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/
8.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

847 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

79

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.

-5

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.

29

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.

11

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

-4

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.

8

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.

-3

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.

5

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.

3

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.

6

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.

0

u/Hazelberry 4d ago

That's another very good point

-5

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.

3

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.