Photobucket sued for selling user photos to AI companies

Photobucket users filed a federal class action lawsuit against the company on Wednesday. According to them, the company was selling their photos to artificial intelligence and biometric firms to train their programs. The lawsuit argues that many users never agreed to have their photos used this way.

Chicago artist Mac Pierce leads the case, joined by three other plaintiffs and millions of Photobucket users. The lawsuit also represents people who appear in photos uploaded to the site but never had accounts and cannot opt out.

Pierce claims that Photobucket plans to sell photos to companies building “biometric facial recognition databases” and creating AI-generated images and deepfakes. As the Courthouse News reports, he worries that this practice will exploit users’ content without their knowledge or consent.

Photobucket, founded in Denver in 2003, became popular as a storage and sharing platform long before social media like Twitter and Facebook supported image uploads. Over two decades, users uploaded about 13 billion photos. Initially, the company relied on ads for revenue before switching to user fees.

“When it encouraged customers to upload their photos, Photobucket never gave them notice that it might one day appropriate them for biometric data or machine learning,” Pierce said in the lawsuit. He added that the company promised to respect users’ intellectual property rights and “to be a responsible steward of the photographs entrusted to it.”

The lawsuit accuses Photobucket of exploiting its largely inactive accounts to profit from the growing demand for AI training data. It claims the company sent users “coercive emails,” urging them to log in and accept new terms of service that permit licensing photos to third parties. The company reportedly treated nonresponses as consent.

“Photobucket’s strongarm tactics […] are illegal,” Pierce stated in the complaint. He argues that the updated terms break earlier promises to safeguard users’ photos and violate state laws and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Emails cited in the lawsuit also suggest that some photos may already have been sold to unidentified third parties.

The plaintiffs seek to block Photobucket’s licensing program and demand up to $5,000 in damages for each violation. Mike Kanovitz, the plaintiffs’ attorney, emphasized the growing concern over personal data being used without permission.

“People don’t understand how their personal data becomes raw material for these AI algorithms,” Kanovitz said. “What they sense is that bad things can come of it, and they wish they had more control over their privacy.”

The case highlights pressing issues about consent and data privacy as companies increasingly use personal content to develop AI technology. What’s more, this isn’t the first time AI companies have enraged artists or that we have a lawsuit like this.

Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt are defendants in a class-action lawsuit filed by artists who claim their copyrighted artworks were used to train AI image generators without permission. Photographer Jingna Zhang sued Google for reportedly using her images without consent to train its AI model, Imagen. Midjourney also came under fire after a list of names emerged, revealing artists whose style the image generator replicated.

And it’s not only photographer and visual artists who have the issue with AI generators. Earlier this year, George Carlin’s Estate filed a lawsuit over an AI-generated comedy special imitating the late comedy genius. The Authors Guild and writers like George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and others sued OpenAI for allegedly using their books to train their AI models.

All in all, this is one of many issues arising since we’ve seen the rapid rise of generative AI. And I’m sure there are more to come, as copyright is still a gray area in the AI realm.

Photobucket has reportedly not commented nor responded to the lawsuit yet.

[via PetaPixel]

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