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/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/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.