You’re right, whether it’s AI generated or not doesn’t matter.
This is a copyright infringment matter in which “Fair Use” will become a major factor. fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/…/four-factors/
In this case, if the courts rule in favor of Alcon there’s a danger that this expands how copyright law is judged and future cases can use that ruling in their favor. It would make it a lot easier for them to only prove that someone wanted an image that “looks like” even when the image wouldn’t normally be held to that level of scrutiny at face value.
You’re right that there are other factors at play here:
The “Hollywood talent pool market generally is less likely to deal with Alcon, or parts of the market may be, if they believe or are confused as to whether, Alcon has an affiliation with Tesla or Musk,” the complaint said.
They are absolutely concerned that Musk is trying to associate his product with Blade Runner and if the case hinges on the association rather than the image in question then I don’t see a problem with that.
But it’s very concerning that the image itself seems to be a major factor in this case, specifically that they are accusing “(WBD) of conspiring with Musk and Tesla to steal the image and infringe Alcon’s copyright”.
So you saying that anything AI generated that is similar to something else will get sued for copyright infringement makes no sense, unless you can already do that for hand drawn images.
Yes, you can already sue someone else for copyright infringment with hand drawn images. What matters for the decision are a number of factors (as listed out on that link to fair use) one of them being how closely your drawing resembles the copyrighted material. Here’s an article about a photographer who successfully sued a painter who plagiarized her work: boingboing.net/…/photographer-wins-lawsuit-agains…
kameecoding@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
In my laic opinion no criteria for fair use is fulfilled here, so it would be really hard to argue that it would set some harsher precedent that exists, in real life proving someone wanted what looks like something else will be hard to prove as they would need either the exact prompt and then prove what the author meant by that point, IANAL but AFAIK proving what someone was thinking when entered the prompt will be pretty difficult unless it’s something obvious like “make it a slightly different version of that iconic blade runner picture”
Here the court will have documents showing that they tried to get permission to use the picture when denied they used something that’s essentially the same thing while also livestreaming themselves mentioning what they are ripping off, so it’s a much different case to some random person generating a similar picture.
This to me is very close to the Kanye New Slaves case, feel free to listen to it then go on youtube and checkout “gyöngyhajú lány” while you will find that kanyes version is slightly different, he entirely ripped the song off, then tried get permission afterwards, which he didn’t get and had to settle for undisclosed millions.