- Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
- The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
- The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.
Artists doing fan art are infringing copyright, yes. If the fan art meets the fair use criteria then they are not Infringing.
Companies usually overlook the infringement from fan artists because it’s free advertising and the public backlash is not worth going after lone artists. They usually will go after fan art of people that profit off it.
Yes I under that, but is Midjourney profiting off these characters? Ie are people paying for these services just so they can create images of these specific characters ? I think that’s the question that needs to be answered here.
I mean you’re not paying piecemeal as you would for an artist to create your commission of Shrek getting railed by Donkey, you pay for the service which in turns creates anything you tell it to.
It’s like I’m still not convinced that training AI with copyrighted material is infringement, because in my mind is not any different than me seeing Arthas when I was kid, thinking he was cool as fuck and then deciding to make my own OC inspired by him. Was I infringing on Blizzard’s copyrighted character for taking inspiration from its design? Was Mike Pondsmith infringing on William Gibson’s copyright when he invented Cyberpunk?
Yes, your fan art infringed on Blizzards copyright. Blizzard lets it slide, because there’s nothing to gain from it apart from a massive PR desaster.
Now if you sold your Arthas images on a large enough scale then Blizzard will clearly come after you. Copyright is not only about the damages occured by people not buying Blizzards stuff, but also the license fees they didn’t get from you.
That’s the real big difference: if Midjourney was a little hobby project of some guy in his basement that never saw the the light of day, there wouldn’t be a problem. But Midjourney is a for-profit tool with the express purpose of allowing people to make images without paying an artist and the way it does that is by using copyrighted works to do so.