- Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
- The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
- The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.
A copy is not theft.
Intellectual property is thought monopoly. See Disco Elysium for a particularly sad case of it.
Do you mean play disco Elysium or is there some drama associated with it?
Drama. A business partner of the creators used an illegal loophole to obtain a majority stake of the company and then fired the actual creators because they where considered to volatile.
The universe of Disco Elysium is Kurvitz paracosm which he has been creating since his teens. Its a part of their identity that they are now barred from expressing.
Its a bit like if you told Tolkien halfway trough writing lotr that he is fired as the author and can never write anything about middle earth again.
intellectual property is grotesque.
under no circumstances a creator should be barred from his creation.
if shit like that happens I’d rather there not be any intellectual property at all
It’s quite illustrative of DE’s universe’s relevance to our world though.
(I’m more partial to SW KotORII: TSL, even if DE feels more like my life, even I wonder if Harry’s ex is too not just a blindingly bright and quite f-ckable picture, but also a murderer ; too autistic to look for authors’ contacts to ask them about it.)
Barred from expressing with monetizing it, you certainly mean? Otherwise most of fan fiction would have to be censored, having IP owners not willing competition.
And even then it’s in question, there are plenty of crowdfunded and later paid for indie games set in Harry Potter universe. Those I’m thinking about are NSFW though.
Fanfiction and non monetised use is not at all exempt from these laws but rather tolerated by the copyright holder. Something tells me this one wont tolerate if the og creator posts anything and they may know enough background canon to know its them.
A real irony to the plot of the game is that the business partner wanted to reign in the freedom of the creators. Not impossible they deemed it to political.
I am not sure about those games you mentioning but its possible they are tolerated because a combination of plausible deniability (wizard uk boarding school isnt that orginal) and not wanting it to gain any more publicity. Disney did the same thing ignoring Micky mouse porn.
Fanfiction and non monetised use is not at all exempt from these laws but rather tolerated by the copyright holder.
Should fix that in law, based on the commonality of such use.
IP companies use every such opening, we should too.
combination of plausible deniability (wizard uk boarding school isnt that orginal)
Except they even use character names from HP.
Publicity - maybe, would be funny.
I would personally argue that fixing the law means getting rid of the notion of intellectual property all together.
In my own reasoning someone copying me is the highest form of flattery and i would still have an edge understanding the properties of own idea better then the copycat does.
Its a huge limiter on human progress and absolutely non sensical in situations where multiple people just happen to have a similar idea. As it stands now an employee could invent the cure to cancer, the employer claiming it and then putting it in a vault to never use and bar anyone from creating it.
Naturally such idea of abolishing copyright receives lots of criticism from many people because we would have to solve other problems that copyright now aims to fix but i don’t think that justifies the damage it does.
While in capitalism we’ll always have ip, copyright, what have you.
Gotta “protect” capital
I would personally argue that fixing the law means getting rid of the notion of intellectual property all together.
Perhaps now - yes. 20 years ago one could argue, but today in practice it, as it was intended, simply already doesn’t exist. Those holding the IP are those having enough power to insert themselves in a right place. The initial purpose is just not achievable.
In my own reasoning someone copying me is the highest form of flattery and i would still have an edge understanding the properties of own idea better then the copycat does.
Yes, if the artist thinks that. And no, if the artist expects to make some money from every copy.
Its a huge limiter on human progress and absolutely non sensical in situations where multiple people just happen to have a similar idea.
That’s true for patents and technologies, but not true for art and software, where it’s improbable to just come up with the same thing.
Naturally such idea of abolishing copyright receives lots of criticism from many people because we would have to solve other problems that copyright now aims to fix but i don’t think that justifies the damage it does.
Now - maybe. There are a few traditional ways, like authors reading aloud pieces of their creations and people buying tickets to such performances, same with music. And models with paying forward for a request, like crowdfunding or an order.
But personally I still think some form of it should exist. Maybe non-transferable to companies and other people other than via inheritance. Intellectual work is work, and people do it to get paid. It’s just not good enough if the returns don’t scale with popularity.
You should totally play the game, but make sure that you pirate it so your money doesn’t go to the thief who stole the rights from the creators.
Would it not then be better to buy a shady key to financially hurt the company?
You mean cause a chargeback or something? You’d have to find a sufficiently shady seller, the key might get revoked, also you’re supporting another ilk of scumbags.
How so? Isn’t it the same for the financial purposes?
Many times these keys are obtained illegitimately and they end up being refunded. In other cases the key is bought from another region so the devs do get some money, but far less than they would from a regular purchase.
I’m not sure exactly how the illegitimate keys are obtained, though. Maybe in trying to not pay the publisher you end up rewarding someone who steals peoples’ credit cards or something.
Oh that’s unfortunate. Well I don’t mind not supporting people like that so I’ll give it a go
But it would be a copyright infringement.
Exactly
Profiting off the copied content makes it theft
Oh so when Big companies do it, it’s OK. But it’s stealing when an OpenSource AI gives that same power back to the people.
That’s part of the strategy. First, go after the small project that can’t defend itself. Use that to set a precedent that is harder for the bigger targets to overturn.
I would expect the bigger players to get themselves involved in the defense for exactly that reason.
There is no logic in mans lust for power. The most self serving will do whatever it takes to achieve wealth, status, and control. The world made so much more sense once I realized that.
oooooo do openAI next!
requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.
good luck proving and putting an accurate number to that perceived ‘damage’?
Easy, ten gajillion dollars. Payable in stock.
No problem, how much is “everything” in USD?
“Piracy” isn’t piracy.
It depends. Pirating a specific thing created by someone I think is not good. Ask almost any creator on the Web.
While using motives, aesthetics, characters, universes … is usually something that shouldn’t be subject to IP law, but in fact is, because the law is not written with any creators in mind, it’s intended to create convenient conditions for big businesses.
It depends.
It doesn’t :)
Piracy is a sea ship attack. “Unauthorized copying” is the term you seek. Copying doesn’t involve attacks, killing, or even robbing, but piracy – does. And no, it isn’t just some terminology casus. Law strictly differentiate killing, raping, robbing and unauthorized copying.
No, I don’t talk stupid shit. It is important.
It’s important propaganda-wise, because it supports a subconscious association between unauthorized copy and and capturing a vessel with its crew. I agree.
What I meant is - unauthorized copying is sometimes too morally very similar to a robbery. There are people, not living very rich, who depend on it happening more rarely. Of course they are being robbed by intermediaries always and by us sometimes, but they still feel it.
It’s important propaganda-wise, because
Exactly
copying is sometimes too morally very similar to a robbery
Never. Robbery involves violence plus moving something of value from the victim to the robber. Your moral compass is broken already by the propaganda you mentioned earlier.
You may think that copying is “bad” in some cases but it never “armed violent values extortion” bad. Never.
I agree. I had a “pleasure” to experience the difference.
That also involved learning that human society consists of apes, real danger is always very close and no police will help you against it, thus right to carry arms is paramount. Preferably allowing you to kill a tank.
Removes sunglasses …“Let them fight”
Remember when stealing on sea was piracy? Always has been.
Copyright infringement is different.
Yes. Piracy in the sense of stealing from ships in international waters is different from piracy in the sense of copyright infringement. Thanks for that.
I didn’t mean to suggest that. I consider calling copyright infringement “piracy” to be propaganda started by the music industry to push their monetary interests. A derogatory term that conflates it with immoral stealing (and murder). This overstates any harms caused.
The worst person you know just made a great point
I dunno were I stand on this one. I can see Disneys argument and agree with it on first glance, but at the same time, is the artists doing fan art infringing copyright then?
Artists doing fan art are infringing copyright, yes. If the fan art meets the fair use criteria then they are not Infringing.
Companies usually overlook the infringement from fan artists because it’s free advertising and the public backlash is not worth going after lone artists. They usually will go after fan art of people that profit off it.
Yes I under that, but is Midjourney profiting off these characters? Ie are people paying for these services just so they can create images of these specific characters ? I think that’s the question that needs to be answered here.
I mean you’re not paying piecemeal as you would for an artist to create your commission of Shrek getting railed by Donkey, you pay for the service which in turns creates anything you tell it to.
It’s like I’m still not convinced that training AI with copyrighted material is infringement, because in my mind is not any different than me seeing Arthas when I was kid, thinking he was cool as fuck and then deciding to make my own OC inspired by him. Was I infringing on Blizzard’s copyrighted character for taking inspiration from its design? Was Mike Pondsmith infringing on William Gibson’s copyright when he invented Cyberpunk?
I mean if you paid for a copy of wc3 to find out about Arthas then no, if you downloaded the game illegally then yes. These companies are often torrenting content just like we would just instead of consuming it directly they’re feeding it to their slop printers to train them. I’m all for piracy, including in this context, but if copyright is a going to be a thing and going to be enforced against individuals pirating treats to consume then it sure as shit should be enforced against the corporations pirating huge amounts of content to train their energy sucking crap factories lol
Piracy to me is not the same thing, I’m actually not in favor of piracy, because the way I see it if you want access to a content, and the creator says that you need to pay for that content then you will pay for it. If not then you don’t really want access to it, or you in fact simply did not want to pay for it in which case it’s very similar to stealing. None of the pro piracy arguments convince me, except the ones in which it’s about consuming the content in the format that you want. Ie I buy books from Amazon, but only because I want the writer to get their cut, but I will either remove the DRM off the book or pirate it. So yes if the AI was trained using for example a book whose content is not freely available and ChatGPT simply pirates the content of the book to train their models, then they are in the wrong.
But here’s the thing about my argument regarding AI training data. I never played Warcraft3 nor World of Warcraft! I only saw the cool art that was displayed on GameStop, online and on shirts on hot topic. I never paid Blizzard for access to Arthas, the design of Arthas was publicly accessible to me by virtue of Blizzard trying to promote their game. So I guess what I’m saying is if the content they trained a model is publicly accessible to people without payment, then there’s no reason AI cannot be trained on it.
As far as the ethics of piracy, my stance is that The current model where we are essentially paying for someone to hit copy and paste is inherently broken and we need to move to a model based on commissions/grants etc where the artists are being paid to make the works, ideally through public funds.
As far as the current reality around the AI companies, that Arthas stand was one gamestop had a license to display in their store provided by Blizzard to promote their game. The copyrighted material you “trained on” was provided for piblic access. These companies aren’t training off of publicly available information, as I was saying, they’re torrenting the full copyrighted material in the exact same way a traditional pirate would, The only difference is what they’re doing with it afterwards.
Edit: I don’t know if there’s evidence of Midjourney’s developers doing it specifically but Meta absolutely has so it’s a pretty safe assumption.
Terrible idea man. Can you imagine Trump being in charge of funding all of the arts? I don’t want any government with that sort of power over creative endeavor.
The current system works. You’re not paying for someone to hit copy paste, you’re paying for access to the idea that is physically embodied in the content if that makes sense. The creator decides whether you pay for that or not, and how much to pay. But many pirates don’t want to pay, don’t want to watch ad; in summary they simply believe that they are entitled to the work of the creative, which to me is absurd and outrageous.
But yeah that’s what I meant about AI training. If there are Shrek images out there that Disney willingly published and I trained an AI on it there should be no issue because it would be no different than me looking at Shrek and then making a drawing of it.
Yes but looking at publicly available shrek images is not what’s happening here, this is downloading every shrek movie
Yes, your fan art infringed on Blizzards copyright. Blizzard lets it slide, because there’s nothing to gain from it apart from a massive PR desaster.
Now if you sold your Arthas images on a large enough scale then Blizzard will clearly come after you. Copyright is not only about the damages occured by people not buying Blizzards stuff, but also the license fees they didn’t get from you.
That’s the real big difference: if Midjourney was a little hobby project of some guy in his basement that never saw the the light of day, there wouldn’t be a problem. But Midjourney is a for-profit tool with the express purpose of allowing people to make images without paying an artist and the way it does that is by using copyrighted works to do so.
The enemies of my enemies are my friends.
But if both sides are your enemies, they’re both your friends. But if they’re your friends, they aren’t the enemies of your enemies anymore, which would make them your enemies once again. But then they are your friends again. But then
But if both sides are your enemies, they’re both your friends.
Yes. And both of my friends will weaken both of my enemies.
The biggest pirates in the world should know.
:D
Stupid lawsuit because anyone can do Ai now.
that’s a shit take.
anyone can do AI now, but everyone can’t profit from it like they can. that’s why the lawsuit.
