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LOS ANGELES, June 11 (Reuters) - Walt Disney (DIS.N), opens new tab and Comcast’s (CMCSA.O)
, opens new tab Universal filed a copyright lawsuit against Midjourney on Wednesday, calling its popular AI-powered image generator a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” for its use of the studios’ best-known characters.
The suit, filed in federal district court in Los Angeles, claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios, making and distributing without permission “innumerable” copies of characters such as Darth Vader from “Star Wars,” Elsa from “Frozen,” and the Minions from “Despicable Me”.
Spokespeople for Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s executive vice president and chief legal officer, said in a statement: “We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity, but piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”
NBCUniversal Executive Vice President and General Counsel Kim Harris said the company was suing to “protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”
The studios claim the San Francisco company rebuffed their request to stop infringing their copyrighted works or, at a minimum, take technological measures to halt the creation of these AI-generated characters.
Instead, the studios argue, Midjourney continued to release new versions of its AI image service that boast higher quality infringing images.
Midjourney recreates animated images from a typed request, or prompt.
In the suit filed by seven corporate entities at the studios that own or control copyrights for the various Disney and Universal Pictures film units, the studios offered examples of Midjourney animations that include Disney characters, such as Yoda wielding a lightsaber, Bart Simpson riding a skateboard, Marvel’s Iron Man soaring above the clouds and Pixar’s Buzz Lightyear taking flight.
The image generator also recreated such Universal characters as “How to Train Your Dragon’s” dragon, Toothless, the green ogre “Shrek,” and Po from “Kung Fu Panda.”
“By helping itself to plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and then distributing images (and soon videos) that blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters – without investing a penny in their creation – Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the suit alleges.
“Midjourney’s infringement is calculated and willful,” it said.
‘BIG SCRAPE OF THE INTERNET’
Disney and Universal asked the court for a preliminary injunction, to prevent Midjourney from copying their works, or offering its image- or video-generation service without protections against infringement. The studios also seek unspecified damages.
The suit alleges Midjourney used the studios’ works to train its image service and generate reproductions of their copyrighted characters. The company, founded in 2021 by David Holz, monetizes the service through paid subscriptions and generated $300 million in revenue last year alone, the studios said.
This is not the first time Midjourney has been accused of misusing artists’ work to train their AI systems.
A year ago, a California federal judge found that 10 artists behind a copyright infringement suit against Midjourney, Stability AI and other companies had plausibly argued these AI companies had copied and stored their work on company servers, and could be liable for using it without permission.
That ruling allowed the lawsuit over the unauthorized use of images to proceed. It is in the process of litigation.
The cases are part of a wave of lawsuits brought by copyright owners including authors, news outlets and record labels against tech companies over their use of copyrighted materials for AI training without permission.
In a 2022 interview with Forbes, Midjourney CEO Holz said he built the company’s database by performing “a big scrape of the Internet.”
Asked whether he sought consent of the artists whose work was covered by copyright, he responded, “there isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from.”
The problem is that Disney isnt fighting to stop AI but to gain control of it. They just want a fat piece of the pie and to stem the competition to their own animation and movie sector. They mostly want to kill the indie animation scene that could come about with Gen AI, they will still use it aggressively to bring up their own profits.
It’s corporate AI vs open source AI.
You’re going to have to unpack that because I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Animation is clearly going to get easier since you already can do it with only the first and last frame drawn. Disney is okay with this, because they can slash costs, but would prefer if only they could do it.
Huh? Why would anyone want to watch that? I think the jury is certainly out that any significant TV show/film generated by slop machines is in any way appealing to a significant audience.
It’s slop right now but it won’t be in a few years time imo. I just think lawsuits like this will solely benefit big AI companies and copyright powerhouses like Disney.
Everybody keeps saying “<X> will be great Someday™” in the tech world. Only Someday Never Comes, does it?
Full self driving by the end of this year. For the past who knows how many years, it seems. LLMbeciles will stop hallucinating sometime Real Soon Now™. Only the newer LLMbeciles hallucinate more than the older ones did. We’ll have humans on Mars by
20212022202620282029203120442046. We’ll have AI-powered humanoid robots doing our bidding in2023???.And so on and so on and so on.
So here’s the thing: until there is evidence of non-slip generative “AI”, just assume it will remain slop. Because that’s been the pattern of Silly Con Valley since the '90s.
I mean, to be fair genAI is just plagiarism with extra steps so it’s no different from them issuing takedowns for shitty mobile games ripping off Frozen characters. Indie studios are actively harmed by GenAI as well, given that if their content gets fed into MidJourney they don’t have the resources to battle in court. So I think if GenAI faces more scrutiny as a whole and laws are put in place to stop people profiting off material generated on copyrighted material, the only people harmed are those pumping out AI slop to make a quick buck - which I’m happy with
Like to be clear I don’t like Disney and I have a lot of grievances with copyright laws at large. But a broken clock’s right twice a day and I think they’re based for doing this
A better example would be issuing a take down notice to Adobe because photoshop was used to make pictures of shrek. If someone puts up a game using copyright infringing assets, then the game gets taken down and not the program used to build the frozen game asset.
The indie industry in animation is currently very small. It takes a lot of budget to come out with a full series with multiple epidodes. I only know of short stand alone videos. This will not get better if the indie scene needs to hand draw every frame because of lawsuits while disney can generate everything between the first and last frame of a scene.
This is seriously a losing proposition for the consumers and small time content generators. Drawing by hand is getting fucked either way, I’m just saying its better to be pragmatic and not give it all to Disney out of misplaced anger.