- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- 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.
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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.
Bite each others dicks off
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.
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.
Oh that’s unfortunate. Well I don’t mind not supporting people like that so I’ll give it a go
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
