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Disney and Universal have filed a complaint against Midjourney, alleging that the base of San Francisco Image generation startup ai is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” which generates “unauthorized endless copies” of studios work. There is already Dozens of copyright prosecution Against the companies of AI rolling up by the American judicial system, including a collective appeal, the visual artists brought Against Midjourney In 2023, but this is the first time that the major Hollywood studios have been jumping into the fray.
The complaint includes dozens of images that demonstrate how Midjourney can evoke images starring the intellectual property of the studios. An image represents Yoda from Star Wars holding a light saber which, according to him, was made by entering the invite “Yoda with Laser Saber, Imax”. Another watch that typing “The Boss Baby” dactylography like an prompt would have resulted in an image of an animated child in a tuxedo closely resembling the Universal protagonist The baby boss franchise.
“This is an extremely important evolution,” explains the lawyer for IP Chad Hummel, who considers the compilation of images in the complaint as a convincing proof that “the exit is not sufficiently transforming”. Most AI companies faced with prosecution argued that they are protected by the “fair use” doctrine, which makes it possible to use works protected by copyright in certain circumstances; One of the main questions posed by the courts is whether the new work is “transformer” or adds a new meaning or a new message, when they determining fair use.
Matthew SAG, professor of law and artificial intelligence at EMORY University, believes that Midjourney will have more trouble doing a fair use case than the defendants of the previous AI.
“The reason for which it is different is that Disney directly attacks the output of the model. It does not only use a few examples selected in the cherry to prove that the model has been formed on its work,” he said. “It will be very difficult for a court or a jury to accept that it is a transformer to take 1,000 photos of Dark Vader and use them to produce even more photos of Dark Vader.
The trial alleys that Disney and Universal asked Midjourney to “adopt technological measures” to prevent its images from producing counterfeit equipment, but that the company has “ignored” their requests. In addition, he alleged that Midjourney “cleaned” copies of Universal and Disney’s work during the training process, which “necessarily included the creation of more copies of documents”. Midjourney did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
“We are optimistic about the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsible for a tool to pursue human creativity,” Disney’s general councilor, Horacio Gutierrez, said in a press release. “But hacking is hacking, and the fact that it is done by an AI company makes it no less counterfeit.”
Midjourney, like many other generative AI startups, has trained its tools by scraping the Internet to create large sets of image data, rather than looking for specific licenses. In 2022 interview With Forbes, CEO David Holz has openly discussed the process. “It’s just a big internet scraper. We use open data sets that are published and leading us through them,” he said. “There is not really a way to obtain one hundred million images and to know where they come from. It would be cool if the images had metadata which are integrated with the owner of copyright or something. But that is not one thing; there is no register.”
