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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. 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 billio…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say it depends on the details. The generated image are clearly derivative and not pixel perfect recreations
How many pixels must be the same to qualify as copyright infringement?
(But neither do the pixels stay the same when you re-compress in JPG. So I'm not sure if Pixel sameness is a good metric?)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I go to Google and ask for screenshots from a movie, it will also produce copyrighted material. So you're right that it isn't complicated. Tools with the same capability already exist and are perfectly legal, and therefore, so is Midjourney.
Does Google claim the image is it's own? No. Does Google include a message that the image is copyrighted? Yes. Does MidJourney attribute the source of the image? No. Does MidJourney's owners claim the requested image is an original generated by their black box correlation machine? Yes. That's the infringement. Period.
The images aren’t exact copies, though they’re obviously really close. Considering those are all famous stills from the movies I kind of doubt they actually just took random scenes from the movies themselves - instead it was trained on just images from the internet.
Point A means it might be transformative enough. Point B means it possibly wasn’t deliberately trained on copyrighted material, though obviously they know stuff would be in there. Further, no court has decided whether or not that’d be illegal anyways. My money is on that it won’t be, because there’s really no legal argument that it should be.
If a painter trains himself on copyrighted stuff he’s certainly allowed to sell his own paintings, even if they’re incredibly close to his training material.
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. 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 billio…
It's perfectly legal to paint a copy of another image.
Asks for screenshot from movie. Image generator gives screenshot from movie. Who’s at fault here?
The image generator that provided the screenshot without licensing/permission. This isn't complicated, we have laws on the books, and I hope legislators learned their lesson after the "Uber's not a taxi company, and AirBNBs are not like hotels"
They know exactly what they are doing: “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.” https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service
Asks for screenshot from movie. Image generator gives screenshot from movie. Who’s at fault here?
I think you're allowed 30s clips (or something) while staying within fair use (see: film YouTubers are able to use some scenes and clips)
Thus, you could imagine a Google that would show you the clip of the movie or link to a 30s scene from the movie and then prompted you to rent/buy the movie to see more.
I think Google would get away with that. I'm not positive or a lawyer.
Is this different because it's still images only? Again, Google shows copyrighted images in its image search (usually thumbnails, and then maybe serves the full image from the source? Or sometimes sends you to the source?)
It's not quite clear to me that simply showing the image is copyright infringement - non generative ai companies do that. So where is the line?
My understanding is that it really should be incumbent on the user (like it would be if your search found copyrighted material) but I don't have a legal basis for that! It just seems like nobody is suing Google for image search.