Quite similar to the New York Times lawsuit. If you can reproduce an original work, then use of the source material was obviously not transformative, and not covered under fair use. These systems can currently function like a lossy compression algorithm.<p>This is going to be a mess until higher courts in the US or Europe make some rulings. Personally, I think they are going to favor the copyright holders. A few billion handed out to damaged parties, and future commercial systems only trained on licensed content.
If he’s mad at that wait till he sees what the cp command does!<p>In all seriousness, midjourney is like any other tool. You can break the law with it, big surprise. It should still be on the person that broke the law, not the makers of the tool. If you go down the “can’t use my art as training data” how far do you push it? I watched Batman, does that mean if I draw caped super heroes I am stealing training data? Wouldn’t that apply to all comics after Superman? Isn’t he guilty of derivative work himself?<p>Also, nobody is being harmed by this. AI is always derivative. Nobody is interested in copies or impressions of popular art, otherwise the guy selling animes on velvet at the local art fair would be making more money. This just sounds like a Luddite shaking his fist at this perceived enemy.
They know exactly what they are doing:<p><i>“If You knowingly infringe someone else’s intellectual property, and that costs us money, we’re going to come find You and collect that money from You. We might also do other stuff, like try to get a court to make You pay our legal fees. Don’t do it.”</i><p><a href="https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service" rel="nofollow">https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service</a>
I'm not sure this really qualifies as anything new. It's been well known for a long time that many generative AI models are capable of reconstructing copyrighted works (copilot, SD, etc.) from their original training data with nearly 100% fidelity, but until we have a definitive legal ruling it doesn't really matter.
In the Visual Arts (drawing, printmaking, painting, even sculpture) copying the masters has been practised, and even recommended for centuries (if not longer). I believe it's the same with music. It's what you will want to do to some extent in order to get better at doing your own thing - some do it a lot, some do it less. None does not do it.<p>The tool may be a brush, it may be a pencil, it may even be a contraption or machine of some kind. It could even be a camera, or software. This does not matter. The result is typically labelled "a studio", "a reproduction", or if has significant deviations from the original "a paraphrase".<p>Some artists include elements of the work of other artists in their own work regularly, even copyrighted "characters". The thing known as "sampling" did not originate with rap music. Here there's a line somewhere (just like in rap) that, how much is too much? The answer is always that some cases are "fair use" and others are not.<p>My concern in all this is that people scared of this new tool (AI) will react in a way that leads them to demand restrictions in the way that traditional artists have worked like, forever.<p>In my view the AI model is no different from a camera, or that combined with some software suite like blender, photoshop, or even gimp. It's just a tool. And, well it can create reproductions. Reproductions are just that, and no more.
To me it seems pretty unambiguous that the infringement is a problem, and I even agree with the idea that Midjourney, not the users, should be held responsible if their model is being used as a service. I can’t come down on what solution I actually think is reasonable though. Restricting training data to non-copyrighted works would pretty much make AI art non-viable for any modern style, which would make plenty of people happy but feels potentially problematic if the nature of AI continues to change which it certainly will. Restricting output feels more right to me but also feels substantially less effective, since you would need AI to do any practical restriction automatically and what margin of error there would be acceptable? I definitely think this should be clamped down on but I can never settle on what I think would be reasonable and not just totally dismissive of at least one major set of concerns.
Should you pay royalties if someone says to you "remember that scene from Blade Runner" or "imagine if Jean Luc Picard beamed into the middle of a Batman movie" and visualize something similar to something highly similar to a movie or TV show you've seen?
I feel like an artist should be more upset with what could be created from the prompt that was not true to the original film, with only minor changes to the prompt. For instance, a picture of batman and joker having drinks together on the roof top.
A web browser lets you easily commit copyright infringement by right clicking on a copyrighted image you do not have the rights to and selecting download.<p>It is also shockingly easy to do.