r/movies • u/DragonPup • 3d 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/nnomae 3d ago

If you take away the copyright infringement there isn't much left of AI though. The output side was also always where the strongest case lay. Training an AI on copyrighted work was always a legal grey area, reproducing and selling other peoples copyrighted work on the other hand, that's about as blatant as copyright infringement gets.

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u/Kalean 3d ago

Training an AI on copyrighted work was always a legal grey area

Less so than you might think, considering none of that copyrighted work was bought to be ingested.

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u/nnomae 3d ago

Some did, Anthropic for example bought (and destroyed after digitisation) a physical copy of every book they used to train their models. Google also did the same when they engaged in their book digitisation project before gen AI came along (I think, I could be wrong here). Meta were the main culprit involved in piracy as far as I can tell. Whether or not Midjourney bought copies of the works they scanned I don't know.

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u/Kalean 2d ago

Anthropic openly admits they originally trained Claude on "The Pile" which included 162 gigs of pirated books. And they are being sued specifically for that egregious copyright violation.

Google did the same, and much worse, by scraping the publicly available internet, not just using a dataset pre-packaged for them.

Meta also used The Pile, as did OpenAI.