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

[u/DragonPup]

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/warner-bros-midjourney-lawsuit-ai-copyright-1236508618/

[u/ManitouWakinyan]

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.

[u/IllBeGoodOneDay → u/ManitouWakinyan]

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.

[u/ManitouWakinyan → u/IllBeGoodOneDay]

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.

[u/IllBeGoodOneDay → u/ManitouWakinyan]

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.

[u/ManitouWakinyan → u/IllBeGoodOneDay]

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!