views and media references. Instead of collaborating and saying like "Hey, look what cool thing that guy did! Maybe we can find some ways to do more cool stuff together?" they are attacking the innocent non-commercial experiment. In my opinion, this is a personal vendetta, that feels, honestly, as an assault on the whole AI community.
I am wondering if media will write about that situation like they did when the video has gone viral.
That's what Denis writes in his blog (my translation to English):
…knowledge of our history from the dawn of cinematography should be available to audience. Videos from the past are the windows in those times. You can not forbid looking into these windows just because "the past must be flickering, accelerated and black and white". I do not think that I did something bad or wrong, I just increased the realism of these frames, making them easier to perceive in 2020. Especially because I did not violate copyrights and never sold ads in such videos...
Couldn't agree more.
I wish Denis luck in his further experiments.
And I hope that one day IL will reflect on this situation and make the right decision.
P.S. while I was preparing this post Denis wrote his own explanation in YouTube, have a look.