Warner Bros is suing artificial intelligence company Midjourney for copyright infringement, alleging that the start-up enables its millions of subscribers to create AI-generated images and videos of copyrighted characters such as Superman and Bugs Bunny.<\/p>\n
It is the third big Hollywood studio to sue Midjourney in Los Angeles federal court after Disney and Universal filed a joint lawsuit in June.<\/p>\n
Midjourney, based in San Francisco, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit alleges Midjourney trained its AI system on \u201cillegal copies\u201d of Warner Bros works and encourages its users to pick famous characters such as Batman, Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo or the Powerpuff Girls and create downloaded images and videos of those characters in \u201cevery imaginable scene\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even a generic prompt for the AI tool to produce a \u201cclassic comic book superhero battle\u201d will generate high-quality images of DC Studios figures such as Superman, Batman and Flash, according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n
Warner Bros says \u201cMidjourney thinks it is above the law\u201d and \u201ccould easily stop its theft and exploitation\u201d of intellectual property in the same way it sets limits on violence or nudity.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit alleges Midjourney\u2019s practices create \u201cconsumer confusion regarding what is lawful and what is not lawful by misleading its subscribers to believe that Midjourney\u2019s massive copying and the countless infringing images and videos generated by its service are somehow authorised by Warner Bros Discovery\u201d.<\/p>\n
The entertainment giant says it is entitled to up to 150,000 dollars (\u00a3111,315) in damages per infringed work.<\/p>\n
Midjourney has denied copyright infringement allegations in the Disney and Universal case, arguing in an August court filing that while its AI tool \u201chad to be trained on billions of publicly available images\u201d, it did so \u201cin order to learn visual concepts\u201d and how they correspond to language.<\/p>\n
\u201cTraining a generative AI model to understand concepts by extracting statistical information embedded in copyrighted works is a quintessentially transformative fair use \u2013 a determination resoundingly supported by courts that have considered the issue,\u201d said Midjourney\u2019s response, citing recent court rulings in lawsuits by published authors against Anthropic and Facebook parent Meta.<\/p>\n
Midjourney also said the onus was on its customers to follow Midjourney\u2019s terms of use, which prohibit infringing intellectual property rights.<\/p>\n
In a 2022 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney chief executive David Holz described his image-making service as \u201ckind of like a search engine\u201d pulling in a wide swathe of images from across the internet.<\/p>\n
He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such laws have adapted to human creativity.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan a person look at somebody else\u2019s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?\u201d Mr Holz said.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, it\u2019s allowed for people and if it wasn\u2019t, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo the extent that AIs are learning like people, it\u2019s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it\u2019s fine.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Warner Bros is suing artificial intelligence company Midjourney for copyright infringement, alleging that the start-up enables its millions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-4911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}