Comment on “Piracy is Piracy” – Disney and Universal team up to sue Midjourney
Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I dunno were I stand on this one. I can see Disneys argument and agree with it on first glance, but at the same time, is the artists doing fan art infringing copyright then?
Kirp123@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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 their fan art.
Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
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?
Chronographs@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
I mean if you paid for a copy of wc3 to find out about Arthas then no, if you downloaded the game illegally then yes. These companies are often torrenting content just like we would just instead of consuming it directly they’re feeding it to their slop printers to train them. I’m all for piracy, including in this context, but if copyright is a going to be a thing and going to be enforced against individuals pirating treats to consume then it sure as shit should be enforced against the corporations pirating huge amounts of content to train their energy sucking crap factories lol
Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Piracy to me is not the same thing, I’m actually not in favor of piracy, because the way I see it if you want access to a content, and the creator says that you need to pay for that content then you will pay for it. If not then you don’t really want access to it, or you in fact simply did not want to pay for it in which case it’s very similar to stealing. None of the pro piracy arguments convince me, except the ones in which it’s about consuming the content in the format that you want. Ie I buy books from Amazon, but only because I want the writer to get their cut, but I will either remove the DRM off the book or pirate it.
But here’s the thing about my argument regarding AI training data. I never played Warcraft nor World of Warcraft! I only saw the cool art that was displayed on GameStop, online and on shirts on hot topic. I never paid Blizzard for access to Arthas, the design of Arthas was publicly accessible to me by virtue of Blizzard trying to promote their game. So I guess what I’m saying is if the content they trained the model is publicly accessible to people without payment, then there’s no reason AI cannot be trained on it.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.