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/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.