- 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.
Stupid lawsuit because anyone can do Ai now.
Note that Disney and Universal pirate other people’s stuff whenever they want.
Note also that all the Generative AI services are very protective of their big cistern of web-crawled data, say when China borrows it for DeepSeek.
Content, content everywhere and not a drop of principle.
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.
Midjourney isn’t opensource, I can’t run it on my PC, contrary to stable diffusion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While in capitalism we’ll always have ip, copyright, what have you.
Gotta “protect” capital
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.
It’s not actually a very fun game to play, reading the lore or watching a video of someone else play is sufficient.
Disagree, I think being in the pilot seat is important. The immersion of control amplifies the experience.
But it would be a copyright infringement.
Exactly
Profiting off the copied content makes it theft
I say this as a massive AI critic: Disney does not have a legitimate grievance here.
AI training data is scraping. Scraping is — and must continue to be — fair use. As Cory Doctorow (fellow AI critic) says: Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.
I want generative AI firms to get taken down. But I want them to be taken down for the right reasons.
Their products are toxic to communication and collaboration.
They are the embodiment of a pathology that sees humanity — what they might call inefficiency, disagreement, incoherence, emotionality, bias, chaos, disobedience — as a problem, and technology as the answer.
Dismantle them on the basis of what their poison does to public discourse, shared knowledge, connection to each other, mental well-being, fair competition, privacy, labor dignity, and personal identity.
Not because they didn’t pay the fucking Mickey Mouse toll.
You did not read your source. Some quotes you apparently missed:
Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.
Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.
Please read your source before posting it and claiming it says something it doesn’t actually say.
Now why does Doctrow distinguish between good scraping and bad scraping, and even between good LLM training and bad LLM training in his post?
Because the good applications are actually covered by fair use while the bad parts aren’t.
Because fair use isn’t actually about what is done (scraping, LLM training, …) but about who does it (researchers, non-profit vs. companies, for-profit) and for what purpose (research, critique, teaching, news reporting vs. making a profit by putting original copyright owners out of work).
That’s the whole point of fair use. It’s even in the name. It’s about the use, and the use needs to be fair. It’s not called “Allowed techniques, don’t care if it’s fair”.
Are you saying that the mere action of scraping is fair use, or that absolutely anything you do with the data you scrape is also fair use?
The Doctorow article does not say “scraping is good actually” - it says “scraping in X circumstance is good” and “scraping in Y circumstance is bad”, and wraps up by admitting the obvious and glaring contradiction.
I’d say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It’s about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use. (Accuse me of “No True Scotsman” if you would like.)
But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there’s the potential that you’re doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn’t fair use.
Take archive.org for example:
It doesn’t only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.
I don’t personally think that’s a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there’s a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was “scraped” in the first place.
But in the case of gen AI, I think it’s pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it’s firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.
Edit: And to be clear, when I say it’s fair use, I only mean in the strict sense of following copyright law. I don’t mean that it is (or should be) clear of all other legal considerations.
I think the distinction between data acquisition and data application is important. Consider the parallel of photography; you are legally and ethically entitled to take a photo of anything that you can see from public (ie, you can “scrape” it). But that doesn’t mean that you can do anything you want with those photos. Distinguishing them makes the scraping part a lot less muddy.
“if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use.”
I think you make some compelling points overall, but fair use has always been more complex than this. The intent is taken into account when evaluating whether something is fair use, but so is the actual impact — “fair use” is a designation applied to the overall situation, not to any singular factors (so a stated purpose can’t be fair use)
Yes, that’s a good addition.
Overall, my point was not that scraping is a universal moral good, but that legislating tighter boundaries for scraping in an effort to curb AI abuses is a bad approach.
We have better tools to combat this, and placing new limits on scraping will do collateral damage that we should not accept.
And at the very least, the portfolio value of Disney’s IP holdings should not be the motivating force behind AI regulation.
Tbh, this is not a question about scraping at all.
Scraping is just a rather neutral tool that can be used for all sorts of purposes, legal and illegal.
Neither does the technique justify the purpose nor does outlawing the technique fix the actual problem.
Fair use only applies for a certain set of use cases and has a strict set of restrictions applied to it.
The permitted use cases are: “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research”.
And the two relevant restrictions are:
- “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;”
- “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”
(Quoted from 17 U.S.C. § 107)
And here the differences between archive.org and AI become obvious. While archive.org can be abused as some kind of file sharing system or to circumvent paywalls or ads, its intended purpose is for research, and it’s firmly non-profit and doesn’t compete with copyright holders.
AI, on the other hand, is almost always commercial, and its main purpose is to replace human labour, specifically of the copyright owners. It might not be an actual problem for Disney’s bottom line, but it’s a massive problem for smaller artists, stock photographers, translators, and many other professions.
That way, it clearly doesn’t apply to the use cases for fair use while violating the restrictions.
And for that, it doesn’t matter if the training data is acquired using scraping (without permission) or some other way (without permission to use it for AI training).
oooooo do openAI next!
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.
Removes sunglasses …“Let them fight”
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.
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?
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.
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
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 biggest pirates in the world should know.
Too big to fail!
