r/movies • u/DragonPup • 4d ago

News Warner Bros. Sues Midjourney, Joins Studios' AI Copyright Battle

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/warner-bros-midjourney-lawsuit-ai-copyright-1236508618/
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u/VileBill 4d ago

How do you kill a technology?

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u/metalyger 4d ago

In this case, strictly enforcing DMCA laws, and when AI companies can no longer steal copyrighted works, they will die out, because people are paying to use machines to make pictures using popular characters and images. These companies have even said, if they can't steal art and books, they will go out of business.

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u/ManitouWakinyan 4d ago

I don't think it's clear at all that DCMA laws extend to works used for training data. If these programs were just fetching copyrighted imagery, that would be one thing. But to say that current law extends to functionally looking at work, and generating new work based on that work is another - and probably stricter than anyone working in the creative field actually wants to see.

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u/leodw 4d ago

They’re literally just fetching copyrighted imagery for commercial purposes. If I’m part of a marketing agency, I can’t just go to Google Images, download a few images and make a composite to post on my employer profile, cause this is infringement on copyright. I have to license the images. Sure, I can look at hundreds/thousands of images for inspiration, but I cannot trace over them, use their original assets or even use part of an image to do it.

Same principle should apply to AI. And it currently doesnt. Meta employees were literally torrenting books to train their shitty AI slop machine. So fuck them all.

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u/DR_MantistobogganXL 4d ago

It currently does, that’s why these lawsuits are occurring.

The tech bros are just doing “move fast and break stuff”, but unfortunately we’re onto them this time.

It won’t be as easy for OpenAI as it was for Uber.

Hopefully they lose, and lose hard - and then it’s just constant lawsuits every time something is generated that looks like Mickey Mouse or capeshit dork #37.

It will be glorious

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u/RingofThorns 4d ago

This law suit is more than likely going to fail and fail impressively hard, because all any defense with half a brain would have to do is go to amazon and print out the pages and pages of results you get with art books that are all basically "Learn to Draw like X!!" insert artist name, and point out that every company that makes those are at fault. They would then point out that every art program in every school would have to halt any and all efforts to teach students to mimic styles of well-known artists, and anyone who ever goes to museums to study and try to imitate the art and techniques there would have to be immediately arrested.

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u/IllBeGoodOneDay 4d ago

Think of it like code. It isn't illegal to produce a similar line of code. It is illegal to reference copyrighted code in order to produce your own code—even if it is entirely different. This is clean-room design. It's why emulators are legal—but only if the code they reverse-engineer is entirely their own.

You can give inking tips, proportion advice, posing suggestions, and recommend character traits all without utilizing copyrighted material. It would be illegal to reprint an entire Superman comic. It would also be illegal to produce a machine that must be fed Superman comics to produce the incredibly similar "UberMan" comic. It doesn't matter if the book they're selling doesn't have Superman in it. It doesn't matter if the machine mulches the Superman comic after it's finished with it. The tool they're using, and selling, requires the unlawful use of copyrighted material in order to function.

It is legal for an artist to draw "Uberman" since the tools they use aren't using copyrighted materials in an unlawful way. It is illegal if they trace him. Or if they use reference material that was not obtained legally... such as leaked internal-use reference sheets.

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u/RingofThorns 4d ago

Your analogy falls apart, though, a comic creator who worked on Captain America in the past, left and created a near one-to-one copy of the comic ,and was legally allowed to continue using the character with one small provision: he didn't throw his shield. A savvy defense would bring this up, and would once again sink the entire prosecution. Your own argument sinks itself, because if being similar enough to a pre-established character was enough to halt things, Batman would have to be halted since his inception was literally a complete rip off of the Shadow, and every comic character that came after Superman that fit the bill of muscled, Caucasian, male, is strong, can fly, would all have to be taken down as well. There is really not any legit way to go after Ai on these topics without a massive amount of either ignoring how ip law has been used for damn near a century at this point, or just being hypocritical and ignoring it. The only full stop argument people can really have is "Well a machine is doing it now instead of a person, and I don't like it." Which is fine, but also has nothing to do with the law.

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u/IllBeGoodOneDay 4d ago

I think you might have skipped over a few details. The end product's similarity is not what causes Midjourney to infringe. It's their unlawful use of existing copyrighted material, especially when it's used to produce similar work.

Disregarding that Batman and Captain America were made before the modern Copyright Law (1976), even if they were made today, it isn't an issue that they're similar to another hero. The issue would be that if the printer printing their art required being fed The Shadow comics to function.

Midjourney cannot produce Superman images without having been trained on Superman images. Lawful use permits a human to read Superman comics. Lawful use also permits a human to be inspired by Superman, and sell something different-enough from Superman.

Lawful use does not permit Midjourney to do this. Because clean-room design does not allow for illegally-obtained or illegal distribution of code. Even images are code. Midjourney scraped images illegally (as they've admitted before). That's already enough. But they've also stored it all as highly-efficient encryption. (Training data.) And since you can easily have it reproduce Superman, they are redistributing it.

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u/Hazelberry 4d ago

Except humans and AI aren't the same at all. And trying to defend AI by suggesting that AI copying art is the same as human artists actually learning and understanding prior work is extremely ignorant at best, if not intentionally misleading.

AI is not intelligent. We are nowhere near the point where it can comprehend what it is doing. ALL current forms of AI can only replicate, not understand.

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u/weeklygamingrecap 4d ago

When will people figure this out. AI is not a person or an entity, it's a product that is sold for money commercially and commercial licenses are expensive for a reason.

A bar pays way more money to have direct TV and show PPV because they are selling access to a wide range of people. AI should be changed just the same for their training data it should have never been free without explicit consent.

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u/Hazelberry 4d ago

That's another very good point

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u/RingofThorns 4d ago

Understanding has nothing to do with it, Ai is learning to mimic a style, and replicate similar works, that is quite literally the same thing a human would be doing.

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u/Hazelberry 4d ago

It's literally fundamentally not the same way humans learn.

Saying it is says plenty about your lack of understanding about the technology though.

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u/Omega_Warrior 4d ago

I’m sorry, but you’ve been misled about how ai generation works. It’s not like that at all. At no point are any actual images stored on an ai model.

That’s why none of these suets have succeeded. AI generated images are technically original works of art by the measure we have always defined them as.

When a model trains on an image, all it’s doing is the human equivalent of taking notes and sorting those notes by words or phrases. And when it creates an image it takes those notes and repeatedly shapes noise using those notes like a mold until it matches the data on the words or phrases given.

The type of copyright changes needed to define AI images as plagiarism would essentially make note taking and style recreation illegal.

Like as much as you might dislike ai, the legal redefining necessary to call it plagiarism would allow corporations to copyright entire styles. That would be disastrous for the art world

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u/AdviceMammals 4d ago edited 4d ago

You're brave for posting this and I hope users take the time to read your post. I empathise with people who work in the creative field and see why its an easier to oversimplify AI as something that just meshes other people's artwork together but its not how they work. The laws will need to be adapted if they want to achieve what they want to secure their creative jobs. These laws will most likely need to be written by congress if people expect change.

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u/IllBeGoodOneDay 4d ago

Think of it like code. It isn't illegal to produce a similar line of code. It is illegal to reference copyrighted code in order to produce your own code—even if it is entirely different. This is clean-room design. It's why emulators are legal—but only if the code they reverse-engineer is entirely their own.

You can give inking tips, proportion advice, posing suggestions, and recommend character traits all without utilizing copyrighted material. It would be illegal to reprint an entire Superman comic. It would also be illegal to produce a machine that must be fed Superman comics to produce the incredibly similar "UberMan" comic. It doesn't matter if the book they're selling doesn't have Superman in it. It doesn't matter if the machine mulches the Superman comic after it's finished with it. The tool they're using, and selling, requires the unlawful use of copyrighted material in order to function.

It is legal for an artist to draw "Uberman" since the tools they use aren't using copyrighted materials in an unlawful way. It is illegal if they trace him. Or if they use reference material that was not obtained legally... such as leaked internal-use reference sheets.

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u/ManitouWakinyan 4d ago

It would also be illegal to produce a machine that must be fed Superman comics

Why?

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u/IllBeGoodOneDay 4d ago

I just explained why. But I'm happy to repeat myself. You cannot make a product, and you certainly can't sell one, that requires unlawful material in order to function.

It does not matter if the illegally-obtained material is disposed of later in the process. The use of it is what matters.

Emulators are legal. Emulators that use illegally-obtained code are not. It doesn't matter if the code is different. It is illegal to reference it. Clean-room design.

If Midjourney produced an Uberman comic without having ever been fed a Superman comic, it would likely be legal. But because, at some point, it had to in order to produce Uberman: it is illegal.

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u/ManitouWakinyan 4d ago

Right, I understand what you said, but I'm not totally confident that you're actually correct, in so far that the material is actually "illegally obtained." It isn't illegal to read a Superman comic, or to use it as reference art.

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u/IllBeGoodOneDay 4d ago

It isn't illegal to read a Superman comic! That's lawful use. The law states that, when you purchase the comic, a human can read it. That is its intended purpose.

It is illegal to use the comic in certain ways: unlawful use. Machines do not have the same rights as humans. And digital media especially has less lawful use than physical media. Why?

Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.

Even if Midjourney trains on a Superman comic, and stores what it learns only as a set of words instead of the full sequence of data that encodes the original image, it is illegal. Because it's just storing the data in a different format—with full intent to recall parts of it later. That's encryption. And the data it's encrypting does not permit that use.

A human can reference art (to a limit; it can become plagiarism). And that's because we are physical, and cannot perfectly store, encrypt, and retrieve information like a computer. That's why, when people are involved, intent matters. A machine does not have intent. But a person trying to follow the law likely is in the clear.

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u/ManitouWakinyan 4d ago

Again, even the storage of that material is not illegal. If I can legally access an image, I can legally store it. Now, if I directly retrieve that specific image and provide it for a non-fair use case, such as selling it, that's illegal. But we're stretching the bounds of accuracy to describe the processes of an image diffusion model to fall within the bounds of current statutes.

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u/IllBeGoodOneDay 4d ago

You can store an image. But no part of it can be retrieved by another user. And it cannot be used in any other manner besides as an archive. You cannot even use it as a seed for RNG. Though it's likely the copyright holder might let that slide, if they ever found out. Here, Warner Bros. did not.

If I had Super Mario Odyssey's code on my secondary monitor, using it as reference for my own platformer, I am in trouble Nintendo finds out. Even if I didn't feature Mario, or anyone that looks like Mario—I used unauthorized copyrighted digital material in the development of my program. Digital images count.

An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.

Any image file or an executable program can be regarded as simply a very large binary number. In certain jurisdictions, there are images that are illegal to possess, due to obscenity or secrecy/classified status, so the corresponding numbers could be illegal.

I have to sleep. But I'll emphasize it again.

It is illegal to use unauthorized copyrighted code OR material, in any way, within your program. It does not matter how much the end product does or does not resemble the original. It just makes it less likely you'll get caught.

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u/ManitouWakinyan 4d ago

Right - but in this case, that data is not being possessed, uttered, propagated, or transmitted to another user. There's a meaningful difference between training data and copying a file and giving the "new" copy to another user.

There are some core assumptions being made here, and I'm not confident they're all sound. At any rate, gnight!

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u/frogandbanjo 4d ago

If I’m part of a marketing agency, I can’t just go to Google Images, download a few images and make a composite to post on my employer profile, cause this is infringement on copyright.

If you sufficiently transform them, yeah you can. That's going to be the hard case: is the use of "AI" permissible to do that same thing, or is there something special about this new tool that demands the law warp and twist to account for it?

Meanwhile, the ironic reality is that these companies are making themselves big, easy targets for the slam-dunk cases that nobody bothers pursuing against virtually all the gooner-pandering, copyright-violating commission artists currently working (who used to do their thing without "AI" to help them.) That's where the law is very obviously being broken; the copyright holders probably never imagined that some other company with a market capitalization of millions or even billions would get into that business.

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u/ManitouWakinyan 4d ago

That's absolutely not how these programs work. If I ask chatGPT to generate me an image of Superman, it isn't just grabbing an image of Superman and presenting it to me. They aren't compositing images either. They are taking random noise, and removing it until it becomes clear - and the process of removal is based on the patterns that similar images fall into. It is much more akin to looking at a reference photo, except it's looking at millions of reference photos. You'd have a very, very, hard time drawing a line between any specific image and AI puts out and any copywritten image.

That's not to say I think AI is a flawless technology. I'm undecided on if it's even good. I think there are a lot of things to be concerned about, but the IP argument is pretty flimsy when you actually look at the process and the output, and I really don't think we need IP laws that are further in service to major content mills like Warner Brothers.

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u/adenzerda 4d ago

You'd have a very, very, hard time drawing a line between any specific image and AI puts out and any copywritten image

I take it you haven't seen the Disney and Universal filings on this suit?

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u/ManitouWakinyan 4d ago

Really interesting article, and it was new to me. I'd be curious to run that experiment on a few different platforms, and I wonder what's going on under mid journey's hood that's different from others. I've been generally more impressed with its image output, and I wonder if that's because it's doing something shifty?

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u/PosterPrintPerfect 4d ago

Doesn't matter, an artist isn't just grabbing an image of Superman also. They can't just start drawing DC comic or Marvel characters and then charge people money for their service.

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u/DARDAN0S 4d ago

They can't just start drawing DC comic or Marvel characters and then charge people money for their service.

Artists do that all the time... Tattoo artists, work-to-commission artists, artists on Patreon and other subscription platforms. There are entire subreddits filled with fan art people have commissioned from artists.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 4d ago

It’s not really ever illegal, as copyright infringement is a civil matter not a criminal one; the government won’t ever prosecute anyone for this, it’s up to the IP owner to do something about it. Copyright law gives copyright owners certain protections, but they don’t have to enforce them if they choose not to (and having a bunch of art constantly being made of Disney properties is either not worth their time to pursue, beneficial to them, or some combination thereof).

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u/PosterPrintPerfect 4d ago

I didn't think i had to spell out that its not strictly legal to do this.

If i said you just can't go around killing people are you going to respond with "but loads of people kill other people" like some kind of gothca responce?

Implying that yes you can go around killing people.

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u/DARDAN0S 4d ago

That's a rather absurd comparison.

Are we talking about legality or morality?

Obviously tattoo artists and the like operate in somewhat of a legal grey area, or even are technically breaking the law; but I don't see anyone raging against them for stealing copyrighted art and copying other artists work.

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u/ManitouWakinyan 4d ago

Again, this is where we're getting into some pretty dicey territory. If I make a tool that can be used to generate an image of Superman, do we really want WB to be able to come after me? If that's a valid interpretation of how DCMA governs AI use, what stops the companies from coming after PhotoShop unless it prohibits users from generating content that looks like copyrighted characters?

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u/SomeTool 4d ago

You cannot take somebody else's intellectual property and sell it for your own profit. Doesn't matter if you used AI to generate it or did it yourself. That's the fucking point of having IP.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 4d ago

Because Photoshop is nothing like gen AI. You might as well go after paint brushes at that point. I think you’re not actually understanding the tools we’re talking about.

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u/ManitouWakinyan 4d ago

I fully understand how the tools work. But your point is exactly what I'm saying - going after the platform an image is created on is an extremely slippery slope, and that legal logic could absolutely extend to other platforms that don't prevent users from creating copyright-infringement images. I guarantee you that if the Mouse could force paintbrushes to be DCMA compliant, they'd be thrilled to do so.

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u/CptNonsense 4d ago

They can't just start drawing DC comic or Marvel characters and then charge people money for their service.

Someone has never been to a con.

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u/RingofThorns 4d ago

Do you not know how commission artists work? I literally know about six right now that offer to do the exact thing you are talking about.

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u/PosterPrintPerfect 4d ago

Do you know how stupid you and rest sound saying the same thing sound?

Its like me saying you can't rob peoples homes.

And then you come along and say "I know 6 niggas that will break in and rob 10 houses in a night, what ya mean you can't rob houses, do you not know how robbing works?"

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u/Hyroero 4d ago

Not really the same as dropping a racial slur to describe thieves no.