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An artist fights Midjourney

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#51

Post by wrsh07 »

usrbinbash wrote: post #32
passwordoops wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> The image generator So if someone makes a forgery of, say, a picasso, who do we blame: The forger or the brush? > This isn't complicated This concerns copyright law, which is handled case by case, and deals with very fuzzy definitions like "fair use" or what constitutes "transformative works", and things like "impact in the marketplace". So yes, this is a very complicated topic.

The existence of the forgery isn't the problem!! Selling the forged painting _as if it's the real one_ is the problem (am I missing something?)

In _Tim's Vermeer_ he perfectly (too perfectly) forges a Vermeer. That isn't illegal!! He has it hanging in his home, and whoever is so lucky to inherit it will get to keep it for themselves too.

But if he did it again and then tried to sell it as an original Vermeer - that would be illegal!

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#52

Post by stubish »

Glyptodon wrote: post #9

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?

Copyright law does not apply to imaginary reproductions, such as your imagination. Your question becomes more interesting if get someone to draw that scene from Blade Runner. At that point, it comes down to if a judge considers the derivative work transformative enough (for hand drawn sketch, it would be, except maybe if drawn by a savant). And in the Batman case, you might violate trademark law depending on what you did with image after you drew it, which is a whole other set of rules.

When was the last time you heard the original Happy Birthday song sung on TV? It is now generally avoided, because producers don't want to pay royalties to the copyright holders.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#53

Post by joe_the_user »

felipeerias wrote: post #24

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

Wow,

If some site that the allowed anyone to upload and download anything put that as their TOS, would they be absolved of copyright liability also?

It raises fine-grained questions. Is Midjourney generating/offering a copyrighted image the violation or is the user downloading it the violation?

"Your honor, I blame the users/meddling kids"

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#54

Post by sjfjsjdjwvwvc »

felipeerias wrote: post #40
sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who was making any money in this instance? I’m not super familiar with midjourney but it looks to me like he used the free version

Midjourney is returning copies of copyrighted works while its Terms of Service state that “You own all Assets You create with the Services”.

So you need a legal process to determine if that generation was actually infringing on copyright. IANAL so I have no idea really, and I think most of the other commenters here can’t say for sure either.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#55

Post by pylua »

cycomanic wrote: post #45
thrill wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly legal to paint a copy of another image.

No it's not. Especially not to sell it after (or sell a service that paints other images).

Does us law prohibit selling machines or services that potentially can perform copyright infringement?

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#56

Post by wrsh07 »

passwordoops wrote: post #20
fallingknife wrote: post #16

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.

At least one court said you can't copyright generated images, and so I don't think midjourney is exactly claiming it as its own

In fact, they acknowledge that copyrighted material can be created.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#57

Post by pylua »

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.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#58

Post by felipeerias »

pylua wrote: post #30
felipeerias wrote: post #24

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

Seems like you could easily add a couple of adjectives / adverbs to make a completely new scene from the movie and it may be considered fair use?

Would it, really? And would you own that new scene?

Midjourney is a paid service which uses copyrighted works as source, without any agreement with the copyright holders, while declaring that its users own all the assets that it creates for them.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#59

Post by soamv »

thrill wrote: post #41
stubish wrote: post #26

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.

Well, it may be legal to create such a painting, but (depending on details) it may be a derivative work, in which case the original work's copyright still applies.

In other words, in your example, the painter is not necessarily free to distribute their painting while ignoring the original image's copyright.

Re: An artist fights Midjourney

#60

Post by pylua »

felipeerias wrote: post #58
pylua wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you could easily add a couple of adjectives / adverbs to make a completely new scene from the movie and it may be considered fair use?

Would it, really? And would you own that new scene? Midjourney is a paid service which uses copyrighted works as source, without any agreement with the copyright holders, while declaring that its users own all the assets that it creates for them.

I am not a lawyer but adding your own items and creating a hypothetical scenes seems more like fair use than the reaction videos on youtube do? Or, is that a different ballgame altogether?

Curious to find out. I am not a lawyer.

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