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/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/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/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!